Oh here we go…the FSA school rankings for BC are out today

From the Vancouver Sun – Feb 7, 2009

The 2009 report card, released today, ranks more than 1,000 B.C.
elementary schools from top to bottom based on results from last year’s
Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), the only provincewide standardized
test in B.C. elementary schools. The tests are delivered each year in
Grades 4 and 7.

Critics, and there are many, insist the FSA is too narrow a measure for judging schools.

“It
doesn’t provide an accurate picture,” said Patti Bacchus, chair of the
Vancouver board of education. “Schools are much more complex
organizations than you can accurately represent on that narrow piece of
information.

“What it does is it places some schools as winners
and others as losers and I don’t think that is at all helpful and I
don’t think it’s at all accurate.”

Cowley agrees his report card
does not provide a comprehensive look at a school’s performance but
says it does give evidence of how well schools are teaching basic
skills. He says he would expand his report card to include other
provincewide indicators of success in elementary schools, but there are
none.

For quite some time BC teachers have been opposed to the BC Government's Foundation Skills Assessment and related Fraser Institute ranking process.  Even the Vancouver School Board has come out pretty much against the testing.  Recently, the Labour Relations Board in BC ordered teachers to end their boycott of the FSA's.

So what's a parent to think?  Certainly boards, schools and teachers must be accountable at some level for the education that they deliver to students.  However, is it really necessary to rank schools in such a manner?  The results are not necessarily an accurate representation of what is happening within the schools.  Obviously there are always areas that can be improved.  It is important to note however, that there are also things that go on outside of schools that can impact how well things work inside schools.  Would it not be better to factor in some of these influences as well somehow?  Why are we pitting schools against schools?  After all, BC has the most number of children who live in poverty...is it not possible that these social issues can also have an impact on the results of FSA's?  At the very best, these tests offer a small "window in time" about how children are doing within the school system.  They certainly don't offer much more than that.

A few years ago I watched an incredible CBC documentary by Mark Kelley about Prince Rupert’s Roosevelt Park Elementary School which found itself
at the bottom of the list in the Fraser Institute’s ranking of BC
elementary schools.  It is an amazing story.  Watch it and then consider if ranking schools really provides us with an accurate picture about what is happening in our education system.