The Education Quality and Accountability Office of Ontario should be strengthened — and should be a model for the rest of the country

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Provincial student assessment is approaching a moment of reckoning. Canada’s flagship agency, the Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), is now under review. Thirty years after its creation, Education Minister Paul Calandra announced a fresh review of the independent student testing agency earlier this month, triggered by another round of disappointing provincial test results. It’s time to bolster EQAO and encourage other provinces to build upon the lessons.

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The swift reaction from vocal education professors and teachers’ unions was predictable — usually some variant of “the tests don’t measure what matters.” In reality, Calandra was responding to something far more consequential: evidence that too many Ontario students are falling behind in mathematics, reading and writing. And once again, it is EQAO data that has forced the issue into the public spotlight.

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Independent, transparent, arm’s-length provincial assessments are the litmus tests of education. They reveal quality and expose problems that would otherwise remain hidden. Without EQAO, Ontario parents would have no reliable way of........

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