Page Content
The provincial government has announced on its website that it would “no longer require school boards to collect and submit Grade Level of Achievement (GLA) data to Alberta Education as a way of reporting to the province on how well students are learning. Instead, schools will focus on reporting GLA at the local level.” (
http://education.alberta.ca/admin/resources/gla.aspx)
Alberta Teachers’ Association President Carol Henderson applauded the move. “We have been calling on the government to do away with GLA reporting for years,” said Henderson. “It contributed nothing to our understanding of how students are learning and was frankly a waste of time and energy that could be put to better use.”
The government’s announcement acknowledged the long-standing objections of the ATA and other education partners to GLA: “Following consultations with school boards, school administrators and key stakeholders, Alberta Education has concluded that the data-collection process for submission to the province was creating an additional administrative burden for schools.”
Since the outset of GLA reporting in 2004, the ATA saw the data-gathering project as one more compliance requirement that was a distraction from building meaningful assessment practices to improve K–12 education. When GLA reporting was launched, Jim Field, an education professor at the University of Calgary, characterized GLA reporting as “the educational equivalent of building mathematical brick walls on empirical beds of sand.”
GLA was initially planned to include the requirement that by 2007/08, teachers and school jurisdictions assign and report to parents a whole-number grade in the four core subjects in Grades 1–9. Education partners pointed to flaws in the superfluous data-gathering scheme. Central to these objections was a focus on reporting and uploading a single number to Alberta Education’s databases and the plan to compare this data to student and school performance on the government’s provincial achievement tests.
The ATA enlisted David Berliner to assess the GLA initiative. Berliner, a distinguished scholar in student assessment and the author of more than 150 books and articles, predicted that the program would be little more than a bureaucratic data-gathering exercise that would inevitably become “a way to analyse and compare students and schools or worse, a way to justify government’s control of teachers and local school authorities by highlighting their so-called weaknesses.”
Following the objections of the province’s education partners, GLA reporting was downscaled further. A government information bulletin (November 27, 2007) indicated that all public, separate and francophone authority and charter schools with Grades 1–9 would simply report GLA data to Alberta Education as “at, above or below enrolled grade” in English language arts, mathematics and, where applicable, French language arts for the 2007/08 school year. Teachers at the ATA’s 2008 Annual Representative Assembly passed a resolution reaffirming the profession’s opposition to GLA reporting by calling for a moratorium on “Grade Level of Achievement Reporting and all new student assessment and reporting initiatives.”
Despite the government’s announcement that it is ending GLA, President Henderson expressed her concern that “the government continues to advance its outdated bureaucratic accountability model that places its testing programs over the professional judgement of teachers.” Henderson hopes that the “minister’s decision to end GLA reporting marks the end of one of the government’s unhelpful encroachments in classrooms and signals the first of several changes to improve teaching and learning in Alberta schools.”
