BC's Annual School Report released today has officials, teachers, parents, and students lined up on both sides of the debate over province-wide standardized testing of grade 4 and 7 students. No one was surprised to hear students slander the five-hour battery of reading, writing, and math exams, but most interviewed parents supported the yearly assessment, whose results are used to publicly rank schools based on students' overall scores. Sophie Bloom, mother of a Whitesands Elementary School kindergartener, applauds the test—and heeds the rankings. "As a taxpayer and parent, I expect access to this kind of information. I want my child at the top school. Whitesands doesn't measure up. I'm considering Oceanview."

Oceanview School principal Christine Shelley admits she has mixed feelings about compelling teachers to administer the provincially mandated tests but agrees parents have every right to expect statistics on school outcomes, provided they don't use them to unfairly compare public and private schools. "Standardized tests hold teachers and schools appropriately answerable to their stakeholders. Without statistics on learning outcomes, how could we ensure schools are doing what they're publicly funded and mandated to do?"

Adam Birch, who teaches Grade Four at Forestgrove Elementary, is skeptical of the assessments but grudgingly complies. "Standardized testing reinforces the social myth that if we're not competing, we're unproductive," says Birch. "It overlooks many forms of intelligence and mostly rewards test-taking ability. Many gifted students fail these tests. And the tests are like a snapshot; they tell us nothing about a student's improvement."

At Valleyside Middle School, grade seven teacher Gilles Legault is on the brink of mutiny. "Every classroom hour I spend on ‘test prep' is one hour stolen from an actually beneficial learning activity." Legault, whose school outperformed both Oceanview and Forestgrove, concedes the tests provide relevant comparative data but thinks such comparisons merely confirm what we already know: schools in affluent neighborhoods do better. "For this common knowledge," Legault says, "standardized testing squanders 15 million dollars of provincial funds annually. Instead, why not hire more teachers, reduce class sizes, improve services?"