Making the grade

One local school board couldn’t be happier with the results of the Fraser Institute’s annual Report Card on Ontario’s Elementary Schools.

But an official from the other board says she doesn't put too much emphasis on reports like this.

Joan Powell, superintendent of education for the Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board, said having the top eight ranked schools in Thunder Bay according to the Fraser Institute just goes to show the board must be doing something right.
 
“I think this report for us just confirms the data we have already on our student achievement, so we were very thrilled to see that report,” she said Tuesday afternoon.

Not that she was surprised at the results.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of new information in terms of how well our students are doing and our schools are doing,” she said.

The report is based on reading and writing results of students in Grades 3 and 6, and assigns a ranking out of 10 to each school measured.

Overall, Catholic board schools averaged a 6.54 score in 2010, compared to the 5.07 average garnered by the 13 public schools ranked.  The Fraser Institute did not list a couple of the public board’s rural institutions in its rankings.

The public board’s averages are down 0.22 from a year ago and about 2.0 lower than the board’s five-year average of 5.27. As a whole the Catholic board suffered a 0.11 drop over 2009, and came in about 0.08 below its five-year average.

St. Francis Catholic Elementary School was the top-ranked school in the city, receiving a 9.0 grade that also placed it tied for 82nd province-wide. It continues to lead the five-year average scores, at 7.76, 0.32 more than St. Paul.

Three other Catholic board schools – Holy Family (7.16), Corpus Christi (7.1) and St. Thomas Aquinas (7.1) – also maintained a7.0 mark average since 2006.


St. Paul, at 8.5, was the second-ranked school in 2010, edging St. Thomas Aquinas (8.4) by 0.1.

Our Lady of Charity was the board’s lowest-ranked school, at 3.8.

At the other end of the scale, the Lakehead Public board’s Vance Chapman Elementary School’s downward trend continued to the bottom of the pile and 2,689^th in Ontario.

However, Cathy Siemieniuk, the board’s director of education, said parents shouldn’t read too much into the school’s dismal 1.7 score.
In fact, she said the public board pays little attention to the Fraser Institute’s annual report.

“In no way do we endorse any report that ranks schools,” she said, reached in Toronto via telephone by CKPR Radio. “The results that are reported there in no way reflect the Vance Chapman story. It would be absolutely not our process to put too much emphasis on that.

“It’s very demoralizing to the principal, the staff and the students and the families of that school when too much emphasis is placed on that.”

Siemieniuk said Lakehead Public Schools uses other measuring sticks to judge how individual schools are doing.

“The data that we collect, the data that EQAO collects have so much richer components to it than just numbers. And that’s what we look at when we’re assigning support or really ensuring that school improvement plans reflect the very true nature of individual school populations.