The Fraser Institute's 2022 ranking of B.C.'s elementary schools using the controversial Foundations Skills Assessment has drawn criticism for disproportionately affecting Indigenous students. The lowest performing schools on the assessment have significant populations of First Nations students, raising concerns about the fairness of the ranking system.
In its ham-fisted rush to issue its 2022 “ranking” of B.C.’s elementary schools using only the results of the Education Ministry’s controversial Foundations Skills Assessment, the Fraser Institute — a conservative public policy “think tank” — may have backed itself into an uncomfortable corner in this time of Orange Shirt Days and truth and reconciliation initiatives.
Two of the schools are in the Quesnel School District, which serves about 2,950 students with 12 elementary schools. The district is unique in that it’s small and students are members of one language and cultural group — the Nisga’a Nation. All of which raises two important questions in 2023: Firstly, why is the FSA administered right across the Grade 4 and Grade 7 school population, regardless of the application of any other filter? And secondly, what is the Fraser Institute’s FSA-based low ranking of these schools and others with similar significant Indigenous populations intended to demonstrate?
The authors, from the University of Prince Edward Island and the University of Saskatchewan respectively, said many linguistic assessment practices disadvantage Indigenous students, and language-specific and culture-laden standardized tests are often discriminatory, adding that within the past 20 years, assessment tactics for Indigenous students have remained, more or less, the same.
According to a B.C. government media release, “the redesign of curriculum maintains a focus on sound foundations of literacy and numeracy while supporting the development of citizens who are capable thinkers and communicators, and who are personally and socially competent in all areas of their lives” — which to my mind ignores all the research about Indigenous ways of learning and is dangerously close to being as colonial as you can get.
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