The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 10, 2008
Page: C6
Section: Weekend Review
Byline: Janet Steffenhagen
Source: Vancouver Sun

The Fraser Institute admits its controversial report cards are not the definitive word on school performance.

Families choosing a school for their children should also pay it a visit and interview teachers, principals and other parents, the conservative think-tank says in releasing its latest report card ranking B.C. secondary schools. They should also consider non-academic programs offered by schools.

But when it comes to academics, the report cards are one of only two yardsticks available for comparing B.C. schools. The other measure, produced by the C.D. Howe Institute and released for the first time in February, takes socio-economic factors into account and does not rank results.

The Fraser Institute has been publishing its B.C. secondary school report card since 1998 and now produces similar reports in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick as well.

The critics—and there are many—insist the measure is invalid, but that hasn’t killed its popularity.

The report cards consider a range of data, including graduation rates, average exam marks, percentage of exams failed, differences between school and exam marks, percentage of students who complete Grades 10-12 within three years and differences between boys’ and girls’ marks in Language Arts 10 and Math 10.

This year’s report card is different from previous ones because the B.C. graduation program has changed. Students are now required to write five provincial exams—Language Arts 10, Math 10, Science 10, Social Studies 11/12 and Language Arts 12. The rest are optional.

As a result of that change, the report card’s author Peter Cowley says it’s not possible to compare this year’s results with those from previous years, and his 2008 rankings do not indicate whether a school is improving or following a downward trend.

Cowley says the information, which he obtains each year from the B.C. education ministry through freedom-of-information requests, is richer than before because all students are taking the same exams and the results are drawn from three grades. “I think it’s a good solid set of data to answer the prime questions, which is—in general—how is the school doing academically compared with others,” he said.

Of the marks assigned to schools, 25 per cent is based on average exam marks, 25 per cent on the percentage of exams failed, 13 per cent on the school-versus-exam mark difference, six per cent on the Language Arts 10 gender gap, six per cent on the Math 10 gender gap, 12.5 per cent on the graduation rate and 12.5 per cent on the percentage of students who do not progress from grade-to-grade as expected.

Originally, the report card had five indicators and all had equal weightings. As new indicators were introduced, they drew weight from the original ones, Cowley explained.

The report cards also provide information about schools’ characteristics, such as the percentage of students who are special needs and ESL and the average education of parents. That’s intended to help schools compare their performance with others that are similar and is not used to determine rankings.

Paul Shaker, Simon Fraser University’s education dean and a report-card critic, says the rankings are neither scientifically credible nor socially valuable. “Ministry officials, superintendents, school trustees, principals and teachers as well as the B.C. deans of education and our research professors, submit that such ‘report cards’ as publicized are invalid, unreliable, and socially damaging,” he said in an editorial published in The Vancouver Sun.

Connie Denesiuk, president of the B.C. School Trustees’ Association, said she doesn’t have a problem with the “snapshot” data used by the Fraser Institute, but believes it is too narrow a measure. “The data … provides parts of the bigger picture [but] whether that’s sufficient to rank schools—I don’t think so.”

jsteffenhagen@png.canwest.com