Can learning be measured?

Times Contributor 

 

The Fraser Institute have released their controversial report cards for 2011, which rate schools entirely on academic performance. The Fraser Institute base their calculations on the publicly available information that is received from provincial testing.

The Fraser Institute is a Canadian, independent, non-partisan research organization which made its first Alberta high school report card in 1999 and elementary report card in 2002. The Fraser Institute reports have expanded to provinces which provide provincial testing whose results are made available to the public. The Fraser Institute has, in the past 13 years, expanded its research to British Columbia, Ontario and have used to produce results for Quebec.

“You have to keep in mind our report cards are looking at overall school average results, so what the report card is first and foremost designed to do is help you answer the question of a parent or an educator, ‘how is my school doing compared to all the other schools in the report card, in other words, is it keeping up academically?’ Now the report card will clearly tell you if a school is above or below average in terms up keeping up academically, but doesn’t say why,” said Associate Director of School Performance Studies, Fraser Institute Michael Thomas.

Principal of Holy Cross Collegiate Lavern Evans thinks provincial testing and the Fraser Institute only provide a ‘snapshot’ of a school’s performance.

“There’s a lot more that goes on in the school besides results at the end of the day, it’s sort of misrepresenting because it doesn’t give the big picture of the school,” said Evans.

The Fraser Institute has never claimed that its reports offer a complete evaluation of a school success.

“When we say a school is doing a good job, you still have to follow up with the school and affirm our findings. Also look to other aspects of the school that we can’t measure in our report card, like extracurricular programming, special programs, different languages like French emersion, or even a third language, how well a school teaches students to be good community members, these things unfortunately cannot be measured in the report card,” said Thomas.

The Fraser Institute reports focus on core subject areas that are covered by provincial examinations. Looking to high school diploma examinations, which account for 50 per cent of a student’s grade, one could question if the heavily weighted exams, which the reports use for its information, portray a true representation of a student’s academic success and, the school’s academic success as a whole.

“I think (the diplomas) are weighted too heavily on the student’s grade, should they have a final exam and should it be important, of course, but if you weight it at say 30 per cent, the kids are still going to take it seriously,” said Evans. 

On the other hand, Thomas views standardized testing, including diploma examinations, as important to accurately reflect if students know the material at that point in their education. 

“I think it’s very important to measure if the curriculum is being delivered appropriately. Standardized testing is done for a number of reasons, it’s done first of all to measure that the curriculum across the province is appropriate and is at an appropriate level for students, it’s done to make sure school boards are delivering it, to make sure schools are accurately delivering the curriculum and at a student level, to give a diagnostic on the student education and if they need early intervention,” said Thomas.

“When I hear teaching to the test, the fact is if you are teaching the curriculum, by design the way the test is written, you should be teaching to the test,” said Thomas.

At HCC, Evans said they do not implement ‘teaching to the test.’

“(Teaching) isn’t just to prepare kids to write an exam, we want to focus on reading, writing, and discussion, we want to focus on many things not just, ‘can you take a multiple choice exam and do well?’, because you’re doing it as a service to the kids, and preparing them for life after school. You don’t want to be that teacher, as if in a factory, teaching a kid how to take an exam, I think there is so much more to teaching than just that,” said Evans.

 “If you do other things well, such as reading, writing, discussion, I think the kids will naturally do better on a multiple choice exam anyways,” said Evans.

While it may be clear that the Fraser Institute is incapable of delivering a complete review of a school, their reports are still referred to by parents across the province. 

“Last year in Alberta alone, we had 500,000 individual school reports downloaded, so   parents looked up 500,000 different schools to see how they were doing on our report card. Clearly, parents are getting a lot of use out of our report cards in Alberta,” said Thomas. 

A bit of controversy over the years have been sparked by Alberta’s Deputy Premier, Thomas Lukaszuk, who according to Fraser Institute’s website, www.compareschoolrankings.org, called the reports a ‘misuse of provincial test results’ and in the future, provincial testing could possibly change in order to eliminate further production of the reports. 

“I find it unsettling that people would be open to the idea to want less information available about the education system, and it kind of makes me think about the health care system in Alberta, could you imagine the public reaction if the decision makers said, ‘we are not going to release any more information on the state of health care in Alberta’, people would be outraged,” said Thomas. 

Thomas wants schools to use the reports as a tool to pinpoint where the school is lagging behind and areas where the school is excelling.

 “We’re not out here to demonize schools that perform below average, our report cards are intended to be a tool for improvement,” said Thomas.

Evans described HCC as “not overly concerned with the Fraser report at this time.”

“We’ve jumped up quite a bit from last year, and we continue to improve which is always nice to see, as far as action plans and ideas for school improvements, so much is put into that compared to the Fraser reports,” said Evans.

The Fraser Institute hopes to continue their report card as long as they have “good, reliable and objective data out there.”

“We intend to do this report card as long as we have the publicly available  information and I hope people make their voices heard that they want this information to be public so we can do our analysis,” said Thomas.

Thomas encourages parents to not focus on the rating but to look at the data that is collected from over five years to see the trends, and decide for themselves what to make use of from the information.