Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid has taken the fight over the Foundation Skills Assessments (FSAs) to the editorial pages of the Vancouver Sun, accusing the BC Teachers Federation of playing politics by asking parents to remove their children from the tests.

The FSAs are a hot-button issue for the BCTF, who claim preparation for the test takes up valuable classroom time and encourages teachers to teach to the test instead of the curriculum. The union has taken out newspaper advertisements encouraging parents to opt their children out of the test, which include an opt-out form they can fill out and give to their child's principal.

MacDiarmid says her editorial is directed at parents to clear up confusion after B.C. Principals and Vice Principals Association Chair Jameel Aziz told the Vancouver Sun in an interview last week that the annual tests should be stop because they've become "too political." MacDiarmid disagrees, saying the only thing political about the FSAs is the BCTF reaction:

The push by the BCTF to end the FSAs is political. It's about hiding information you, as parents, have a right to know about your child's education and future. Now, they are further interfering with your child's education by making it difficult for principals and vice-principals to do their jobs.

The ministry had previously indicated last week they would continue the testing this year, which they say measures student reading, writing, and numeracy in Grades 4 and 7 and compares the results with the rest of the province:

We will be continuing to assess individual students because it is important for every parent to know whether their child has the reading, writing and math skills they need to be successful in life.

The BCTF says the tests were originally designed to measure the strength of the curriculum, but it was a political move by former Minster of Education Christy Clark that they came to be seen as a way to measure student achievement.

"(Clark) decided to take what was being designed as a measure of the curriculum and use it to announce to parents that her government was listening to them, and announce to parents that her government was giving them what they wanted," says BCTF President Susan Lambert.

"What you get is you get a line on each of these three measures: numeracy, literacy, and writing. And you get a line that shows the gradation of achievement across the province, from one end to the other, and a little bar on that line to show where your child is: it covers a wide ground. That's it, that's all you get."

Lambert says student report cards are a much better indicator of student progress than the FSAs, though she acknowledges they should still be used with a random sample of students in order to measure the effectiveness curriculum as they were originally intended.

"You can nuance that year over year to determine how subpopulations are doing: how our Aboriginal children, for example, our immigrant children, our rural children as opposed to urban children, you can do that with a random sample," she told The Tyee.

"And when you do it with a random sample, you disallow the (Fraser Institute) rankings, which all of us agree are wrong, and you make it impossible to teach to the test."

Katie Hyslop reports on education for the Tyee Solutions Society, and is a freelance reporter for a number of other outlets including The Tyee.