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Fraser Institute's Report Card ranks private schools as Burnaby's top five

It's always a topic that gets people's blood boiling in Burnaby. The Fraser Institute released its annual Report Card today, a ranking of 876 public and private schools in B.C.

This year, Burnaby's top five schools were all private: Holy Cross was first, St. Michael's second, John Knox third, etc. Montecito Elementary was sixth, making it the first public school to appear on the list. Edmonds Elementary, one of the city's poorest schools, was ranked last – 870 on a list of 876 schools provincewide. Click here to see the Report Card.

What is the Report Card exactly? The Fraser Institute takes the results from the Foundation Skills Assessment tests, (the annual provincewide reading, writing and math tests for grades 4 and 7 students) and uses them to rank and compare schools. (They also include demographic data: parental income and the number of ESL and special needs students.)  The FSA tests are intended to give the government a snapshot of how B.C. students are doing. The B.C. Teachers' Federation opposes the test and has been aggressively campaigning against them for years. One of the main reasons is because if they were scrapped, the Fraser Institute would have nothing to rank the schools. And ranking the schools is "unfair, damaging, and inappropriate" according to president Irene Lanzinger. The teachers argue the Report Card favours private schools while undermining confidence in the public system, a system already suffering from underfunding. The Fraser Institute says parents want the information, that the report helps parents compare and chose schools, and the ranking encourages schools to improve. Anyway, read the story in Saturday's paper for the rest of the arguments and our local school board chair's response.

The Report Card tends to reflect socioeconomic status, (poor schools rank low, private rank high) but the Fraser Institute communications guy pointed out an anomaly:
"I also want to draw you attention to Chaffey-Burke school which scored an 8.1 out of 10 and is ranked 90th in the province. The average parental income of students in this school is just $48,200 and only 10.8 per cent of its students are below provincial expectations in reading, writing and arithmetic. Now compare it to Gilmore Elementary, which scored 5.5 out of 10, ranking it 507th in the province. Students here come from homes with average incomes of $78,500 and almost 20% of the students are not meeting provincial expectations. What is Chaffey-Burke doing that makes it so successful? Why is Gilmore, a more affluent school, not doing as well?"

Also, readers may have noticed some of the Black Press papers (our competition) ran the story already. They made a deal to run the report in the paper in exchange for getting the results early. Usually that deal is made with The Vancouver Sun (part of our company) but they don't have the space this year because of the Olympics coverage. For the record, I oppose that practice for any paper, including ours. It's no different than paying for information, in this case with ad space, something journalists are ethically forbidden to do. But with the industry in rough shape and papers hurting for revenue, I'm sure we'll see more pressure to throw ethics out the window.

Source: http://communities.canada.com/vannet/blogs/commcons/archive/2010/02/05/fraser-institute-s-report-card-ranks-private-schools-as-burnaby-s-top-five.aspx