The overwhelming majority of British Columbia parents of school age children believe that parents should have a right to school test scores in reading, writing, and maths to see how their school is doing. This is one of the key findings from a province-wide survey conducted for the School Performance Studies Research Program of the Fraser Institute.

The same COMPAS poll among more than a thousand parents shows strong backing for the Ministry of Education’s policy of carrying out such testing.

In practice, 83% of B.C. parents believe that parents should have a right to such information (77%) or should probably (6%) have such a right, as shown in table 1. Eighteen percent take the opposite view. Among parents with strong views, those who favour parental rights on the matter outnumber more than 6:1 those who do not (77:12). When those with strong views are combined with those with moderate views, supporters of parental rights to that information outnumber opponents by a factor of almost 6:1.

Among parents who are themselves a teacher or married to one (n=98), support for parental rights to such information is virtually as strong, as shown in table 1. Thus, teachers and their spouses resolutely support parents’ rights to the information. But, they are far less supportive of the policy to have such tests than parents as a whole.

Among parents as a whole, the overwhelming majority believes that the Ministry of Education is on the right track in its testing policy. A more than two-thirds majority (70%) agrees with the policy while 19% disagrees, as shown in table 2. Among teachers and their spouses, opinion is divided with a seeming plurality (49%) opposed and a large minority (41%) supportive of Ministry policy. In practice, the subset of teachers and spouses is too small to be certain that the plurality is actually opposed to Ministry policy.