Tensions and fissures: the politics of standardised testing and accountability in Ontario, 1995–2015

Abstract

While Ontario has received international accolades for its enactment of province-wide standardised testing upon the formation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), a closer look at provincial assessments over a 20-year span reveals successes as well as systemic tensions and fissures. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a socio-historical account of EQAO policy and programme enactment. Second, it offers insight into the lesspublicised politics of enactment within systems with respect to principles and methods of accountability and their link to instructional systems. Data and findings from various sources shed light on the realities of struggles, tensions in macro-political consensus and dissensus among various stakeholders, and the micro-politics at the school and district levels.

The Heist: Neoliberal Education and the Theft of Time

“…Within the global context, large-scale neoliberal education reforms in most industrialized nations repeatedly introduce unprecedented amounts of policy in the form of texts, strategies, legislation, and discursive processes. Standardization and prescriptiveness abound (Pinto, 2012(Pinto, , 2015(Pinto, , 2016. This proliferation of policy dictates the length of the school year, hours of instruction, content of those hours of instruction, curriculum outcomes, and in some cases, pedagogies and assessments to be used as specific points in the school year.…”

“…Take, for example, the government response to Ontario's 2014 decreasing math test scores among elementary students (Pinto, 2016). The Ontario Ministry of Education (OME), in a bid to increase student achievement on standardized tests, enacted two measures.…”

“…The Ontario Ministry of Education (OME), in a bid to increase student achievement on standardized tests, enacted two measures. First, the OME increased professional development time for teachers in mathematics instruction; second, the OME mandated increased time for standardized mathematics instruction in the classroom (Pinto, 2016). Interestingly, the move to increase standardization and instructional time is certainly not supported by researchthe relationship between allotted instructional time and student achievement is weak at best (Gándara, 2000).…”

What works? Academic integrity and the research-policy relationship

“…For example, how far should they accommodate themselves to the performance measurement regimes that dominate the school sector? For most critical and progressive educators, deliverology represents a serious set of problems because it has a tendency to reduce education to the production of 'results' at the risk of dehumanising teaching and learning, to reinforce narrow conceptions of what matters in education, to generate competition between educational institutions, between teachers and between students, and to reproduce and exacerbate class-based and racialised inequalities in treatment and esteem (see, for example, Ravitch 2011;Polesel, Rice and Dulfer 2014;Pinto 2016;Stuart Wells 2019).…”

What’s wrong with ‘deliverology’? Performance measurement, accountability and quality improvement in English secondary education

“…A wealth of previous research conducted in diverse national contexts where this approach has been influential has suggested that the unintended harms it generates may be outweighing its benefits. In the case of school education, these harms have been found to include a widening of inequalities (Au 2009;Ravitch 2011;Cumming, Wyatt-Smith, and Colbert 2015;Picower and Mayorga 2015;, forms of 'gaming the system' or outright cheating (Nichols and Berliner 2007;Klenowski and Wyatt-Smith 2012;Lingard and Sellar 2013;Ohemeng and McCall-Thomas 2013; Thompson and Cook 2014;Hofflinger and Hippel 2018;Johnson 2018), a test-driven pedagogic culture and a narrowing of the curriculum (Stobart 2008;Klinger, Maggi, and D'Angiulli 2011;Polesel, Rice, and Dulfer 2014;Hardy 2015;Pinto 2016). In an attempt to circumnavigate such perverse effects, in England the performance measures used have, at least in some respects, become increasingly sophisticated over recent years.…”