The latest report from the Fraser Institute ranking BC secondary schools failed to make much of an impact with the Okanagan Skaha school district superintendent.
“We put our time and energy into the things we value, so we don’t put a lot of time into looking at the report card,” said superintendent Wendy Hyer. “We think they are skewed and not reflective of the work that we do.”
The Report Card on Secondary Schools in B.C. 2015 rates 289 public and independent secondary schools based on seven academic indicators using student results from annual province-wide exams, grade-to-grade transition rates and graduation rates.
According to Peter Cowley, the Fraser Institute’s director of school performance studies, the rankings are the go-to source for parents who want to find out how a school is doing over time or when compared to other schools. But Hyer points out that the academic indicators used by the Fraser Institute focus mainly on provincial exams, many of which are no longer mandatory. Hyer added that many students are choosing not to take exams they don’t need.
As in previous years, private schools top the rankings. Hyer suggests that is because of the strategies private schools that focus on academics, without trades, vocational or arts programming, can employ.
“Many of them select who will attend their school,” said Hyer. “They certainly provide extracurricular activities, but there is an academic focus, where we have a more comprehensive focus in our schools around trades and transitions.
“They are writing more provincial exams, and they have mandatory tutorials after school, those sort of things. They have a number of different strategies they can use.”
Hyer also pointed out that the district’s concern is ensuring that individual students have the tools they need to succeed.
“An exam score isn’t necessarily going to correlate with how successful folks are once they leave school,” she said. “We do a lot more looking at qualitative data that is student specific.”
In the Okanagan Skaha school district, Summerland Secondary achieved the highest ranking, coming in at 88 of the 289 schools ranked. Pen High fell in the rankings to 165 and Princess Margaret Secondary ranked 118. The highest ranking in the region was achieved by South Okanagan Secondary, in the Okanagan Similkameen School district, with a ranking of 85. Osoyoos Secondary was ranked 118, and Similkameen Secondary came in at 151.
This year, the Fraser Institute used their rankings to rate the school boards themselves.
“Ultimately, it is B.C.’s school boards that are responsible for the quality of the education services their schools provide. If schools in an individual board are not doing well, a fair question is: ‘What is the school board doing about it?’” Cowley said in a release.
In 2014, seven of the top 10 school boards — based on the average overall rating out of 10 earned by the schools they operate — were located in Metro Vancouver. The West Vancouver School District was highest with an average rating of 7.5 out of 10, followed by New Westminster, Coquitlam, Richmond and Langley.
The Okanagan Similkameen school board was the only valley board to break into the top ten, coming in at No. 8 on the list, ahead of Vancouver, and North Vancouver.