March 27th, 2011:

Here is how the OCDSB schools ranked according to the Fraser Institute school “report card” that was released on Friday.

As a statistician, I do have some serious issues with rankings like these – much like the EQAO testing process itself – there is no context presented in order to interpret these numbers fully. Unknown are factors that can greatly influence a schools performance, like:

• the percentage of students in ESL programs
• proportion of special needs students
• family income and household education
• and others…

The Fraser Institute says the following on their website:

By combining a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible public web site, the school report cards allow teachers, parents, school administrators, students, and taxpayers to analyze and compare the academic performance of individual schools in an attempt to answer the question, “How are our schools doing?”.

Fine. Take this at face value, but the danger is that some parents will use tools like these as their ONLY basis of judgement about a particlar school. THAT is where I have a problem. Still, this is a tool that might be combined with others to help make decisions about the relative merits of one school over another. In that case, rankings like these can have some limited value.

Anyhow, here is the list. It would be interesting if someone organized these according to zone…

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