B.C. teacher faces disciplinary action after scrapping reading test

A disciplinary hearing was underway in Vancouver Island Tuesday night to determine if an elementary school teacher who refused to give an annual reading test to her Grade 3 students should be punished.

Kathryn Sihota, who teaches Grades 2 and 3 at Millstream Elementary School in Victoria, defied a school board order in June by not giving her students the District Assessment of Reading Team test, or DART.

The tears of a little girl in her class made her defy the Sooke School District order, Sihota told CBC News Tuesday.

"When that happened, I immediately went to the assistant superintendent and told him I just couldn't do that to my students anymore," she said.

DART is a performance-based assessment of learning, administered to Grades 3 to 9 students on a voluntary basis in the fall and on a required basis in the spring.

The school board said it introduced the district-wide reading assessment test four years ago, with the goalof helping teachers and parents to assessthe literacy levels of students.

"When one person decides not to do something, that child's record is lost for that year, and we're looking at how those kids are progressing from year to year, and the impact on them," said Jim Cambridge, the school boards' assistant superintendent.

The British Columbia Teachers' Federation sided with Sihota, and has been lobbying for years against any form of standardized testing, said Irene Lanzinger, the federation's president.

"We're seeing more and more tests imposed on us," Lanzinger told CBC News Tuesday night. "That causes us to change the way we teach. It actually stifles lab work, field trips, [and] creative and innovative teaching because the kids feel the pressure to do well on that test."