The Fraser Institute has released its latest report card on British Columbia public and private schools, a both popular and controversial resource for parents and schools. Popular because the annual report gives parents a third party critique of schools and a way to compare or even rank different schools. Controversial because it’s an enormous challenge to rank or compare schools that have a different focus, learning strategy or enrollment.
“Our report card allows parents to quickly and easily determine if their child’s school is improving or regressing academically,” says the Fraser Insitute. “It gives parents information they can use in discussions with teachers and principals.” And for their part, it’s true. The trick is to remember to use the report as just one of many tools in researching and assessing schools.
The report does not try to pretend all schools are the same and in fact attempts to normalize each school for the purposes of comparison. One article examines how these comparisons are made, going so far as to find an example where a lower income school vastly out-performs a higher income school.
Another popular resource, for American universities, is a U.S. News & World Report annual feature. It ranks the options for higher education and tries to keep different types of schools in different categories, but ultimately is trying to fit every type of shoe, so to speak, into one too-small shoe box. It’s still a valuable resource, but the best school in the report may not be the best school for your child for all sorts of reasons.
The same is true of the Fraser Institute report. They have provided a good starting point for research and inquiry, and valuable information is presented in a thoughtful manner. But of course it’s not the only resource out there and it is only to our benefit that we explore all of the information out there and make a decision that is best for our own individual children’s needs.
[...] wrote about the benefits and limitations of the Fraser Institute reports a few weeks ago with the release of the BC schools edition. For the Ontario version, the Toronto Sun published a special section on elementary schools [...]