Elementary rankings raise questions
Calgary schools put in solid performance
Sarah Bieber is more than your average concerned parent when it comes to her children’s education. An advocate for better public education across Alberta, she has a good grip on the strengths and weaknesses of the school system.
Also a tutor and teacher by training, Bieber — whose children attend Westgate School in the Calgary ’s southwest — has seen a spike in students needing extracurricular help.
“In the school my kids attend, there are a lot of students getting private tutoring in math,” says the member of the education advocacy group Kids Come First.
Bieber suspects a change in the way mathematics is taught plays a role. Focused on inquiry-based learning, Alberta Education’s ‘discovery math’ curriculum puts less emphasis on repetition-based learning such as memorizing times tables.
“But I think they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” she says, adding the initiative is well intended, but needs fine tuning.
She is concerned about families that might not be able to afford extra tutoring.
Despite these concerns, Calgary schools rank among the best in the province for academic performance, according to the 2018 Fraser Institute’s Report Card on Alberta’s Elementary Schools.
The report card ranks 819 public, separate, private, francophone, independent and charter schools based on seven academic indicators derived from provincewide test results from Grade 6.
And this year, Calgary schools are among the best.
In fact, seven of the top 10 schools in Alberta are from Calgary.
“These reports are intended to measure individual schools and how they did relative to others,” says Peter Cowley with the Fraser Institute.
Among the large, non-private, institutions, he says Calgary Catholic School District fared best overall, followed by Calgary Board of Education (CBE), Edmonton Public Schools and Edmonton Catholic Schools.
“Calgary Catholic, on average, has done better in the last five years of the ratings,” says Cowley, who also heads up the Fraser Institute’s studies of schools in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.
The key metrics are the provincial achievement exam results for math, language arts, social studies and science, he says.
“They are curriculum-based tests that answer the question: Do the kids have the knowledge and the skills embodied in the curriculum at the Grade 6 level?” he says. “In my view, when you look at the results and see ‘Hmmm … Catholic is always on top,’ then you ask the question ‘Why?’ ”
The report card does have its critics. Among them is Bieber, who argues it favours schools with more students from higher socio-economic backgrounds and fewer students with diverse learning needs.
The Calgary Board of Education contends the report card relies heavily on provincial achievement exams, which it says is misleading.
“The CBE considers the overall success of students, which includes the ways they demonstrate citizenship, personal development and character in addition to academic achievement,” says Megan Geyer, spokesperson for the public board.
Still, Cowley argues the report card is the best available measuring stick. He acknowledges socioeconomic factors affect performance, but they should not be used as a crutch.
“If you say, ‘The kids in this school are poor and as a result that explains their poor performance,’ then you undermine the very goal and responsibility of public education.”
The only important question, he notes, is how schools can improve.
To that end some public and Catholic schools made big strides in this survey, including Lake Bonavista School. The public school moved from a five-year average ranking of 126th to 53rd. Among Catholic schools, St. Teresa of Calcutta rose from 213th to 25th.
Despite the great leap forward, parent Rachel Jensen — who has one child attending Lake Bonavista — says she hasn’t noticed any tangible difference in the quality of education at the school.
“My kids have done really well there,” she says, adding her son graduated Grade 6 last year.
While many public and Catholic schools rank highly, many of the top 10 are private schools.
Even Cowley notes these schools fare better because they skew toward higher-income families able to afford tuition, generally thousands of dollars annually.
“Private schools … have a very strong interest in doing well in these tests because … if they don’t, parents ask the embarrassing question ‘Why are we spending this money?’ ”
Bieber says she is “very happy” with her children’s experience at Westgate School — which placed 67th — despite a few bumps. Shifting to an inquiry-based learning model from a traditional one focused on rote learning and memorization is a work in progress, she adds.
The problem, she says, is that students with the most needs are falling further behind.
“They have students that need more support, but they’re not getting enough access to the supports they need to progress.”