Published in the Vancouver Sun on June 11, 2010
By David Johnson
There are about 1,400 elementary schools in British Columbia, with about 600 of them in Metro Vancouver. How do parents, teachers, taxpayers and school administrators know if children are attending a school that does well by its students, that is, where the best schools are?
In a study published by the C.D. Howe Institute this week, I have created a measure of school performance that fairly compares schools where students come from similar social and economic backgrounds.
There is a big range in school performance, and some schools are better than others, but they cannot be meaningfully ranked by simply using the percentage of students who do well on provincial exams.
Why? Because the schools where more students come from homes that offer them the most advantages usually have the highest success rates. Accordingly, most educators realize that to rank schools by overall success rates would tell us little about the quality of staff at any given school.
British Columbia students write the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) in Grade 4 and Grade 7. This is a standardized exam that is comparable between years and assesses students on numeracy, reading and writing. I construct success rates at schools by calculating the percentage of students who meet or exceed provincial expectations in mastering the curriculum.
To eliminate the potential problem of schools' excluding some students to boost their success rates, I use the percentage of all students meeting or exceeding expectations in the grade over all, not the percentage of students who write. If a school strategically encouraged poorer students to be absent from the FSA, in my analysis this would not increase their measure of school performance.
By linking student postal codes to census data on education, employment, and other variables, and by using the data that directly describe students in the FSA grades in each year, I have constructed social and economic profiles for most provincial schools.
When these data are combined and linked to each school, it becomes apparent that about 40 per cent of the variation in school success rates is associated with variations in students' social and economic backgrounds.
And by focusing on the statistical variation that remains after the influence of these socioeconomic variables has been accounted for, we can judge whether a school appears to be performing above or below average.
This comparison is fair to teachers and principals because it is made only after separating out the effects of the student pool at the school. That way, the role of other factors, such as the quality of teaching and administration, becomes clear.
Using this fair comparison, two public schools in Vancouver stand out: Grandview and Britannia elementary schools. These schools have large numbers of aboriginal students and produce better student results in both Grade 4 and Grade 7 than similar largely aboriginal schools in the rest of the province.
These schools take students who would normally do extremely poorly on the FSA and bring them much closer to the provincial average performance. This is an exceptional achievement, but it would not have been recognized in rankings using just raw student success rates.
These two schools are clearly doing something right, and educators elsewhere in B.C. should investigate what practices make them stand out. Improving aboriginal student performance is a top priority for the education system across Canada, and educators need to know what has been successful.
Five Catholic schools in Vancouver-- Corpus Christi, St. Augustine's, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Patrick's elementary-- also excel in both Grade 4 and Grade 7 FSA results relative to schools where children come from similar backgrounds. For the last three schools on this list, the students are from average neighbourhoods. Yet, they do well above average. Their excellent performance is worth investigating and understanding.
We live in a society that encourages transparency and accountability in public institutions. This includes the educational system. To promote a greater understanding of it, we need to understand and measure how students are doing. However, it is essential that schools be compared fairly -- with other schools whose student population is drawn from similar socioeconomic conditions.
The FSA is crucial not just for measuring the quality of schools, but also for finding out how well aboriginal, English as a second language or special education programs work so that they can be expanded for the benefit of all students who could benefit.
The FSA creates a measure of student performance that is necessary to evaluate educational outcomes. The better the information we have, the better job we can do getting our children ready to face the world.
David Johnson is a professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., and education policy scholar at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto.
