‘Graduation rate reaches new high in Greater Victoria school district,” said last Saturday’s headline.
Wondering about your school’s graduation rate? Check the Fraser Institute Report Card on Secondary Schools. It shows the rates for each school in the past five years.
Be sure to read the introduction to better understand how parental education and income levels tend to influence how well students do. Actual rating versus predicted helps point out which schools are performing better or worse than expected after those socio-economic variables have been factored in.
Government can then focus on the exceptional schools, sharing strategies and techniques used by successful schools and stepping in with extra help to bring struggling schools back on track.
As taxpayers, we want our money used wisely to give our youngest citizens the best education possible. So when the Report Card on Secondary Schools shows a school with an exam-mark difference of 11 or 12 per cent for five years, it’s time for the province to crack down and maintain provincewide standards because a large difference usually indicates that the school has been inflating the grades. Inflating our kids’ self-esteem is not the purpose of education.
Also of concern is the delayed-advancement rate, the percentage of graduates who take longer than the usual three years to complete high school. Needing extra time is to be expected for a certain percentage of the population, but when the rates reach 30 to 50 per cent, the province needs to start asking some questions. Often, there are no consequences in choosing to chill for an extra year or two. That can make high school a pretty great place to hang out. At taxpayers’ expense.
The Fraser Institute report cards pull together massive amounts of useful data to present a meaningful picture of various aspects of each school’s performance. Yet critics continue to bleat about the rankings while ignoring everything else.
If they would just read the report cards, they would see the explanation of socio-economic factors and how they are accounted for. And the report cards acknowledge that testing doesn’t tell anything about all the other important things that are going on in the schools. Parents choosing a school are encouraged to investigate multiple sources of information.
Some educators grudgingly acknowledge that the Foundation Skills Assessments and provincial examinations do serve a useful purpose. They just don’t like the publication of those provincewide statistics for the rest of us to analyze.
We, the public, are supposed to blindly trust the “professionals” to make the right decisions for our children. We already hand them over for 30-plus hours a week for 13 years. I am not prepared to do so in total ignorance. I want to know how my child is doing in relation to provincial standards, not just within my little local fiefdom.
It is time for taxpayers and parents to read up and speak out about our education system. The B.C. Teachers’ Federation has already succeeded in eliminating most of the mandatory provincial final exams — there is just one left. And again this year, they are actively sabotaging the FSAs by telling parents to keep their kids at home.
If you’re OK with going forth in blissful ignorance, thinking your child is a solid 75 per cent student, think twice. That kid is in for a rude shock when he or she hits post-secondary and is struggling along at 63 per cent.
All because your school was its own island, subject to no standards except the ones they chose for themselves. That’s what happens when there are no FSAs and no mandatory provincial exams to measure achievement and maintain standards.
Lori Hamilton of Cobble Hill is the parent of a former student, a past parent-advisory-council member and president, and a former teacher on call.
