The Fraser Institute released its “report card” on Ontario elementary schools last week, placing the Rainy River District School Board tied for ninth place overall.
The report used the province’s Education Quality Assessment Office results for Grade 3 and 6 students as a basis for the ranking system, as well as an overall grading system and value-added approach to examine all of the schools’ programs to make the assessment.
“I’m proud of the efforts our teachers and administrators are putting forth,” board chairman Gord McBride said upon hearing of their top 10 finish.
Five schools in the district were part of the report: J.W. Walker and Robert Moore in Fort Frances, Sturgeon Creek in Barwick, Cross-roads in Devlin, and North Star in Atikokan.
The report gave each school in the province—which had eligible EQAO results as well as Grade 3 and 6 classes with 15 students or more—a score out of 10, then ranked them in descending order.
Although Sturgeon Creek ranked the highest of the five local schools, with a rating of 7.6 out of 10, it ended up ranked 528 out of the 2,885 schools that took part in the report.
J.W. Walker was second with a 7.2 rating to finish at 685 overall, Robert Moore was third (7.0) for a rank of 814, Crossroads was fourth (6.9) to sit at 868, and North Star was fifth (5.2) to rank 1,930th.
The average of the five schools was 6.8—good enough for a ninth-place tie with the much larger Tor-onto District and Peel District school boards.
According to Peter Cowley of the Fraser Institute, a co-author of the report, one must take into consideration local board only had five schools in the assessment, whereas the Toronto and Peel boards had 278 and 60, respectively, meaning their rank is probably a closer snapshot of where the schools in the boards sit.
Cowley said the purpose of the report was to compare schools in an effort to help parents choose a “better” school for their child, as well as help encourage better efforts in schools that ranked low.
“People are always comparing the price, features, safety,” he said of people’s consumer habits. “There’s comparisons all over the place.
“When choosing a school for their kid, they’ll want to make a comparison,” he reasoned.
A sticking point of using the EQAO results is that when they are released each year, it is strictly stated the results should not be used to compare individual schools—and that the results are for determining student achievement only.
Part of the reason for this is that by comparing achievement be-tween Grade 6 classes from school to school, or even by comparing Grade 3 to Grade 6 results in individual schools, you are not always comparing apples with apples as students move from school to school—and some classes have higher achieving students in them than others from year to year.
“In an average school, that would result in variations from year to year,” Cowley countered. “We don’t want average schools.
“We want to iron out those differences,” he added. “The idea is to have everyone perform at an equally high level.
“Average schools and average teachers . . . the stuff that goes in is what you get out,” he argued.
What the report found, he ex-plained, is that student achievement and school success only were affected by things like income and parental education level “25 to 30 percent of the time.”
“Only about one-quarter is ex-plained by income or education of the parents,” he said, inferring that it must be something else.
“Is it so hard to hypothesize that some teachers are better than others?” he questioned.
But for some groups, not only is it hard to hypothesize, it is demeaning to consider it.
“Boards have always used EQAO results to help our teachers and schools to develop strategies to improve student learning and achievement,” Louise Ervin, president of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association, said in a press release shortly after the report was unveiled.
“[The] published ranking, however, undermines valid evaluation and testing measures; discourages and demoralizes teachers; and belittles the efforts of our students,” she argued.
From the moment EQAO results were first released, the local board adamantly objected to the ranking of schools by their test results.
“We are very proud of our achievements of EQAO,” said Terry Ellwood, superintendent of education for the board, adding it’s just “the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many other indicators of success other than EQAO.
“We don’t see anything good in comparing board to board or school to school in this manner,” he said of the report. “One of the things we’ve stressed is to keep working on steady improvement over the course of time.
“Educationally, we work for student improvement,” he continued. “Ranking has no effect on student achievement, and can be detrimental.”
“I don’t believe the criticisms of the report card are valid,” said Cowley. “If you take away comparison, how do we develop? Do we want to improve our schools or not?
“I suppose it comes down to personality,” he said of what kind of teacher may feel demoralized by a poor ranking. “It shouldn’t feel demeaning. Look at what that rating reflects.
“You can go to the staff room and cry a little and get mad and blame the Fraser Institute for the report card,” he continued, then adding teachers should be thinking, “But what are we going to do tomorrow?”
He said if 75 percent of a class is failing the EQAO tests, for example, the teachers should be thinking about what they’ll do to im-prove results.
“They should be determining where they’re falling down,” he noted. “Then looking at schools similar to them, finding the ones doing better than they are and learn.
“You’ll find schools that are doing a great job at being consistent,” he said. “There’s a huge body of expertise out there.
“Comparison between schools is good for students,” he concluded. “They’re missing the boat on the value of being compared.”
Cowley admitted comparing schools, and learning some schools and teachers are doing better than others, can cause some problems for teachers and teachers’ unions.
“If you can come to the rationale that some teachers are better than others, then collective bargaining agreements based on tenure can be questioned,” he noted. “Who says that a really outstanding teacher can’t be paid more than a mediocre teacher?”
(Fort Frances Times)
Fort Frances Times
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