Elmira District Secondary School has been ranked 33 out of 747 secondary schools in Ontario, up from 38th in last year’s report card compiled by the Fraser Institute.
The market-driven organization annually ranks Ontario’s schools. Ratings are determined by collecting objective indicators about each school’s performance from the Education Quality and Accountability Office and the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) with the hopes of assisting parents when they choose a school for their children.
“The idea behind them was to provide objective information to parents on any student outcomes to which we were able to get data,” said Peter Cowley, director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute. “Even though public education in this country is something in excess of $70 billion a year, there are very few publicly available objective comparable annually generated measures of anything. We take what we can and in Ontario – we do have a well-established set of province-wide tests.”
Cowley says the Fraser Institute looks at and asks a number of questions of the results, including how the results rank against provincial data, what percentage of test participants were successful or unsuccessful, and the success rate of males versus females. They take those results and compile an overall rating out of ten.
At 33rd overall, EDSS saw a rating of 8.5 out of 10, calculated as a result of the following school achievements – an average level of 3.0 out of 4 in Grade 9 academic math, and 3.2 out of 4 in Grade 9 applied math; 92.1 per cent of students passed the OSSLT exam, while 70 per cent of individuals who had previously attempted the test passed; only 10.5 per cent of tests were marked at below standard; there is no gender gap in math, however the OSSLT gender gap is in favour of girls.
“A 33rd ranking puts them in the top five per cent of schools, so it is a very, very strong result,” said Cowley. “In the case of Elmira, they have done very well on a continuing basis; in this particular report, we go back as far as the 2012/13 school year – they are well above average. They have done very, very well in every one of the years and particularly in this one, where they got the highest that they have had in the five-year period.”
EDSS has received the highest rating and ranking received for a school in the Waterloo Region. Even more, this area has been praised by the Fraser Institute for their high performance.
“This is a very strong performing area from the point of view that we have 14 schools for this year and their average overall rating is 6.7. Remember that for the province as a whole for all of the schools in the report – for all 747 of them – the average is 6.0,” he said, however noting that they don’t know why any of these schools have this result, all they know is the objective data that reflects student outcomes.
While EDSS has been very successful, Cowley says there are two areas the school could focus on to improve their rankings.
“Elmira is doing well, to get that 33rd ranking they have to do well in everything. The applied math at Elmira has never been below 3.0 in the five years that we report now, and neither has academic, and generally 3.0 is saying that on average our kids are meeting the provincial standard. It’s a good high score, and in both cases they are very consistent,” he said. “There are two areas anyway there that, at the very least, should cause the principal and staff to think why do we think this is happening and what, if anything, can we do about it and both in terms of the previously eligible pass rate on the OSSLT, and the gender gap on the OSSLT.”
While new EDSS principal Brad Marsh said the ranking is nice to see, it isn’t anything administrators take too seriously.
“We are pleased that the Fraser Institute continues to recognize the good work our students and staff do at Elmira District Secondary School and across Waterloo Region District School Board,” he said. “However, the vast majority of the work we do across this region to support our students is not reflected in these rankings. As presented, the ratings in the report provide an incomplete and distorted picture of school effectiveness.
“There is no evidence to show that ranking schools improves student learning. We also disagree with the use of standardized tests to compare schools.”
