Five city grade schools rank in top quarter of new report

Five Windsor elementary schools made the top 25 per cent of the Fraser Institute's rankings based on standardized testing results in 2022.

The institute, which describes itself as a libertarian-conservative Canadian public policy think tank, compiled results of elementary school performance based on results of testing from the Education Quality and Accountability Office, a Crown agency of the government of Ontario.

“Our report cards offer parents information they can't easily get anywhere else, about how their child's school performs and how it compares to other schools in Ontario,” Peter Cowley, a Fraser Institute senior fellow, wrote in a release. The institute ranked 2,975 public, Catholic, and independent schools based on nine academic indicators derived from provincewide test results.

“It doesn't matter where a school is ranked, or what challenges its students may face. The evidence is clear — all types of schools, located all over the province with different types of students, are all capable of improvement,” Cowley wrote.

The city's top ranking school, Bellewood Public School, ranked 87th. The rankings assign a school performance number based on the results. Bellewood's scores have ranged from 8.7 to 9.3 out of 10 from 2016 to 2022.

In an interview, Cowley said the rankings allow parents to challenge their children's schools to improve and encourage communications among school principals to share ideas on how to progress.

“Parents would be able to talk to the principal and say `you know what, we're not doing very well in history and I think at the school down the way continues to do good work in terms of history and the final exams,'” Cowley said. “So the question is `what do they do over there that enables them to do better than us?'”

Other schools in the top quarter of the rankings are St. Rose Catholic School (443), St. Anne French Immersion Catholic School (486), École élémentaire catholique Monseigneur Jean Noël (580), and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic School (626).