o-author of the report Peter Cowley said.
You can compare the school based on its own history, or to other schools within your district, or overall in the province, he said. For parents, who have the right to send their child to any school in the province, they can use this data to see how each school does when it comes to academic criteria to choose which one to place their child in, Cowley said.
Once a student is enrolled, the report serves as an annual audit, Cowley said, showing whether or not the school is improving, declining, or staying the same when it comes to FSA results.
For educators, it means that they could compare themselves against another school in the province that serves similar kids with similar families, Cowley said, and see what it is they are doing to get a higher score.
“Maybe [as an educator] you can find some that are doing better, and you might be able to get in touch with them and ask ‘what are you doing with your kids’ because maybe we can adapt some of your methods to our schools for the benefit of our kids,” Cowley said.
“We’d like to have all the schools in the report card but we feel compelled, and I think it’s a reasonable thing, to assure ourselves that we have a reasonable amount of data to use,” Cowley said.
St. Joseph’s, an independent school, ranked 57 out of 875, had an overall ranking of 8.9 out of 10.
Of the public schools, Twain Sullivan was the highest in the valley, ranked 137 with a 7.7 score. That’s the highest its been in five years, according to the report, with an upward trend seen since 2006 except for 2009, which was lower than 2008 figures.
Muheim Memorial was next, scored 237 in the province, with a slightly lower overall score of 6.9 this year compared to last year’s 7.9.
Telkwa is a close follower at 261, with a 6.8 overall score, and last of the Bulkley Valley schools was Walnut Park at 335, with a 6.4 overall score.
But the Fraser Institute report is not one that School District #54 pays much stock to, according to assistant superintendent Chris van der Mark.
“We don’t use the Fraser Report,” van der Mark said. “We do make some use of the FSA, but we’re not interested in what the Fraser Institute does.”
The FSA test is used as a snapshot, van der Mark said. It’s to see how students are doing at one point in time, but by no means is it the only measure of a student’s success. Rather, a teacher will administer the FSA and the district will look at the scores in conjunction with in-class assessments written and report card information.
“We use that information all the time, and we can use that and compare it to how the students do on the FSA,” van der Mark said. “It’s more alarming if a student is struggling on a number of assessments.”
But you can’t get a full understanding just by looking at that grades’ reading, writing, and numeracy skills.
“We don’t lump all our eggs into one basket,” van der Mark said. “There is so much more that goes on into the development of that child … but it gets us information and we use that to see how it correlates with the bigger picture that we have going on in the district.”
In fact, the FSA has shown the district that they’re doing very well, above the provincial average in grade fours who are meeting or exceeding, girls, boys, and aboriginal scores. Provincially, the Grade 4 averages are 65, 69, 62, and 52 per cent; for the Bulkley Valley, these percentages are 75, 80, 73, and 55.
“We had a pretty good year,” van der Mark said. “As a district last year our kids scored pretty well, and there’s lots of things that can affect that.”
What’s interesting is to compare last year’s Grade 4s did in Grade 5 this year. You can’t compare different kids, even in the same school, and come up with a fair comparison; the only fair comparison, and the one that makes the most importance, is tracking each student’s improvements against their own scores in years prior.
“Thats the way we, and our schools, monitor our kids and to track their progress,” van der Mark said.
It is a report that some, however, find questionable, including the B.C. Teacher’s Federation, who are opposed to not just the Fraser Institute report but the FSA on a whole.
“These tests assess only a very narrow and superficial slice of the curriculum, but they take on exaggerated importance when the minister inflates their value … and when the Fraser Institute misuses the results to rank schools,” President of the BCTF Susan Lambert said.
In fact, the Ministry of Education, who implement the FSA, has on it’s website its own caution into ranking schools using their data.
“FSA results are a snapshot of student performance and should be considered along with a wide variety of other information,” the website states. “Attempting to rank schools or districts based on FSA results invites misleading comparisons.”