Fraser Institute releases its 2010 Ontario School Rankings
by David Field
This week the Fraser Institute released its 2010 school rankings of 2,742 Ontario elementary schools. The rankings are largely based on the results of Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) of Grade 3 and Grade 6 measurements of reading, writing and math. For many schools listed in the report five years worth of EQAO data is measured.
Ontario’s EQAO testing is mandatory for publicly funded schools including Catholic and French. Therefore the majority of the schools ranked are public. Private schools have the opportunity participate in the EQAO testing but it is not mandatory for them like the public schools. The Bishop Strachan School (a girls school in Toronto) did choose to participate for the first time in 2009 and received an overall rating of 9.9 out of 10 by the Fraser Institute. The other schools listed as private schools included Islamic and Hebrew religious schools and schools run by First Nations.
The accompanying Fraser Institute report indicates the purpose of such school rankings as a valuable tool for parents to make decisions about what schools to send their children to. In addition, the report states that the rankings are an opportunity for schools to improve aspects of their school’s performance. School rankings are often very controversial because they can present a very narrow analysis of all that a school is doing and what students are learning. The report acknowledges on page three that it should not be the only resource used in researching schools, “Of course, the choice of a school should not be made solely on the basis of a single source of information.”
Many parents like having access to school rankings as it can often reaffirm decisions about schooling for their children. If a school has a concerning rating in any report it should make parents ask questions of administrators and teachers. But no research or school rankings can inform parents better than visiting a school, meeting with teachers and speaking to parents at that school; at ourkids.net, we have persistently cautioned against overdetermining the value of private school reviews and rankings. If school rankings can assist parents in asking the questions that are necessary, then they can serve a purpose.
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