Thank you, Madam Chair. When we got into this kind of testing, it was in order to try and improve accountability for what we are doing with educational funding to try and get a rough idea on how the system was performing. We do already publish, every two years, a document called Towards Excellence, which reports on education in the Northwest Territories and educational achievements, educational levels. What we were looking for was something that we could use that would help us study in a little more detail what was happening in grades 3, 6 and 9.
When we proposed doing this, we discussed it with stakeholders in the system. Most of the divisional educational councils were extremely worried about what might happen. The last thing we want to do is see comparisons between communities, and particularly the smaller communities in the North, because they were worried that that might stigmatize some of the schools in the regions. So we agreed with the point of view and said, no, we won't be releasing that information to allow those kinds of comparisons. It is not just to stop a comparison between Range Lake School and NJ McPherson, but it is to say that we don't think that it is valid to compare schools in our communities across the North. If you want an objective test, it would cost us millions of dollars to set one up because this test is not objective. It is not normed for our population in the Northwest Territories. It is designed for a different population. It doesn't reflect the realities of the situation where many kids come into our schools as English as a second language, and it is really not something that you could point to with any sense of reliability for how students across the North are performing. It gives us a snapshot that we can say, okay, based on this, we know that we need to put more of an emphasis on literacy, or more of an emphasis on numeracy, and we can colour our responses according to that.
Even more than that, the first year's test doesn't really give us much at all. We need to look for the first time that we have the test given to the kids for the second time, to look for a measure of improvement. If we are seeing that, then it tells us that what we have been doing this right. If we don't, then we know that we have to change our strategies.
The position is that we will continue to publish Towards Excellence. We will put out the information that we get from the Alberta achievement tests on a regional basis. We will be accountable to the people in the North that way. Thank you, Madam Chair.