Private schools bookend school rankings

The Okanagan’s independent schools are at the top — and the bottom — of this year’s ranking produced by the Fraser Institute.

Highest marks from the right-leaning think tank go to Aberdeen Hall, an expensive private academy, and Immaculata, a Catholic high school, both in Kelowna. The schools tied for 33rd position among the 252 B.C. schools assessed by the institute.

The lowest-performing Okanagan secondary school was Kelowna Christian School, which placed 167th in the ranks.

Of the Valley’s 16 high schools, 12 placed in the top half of the ranking.

After Aberdeen, the highest-rated Okanagan high schools were Okanagan Mission in Kelowna at 45th spot; George Elliot in Lake Country in 58th spot; and Kelowna Secondary, at 63rd.

The annual rankings are based on six indicators of student success, including results on annual provincewide exams, grade-to-grade transition rates, and graduation rates.

“The good news for the Okanagan is that most of the high schools placed above the provincial average,” study author Peter Cowley said Friday in an interview.

Two schools, Mount Boucherie in West Kelowna and W.L. Seaton in Vernon, have steadily improved their student performance over the past five years, Cowley said. But two other Okanagan high schools, Kelowna Christian and Okanagan Mission, have had five straight years of dropping student performance.

“The data is very clear and it provides significant evidence that two of the high schools in the Okanagan are improving and two of them are declining in terms of student performance,” Cowley said.

No discernible five-year trend upward or downward is evident among the 14 other Okanagan high schools, Cowley said.

The institute says parents should use the report card every year to see how their child’s school is doing, and if necessary ask the principal how he or she plans to turn things around.

For its part, the BC Teachers Federation regularly dismisses the annual rankings, describing them as “bogus” or “useless clickbait” and saying they “serve no useful academic or social purpose,” in tweets sent out by the union.

The union also wants the government to stop publicly releasing the kind of information upon which the rankings are based.