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Fraser Institute gives Rupert Schools a failing grade

The Fraser Institute released its school performance report card for 2010 on Monday, and Prince Rupert’s public schools did not score well.
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The Fraser Institute released its school performance report card for 2010 on Monday, and Prince Rupert’s public schools did not score well.

Westview was the highest ranked Prince Rupert elementary placing 695th out of 875 schools with 4.5/10, followed by Lax Kxeen in 710th with 4.4/10, Pineridge in 768th with a score of 3.9, Conrad in 857th with 2.3 and Roosevelt in 874th of 875 schools with a score of 0.0/10.

The city’s lone private school bucked the trend by scoring a 9.1/10 to sit in 49th.

In British Columbia the results are based on the scores students get on the Foundational Skills Assessment (FSA), a provincial test that students take to measure their reading, writing and math skills. The FSA itself is controversial and is despised by many educators across the province. The BC Teacher’s Federation has been trying to have it removed from the curriculum. Even the B.C. Principals and Vice-Principals Association came out in January to voice opposition to the FSA.

According to the superintendent of the Prince Rupert School District, Lynn Hauptman, the problem is that the FSAs are meant to assess students’ skills mid-year so teachers can know what needs to be worked on before the year is out, but then the Fraser Institute takes that one-day snapshot of and ranks schools entirely on that basis.

After years of bad scores from Prince Rupert schools, Hauptman outright refuses to comment on them.

“I will not comment on what the Fraser Institute does with the [FSA] results. I abhor what the Fraser Institute does. It’s not what the data was intended for, it is a disgrace that it was used in that way,” says Hauptman.

MLA Gary Coons – who is a former teacher himself – supports attempts by education workers to get rid of the FSA. He says that the standardized test is inherently flawed to begin with, and that the Fraser Institute is using it for a right-wing campaign to undermine the public school system to push for greater privatization of education.

The Fraser Institute, which has said it favours a larger role for private schools, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview before this story had to go to press, but they did fire back at criticism over using the FSA results in their press release.

“The teachers’ union wants to deny parents, educators, and taxpayers this information. It doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact that improvement is possible and that it can only be identified by comparing school performance based on student assessments,” says Peter Cowley, the Fraser Institute’ director of school performance.

The results for the Fraser Institute’s 2010 school report card can be found at: www.compareschoolrankings.org