Province quietly pulls plug on Grade 10 exams

Manitoba Education has discreetly dropped Grade 10 exams from its annual system-wide assessment schedule.

The evaluations were originally designed to measure strengths and knowledge gaps up to and including Grade 9 content to inform teacher instruction for the remainder of a cohort’s high school career and provincial planning, policy and resource decisions.

They never made it beyond a November 2023 pilot that was widely criticized for being rushed and disorganized. Manitoba Education recently wiped all information about the exams from its website.

One high school teacher in Winnipeg said Monday that there’d been “full-on radio static” on the topic this school year.

In a statement, the Manitoba Teachers’ Society echoed that sentiment, saying its executive team was unaware of the exams’ status.

Internal documents obtained by the Free Press via freedom of information show Grade 10 tests are “on pause” amid a wider assessment review and redevelopment plan that’s anticipated to take several years.

“There has been no comprehensive review of the program (established in 1999) and no modernization to align with evolving best practices and transition to an online format,” assistant deputy minister Janet Tomy wrote in a fall 2024 briefing note on the subject.

PC education critic Grant Jackson condemned the U-turn and called on Education Minister Tracy Schmidt to “get a hold of her department” and improve communication on such decisions.

“It’s a good benchmark for students and for educators and the system, to be able to track student development through high school,” Jackson said, adding he is hopeful that there will be a public outcry to this change, not unlike when the province announced it was scrapping final-year provincial exams.

Schmidt, who oversees the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 cabinet portfolio, said the cost and logistics — especially in small rural schools where it would be “administratively burdensome,” if not impossible to manage multiple provincial tests annually — informed the department’s direction.

The NDP never intended to keep both Grade 10 and 12 exams and government leaders favoured the former, but there was widespread backlash when they briefly called off final-year exams in 2024 so they changed course, per a government source.

A 2023-2024 fact sheet on the Grade 10 assessment estimated it would take 90 minutes to complete the mathematics section and 2 1/2 hours to complete the “reading and responding” component.

Number sense, exponents and polynomials were among its contents. Students were also supposed to showcase their reading comprehension and communication skills in either English or French, depending on their stream.

The 2019 commission appointed by the former Progressive Conservative government to review K-12 schooling issues prescribed an overhaul of the provincewide testing program.

Recommendation No. 59 of 75 urged the Education Department to develop new curriculum-based tests for math and literacy at the elementary, middle years and Grade 10 levels.

The PCs were mulling a mandatory test for all tenth graders in the leadup to the last election. The NDP announced it was following through with a pilot after winning the 2023 race, but the summative evaluation was made optional at the eleventh-hour.

At the time, MTS president Nathan Martindale said teachers were caught off guard by the rollout and concerned about the related workload. There was a lack of training, time and detail involved in the original plan, said the union leader, who represents upwards of 16,000 public school teachers.

“We’ve inherited a department and a government that effectively was in a state of freefall and in a state of chaos,” Schmidt said Monday.

The education minister added that her office remains “open to ideas” and will continue working with school divisions to keep them up to date as it reviews curriculum and assessments.

Since the start of the school year, Manitoba teachers have carried out formative, classroom-based evaluations in Grade 3, Grade 4 French immersion, Grade 7 math and Grade 8 literacy.

A total of 33 school divisions are involved in an ongoing trial of a new kindergarten assessment.

Grade 12 provincial tests are also on the 2024-25 testing schedule. The department recently released last year’s results, the first of their kind after a multi-year hiatus due to COVID-19 and political flip-flopping about their future.

Pre-calculus, applied math and francophone students’ literacy scores in their first language dropped significantly between 2018-2019 and last year. The average marks in those subjects dropped roughly six per cent, four per cent and eight per cent, respectively.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca