The Alberta government plans to mandate screening tests for literacy and numeracy in Kindergarten to Grade 3. School authorities would then be required to report the results to parents and to the education ministry. Dr. Maren Aukerman, an associate professor in the University of Calgary’s Werkland School of Education joins Albert Primetime host Michael Higgins to discuss the province’s decision. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Michael Higgins: How necessary is it to legislate such a screening program for math and literacy? What kind of gap do you see this filling? Dr. Maren Aukerman: I’m not actually sure, to be honest. Screeners are not new in Alberta. They’ve been going on for a couple of years. The idea that we would need screeners right now or that we would need some kind of legislation for that is not very clear to me. MH: As it is, there is policy around this as it stands, correct? MA: Yes, teachers have been giving screeners for the past couple of years. There have been lots of reports on that. There was a research survey on what was going on with that. There’s not actually any clear reasoning that I can think of for why we would need legislation at this particular time. MH: Where do you feel this leaves the role of teachers and their professional judgment in assessing the needs of young students? MA: I think it’s problematic. There is evidence that screeners can help if teachers find those screeners useful. What is problematic with the screeners that are currently being used and presumably will continue to be used under this legislation is that we have about 70 to 75 per cent of teachers who say these screeners are not actually instructionally useful. They don’t actually help them teach. They already know the kids who are struggling. A screener is not meant to be diagnostic, so it doesn’t actually give you very good information to go on for teaching. The information is not of great quality. Oftentimes, the screeners are assessing things that maybe haven’t been taught yet. This is particularly a problem in math, where you haven’t taught addition, but now you have to assess kids who haven’t been introduced to addition yet. Then they’re being assessed in that which is not a good use of time, not a good use of resources and often puts enormous stress on these kids. I’ve talked to teachers where kids are in tears and the teachers know that this is not good for kids and they’re not getting useful information out of it. But the kids have to do this because that’s what’s being required by the government. MH: How do you see this changing the educational dynamic? MA: I think there are a couple of pieces that have real consequences for kids. One is that this is an additional load for teachers, so they have to spend time doing this. Teachers have reported 14 hours of instructional time instead of actually teaching kids, some teachers are now assessing them. That’s obviously not great for kids. There’s also the possibility of kids being mis-assessed. I’ve heard from people who’ve said about their kids that “maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they just weren’t focused on the assessment. Maybe they were shy, maybe they were sick. They didn’t assess as well as they actually could.” But now you have a score and that score then follows that child. Now with the new mandates, it follows them straight up to the minister, so the minister gets a report of that but also it reduces the flexibility because now the teacher is expected to teach this kid in a remedial way who may not need it. That’s one problem. The other problem is that the screeners are only looking at some aspects of things. For example, in literacy as far as I know, we don’t have a screener that really looks at comprehension like oral language or at writing. What ends up happening is you have all of these screeners and then all of this pressure on teachers to improve student scores on these screeners that only look at a small dimension of what literacy is. What I’m hearing from teachers is we’re encountering kids who are getting to third grade and fourth grade and they don’t have that foundation of rich language, of vocabulary or comprehension because everything that has been emphasized in those lower grades has been focused on the phonics and phonemic awareness. All of which is very important, but if teachers don’t have the discretion and if they’re being forced into focusing only on this kind of work, that’s really damaging in the long run. MH: What needs to come of the government’s commitment to intervention? MA: The government needs to do a couple of things. One, they need to have a real conversation with teachers about what they need. If screeners are going to work, there’s a lot of evidence that screeners don’t work and teachers don’t find them useful. What we’ve seen with this government again and again, even going back to the development of new curriculum, there’s been a real reluctance to have anything more than a cosmetic presence of teachers. That’s a problem because teachers actually know what they need. So if this is going to be successful, you’ve got to get teachers meaningfully involved. Have the teachers not just be able to report on something at the end, but actually say what they need up front. Then there actually has to be real commitment to supporting not just the assessment financially, but also what they do with the results. If a lot of teachers are saying, “You know what? I have some students in my class and they’ve been screened and they need help,” but there’s not many resources from the province right now to provide that and in a classroom that can be up to 37 students, there is no way that a single teacher is going to be able to meet all those needs. We have to really rethink everything from class size to what kind of support teachers are getting so that this is not just “weighing a pig” as they say. “You can weigh the pig, but the pig isn’t going to get bigger just because you weighed it.” MH: To what degree do you see this legislated screening process addressing those issues? MA: I don’t think it really helps. I think it actually hurts because teachers now have more work that they need to do. Some of the teachers are saying it’s taking four or five hours just to do the paperwork and submit that so teachers are actually getting more responsibilities put on them without actually getting any kind of promised support. Supposedly, there is money involved. That is not in the legislation. Will that happen? Maybe? It’s not in the legislation itself. I would love to say, “Yes, this is going to be the starting point,” but from what I’ve seen from the government so far, that is not the way this government has proceeded. I actually think it’s an additional almost moral injury to teachers to put this right after having Bill 2.
