'This is a mess': Teacher, union say EQAO test should be scrapped this year

An elementary schoolteacher in Ingersoll, Ont., says EQAO testing should be cancelled this yearin light of last week's technical problems and lingering learning gaps from theCOVID-19 shutdowns that she said are causing undue stress for students.

"This is a mess, it's a total mess," said Danielle Fletcher, who teaches a Grade 2/3 split class at Harrisfield Public School. "This year, it should definitely be scrapped."

TheEducation Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) oversees the standardized reading, math and writing tests thatare written in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 10.

Thosetests were on hiatus for two years due toCOVID-19 lockdowns, but returned in this academicyear, which was affected by only one two-week shutdown from Jan. 3 to Jan. 19.

Also this year, testing moved to an all-digital online format, which was paused on Thursday when technical issues cropped up.

Fletcher said her students' screens froze in the middle of the testing, in some cases causing them to entirely lose long written answers.

"The saving wheel, the wheel of death, would spin around for many minutes," she said. "They would fill in an answer and wait many minutes for the page to load and then it would tell them that their answers wouldn't save."

Fletcher said many of her Grade 3 students are still catching up after missing weeks of school last year. She said the technical problems in what was their first experience with a standardized test left themfacing considerable stress.

"Putting them in this situation, to me, it's a total disregard for their mental health because you're setting them up to fail," she said. "They're still getting questions that they're not prepared for andthey have high anxiety."

A spokesperson for the Thames Valley District School Board said the technical problems were limited to testing on Thursday,those technical issues have been fixed and since then, testing has resumed normally.

The spokesperson also said the Thursday deadline for completing the testing has been moved to June 23 in light of the technical delays.

Craig Smith is the Thames Valley president of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO), which represents teachers in the public board.

Smith said the union was worried about problems when it wrote to the education minister in February asking them to skip testing for what would have been a third consecutive year. Last week,ETFO, which has long been opposed to EQAO tests, issued a statement saying they're concerned testing has a negative effect on students' mental health.

"It would have been prudent to skip this year and not go with an untested, unreliable system," said Smith. "It would have been a good thing to do and perhaps allow for a better review of EQAO overall to put in a model that was more effective and more reliable."