J-C Couture
Question: What is Grade Level of Achievement Reporting?
Answer: Grade Level of Achievement Reporting (GLAR) was originally planned to include the requirement that teachers and school jurisdictions, by 2007–08, assign and report to parents a whole-number grade in the four core subjects in Grades 1–9.
Following numerous concerns expressed by the Alberta Teachers’ Association and other education partners and the failure of the 2005–06 pilots to demonstrate any significant benefits of GLAR, the provincial government backed off its initial implementation schedule. The October 2006 revisions to the government’s GLAR scheme, calling for a staggered rollout of GLAR in language arts and mathematics from 2006–08, do little to address the fundamental problems with this program.
The government’s implementation schedule requires that one-third of Grades 1–9 schools in each school authority, representing each grade division (1–3, 4–6 and 7–9) and all charter schools, report GLA data in language arts and math to the Ministry of Education by June 2007. By June 2008, all Grades 1–9 in jurisdiction, francophone authority and charter schools will be required to report GLA data in language arts and math.
Once the whole-number grades are collected from teachers, "GLA data must be submitted electronically via Edulink to protect students’ personal information. Once submitted, GLA data simply become a small additional component of relational data … for inclusion in the Student Information System" (Alberta Education November 2006).
Question: What is the government’s purpose in introducing GLAR?
Answer: The 2004 Alberta Learning Business Plan stated that GLAR would "expand the capacity of schools to use classroom and provincial assessment results to improve teaching and learning and to provide a more comprehensive view of overall student achievement." While touted as a way to support teachers’ assessment practices, the initial GLA trials in 2003–04 in seven jurisdictions (most of which were involved in Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) projects), showed only marginal benefits for students, despite considerable expenditures of time and professional development resources.
More recently, the government stated: "GLA data will provide … student performance information that will help decision-makers at the school, jurisdiction and provincial levels evaluate the impact of education programs. This information will be particularly useful in examining performance of groups of students (e.g., by gender, students with high mobility rates, the performance of ESL students, students with special needs, etc.). As additional data is collected each year, provincial trends can be monitored for these different groups of students that could result in local and/or provincial programs, initiatives and/or policy aimed at helping students be more successful. (Alberta Education 2006)"
Question: Why is the ATA opposed to GLAR?
Answer: By focusing on the reporting and uploading of a single number to Alberta Education’s databases, GLAR will not improve teaching, learning or reporting of student progress to parents. The College of Alberta School Superintendents, the Alberta School Boards Association and Alberta’s deans of education have called on the government to review GLAR. The ATA’s 2005 and 2006 Annual Representative Assemblies unanimously called for reconsideration of GLAR.
Grading requires a much more complex and nuanced approach than a focus on a single number. In fact, there is widespread opposition by leading curriculum experts to reporting a single whole-number grade, as the GLAR scheme calls for, in order to report student progress. For example, would a standard of excellence in Grade 4 mathematics be equivalent to a satisfactory level in Grade 5 math? How would exemplary student writing in Grade 6 compare to moderately successful writing in Grade 8?
Jim Field, an education professor at the University of Calgary, called GLAR "the educational equivalent of building mathematical brick walls on empirical beds of sand." Developing consensus as to what we purport to mean by grade level requires much more discussion and deliberation by teachers and education partners before anything remotely related to GLAR data should be considered.
The fact that GLA reporting was to apply to core subjects only—fine arts, languages, health and physical education were not to have been included—points to the government’s ever-narrowing focus on a small range of student learning outcomes outlined in the Guide to Education and further undermines the value of GLAR.
Question: Isn’t GLAR a powerful way to improve teacher assessment practices?
Answer: Since its inception, GLAR has been promoted as a way to advance assessment for learning and improving the quality of information provided to students and parents. Indeed, the government’s current 2006–09 Business Plan claims that GLAR is designed to "enhance teachers’ capacity to assess and report students’ grade level of achievement in accordance with pilot time-frames" (Alberta Education 2006). Yet, as Grace Gruber, Chair of the Parkland School Division, points out in her letter to the Minister that calls for a review of GLAR: "Creating more data to be compiled, graphed and analyzed, however, does not inform practice at the classroom level in a meaningful way." Gruber goes on to suggest that "providing a single number, student information to your Department, so that a team of Department staff can reformat the data and return it to our jurisdiction, is not a valuable use of time or energies we believe could be better focussed on supporting professional learning opportunities and growing the best practices of our staff."
Question: Aren’t teachers reporting this information to parents anyway?
Answer: Alberta teachers already apply a wide variety of sound assessment practices. Despite the claims that GLAR will build "the body of evidence … to provide data … to justify the student’s grade level of achievement" (Alberta Assessment Consortium 2006, 16), the ultimate focus of GLAR is to provide yet one more layer of data collection and surveillance. Teachers and parents believe that a child is more than a grade or a number. Assessments should reflect the variety of knowledge, skills and abilities that support the development of the whole child into a creative and critical thinker and learner, who values herself, loves learning, lives a healthy life and develops an appreciation for the arts (Getting to the Heart of Learning: A Parent Guide to Reporting Student Learning, The Alberta Teachers’ Association, www.teachers.ab.ca).
Parents deserve a comprehensive account of their children’s progress. Report cards, comments on assignments, journals and parent–teacher meetings provide important and useful insights. GLAR as it is being currently implemented is, at best, superficial, at worst, it is misleading.
Question: Isn’t the information collected from GLAR worth the cost?
Answer: Education researchers have long pointed out that Alberta Education already collects more student achievement data than any province in Canada. Alberta students and school jurisdictions are subjected to more provincial standardized testing programs, reporting and accountability requirements in Alberta, than students and schools in any other Canadian jurisdiction.
As might be expected, the initial pilots show that students’ reported GLA aligned with their assigned grade, except, of course, for students on Individual Program Plans, who are not on a graded curriculum and are exempt from GLAR. (These students receive enhanced programming in an effort to improve their learning opportunities.) These findings again raise the basic question: Of what value is GLAR since it is not providing any fundamentally new information about a student’s learning?
Further, it is naive to believe that outside organizations such as the Fraser Institute will not attempt to use the province’s GLAR data to compare and rank schools.
As the GLAR scheme rolls out, it is increasingly apparent that the elaborate data submission requirements and supports through Edulink represent considerable costs both to jurisdictions and the Ministry of Education. The numerous software upgrades and technical infrastructure supports need to be documented and reported for education partners to fully understand the total costs of implementing GLAR.
Professional development dollars are stretched to the limit, and most jurisdictions rely on Alberta AISI funding to support professional development. For example, one rural southern Alberta jurisdiction involved in the early GLA trial committed $50,000 to achieve the goal of GLA reporting in one subject area alone. Committing scarce educational resources to generate yet more data on students, diverts funding away from immediate pressing priorities such as support for students with special needs.
Question: What can teachers do to address issues related to GLAR?
Answer: The Association continues to meet with the government and education partners to resolve the many issues related to GLAR. It is important that teachers make their school communities aware of the issues surrounding GLAR. Presentations to parent councils and school boards are concrete actions teachers and their local ATA representatives can take.
Question: Who do I contact for more information about GLAR?
Answer: Visit the ATA’s website (www.teachers.ab.ca) and under Issues in Education, click on Emerging Issues, or contact J-C Couture at Barnett House, in Edmonton. Telephone: (780) 447-9462, or 1-800-232-7208 (from elsewhere in Alberta).
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