Ups and downs in school grades

Helping you help your child—that’s what “accountability” and “transparency” in education ultimately mean. For seven years the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) and Progress have made it possible for you to do just that. We give you the means to find out for yourself what’s really happening behind the high intimidating walls of our public schools. We highlight for you not only what questions to ask but also to whom you can turn for advice about how to fix things that have gone awry. 

Are your children ready for life after school? For university? Community college? A job? Do they do well on math exams? Do most students at your local high school graduate? Do their teachers give them good grades? What challenges do students and teachers face?

Last year we reported that the international community was coming onside with AIMS’s view that telling you—the parents, teachers, students, employers, taxpayers, and community members—what was going on inside your schools was the best way to make schools better. As one recent newspaper editorial put it, “Grading schools means changing expectations.” Slowly but surely, it seems that the Departments of Education in the Atlantic provinces are getting that message too.

Newfoundland and Labrador remains the standard bearer for this. That province maintains a full set of performance measures, including exam results, average grades, enrollment, attendance, and graduates, for all of its schools. Even better, it keeps this information on its website for everyone to see. 

Prince Edward Island reports more information about student literacy and math performance. It still doesn’t have provincial exams for high school courses, but it continues to publicly release student results of elementary and middle school testing at the school level.

New Brunswick’s anglophone and francophone sectors have stepped forward by introducing their own school report cards; in the past, they took backward steps by eliminating or reducing the number of high school provincial exams. The New Brunswick report cards include the average results for students at each school on every student assessment or exam, are distributed to every student and parent in the province, and are available online. New Brunswick is also looking at making changes to its access to information laws that will make it easier to get school-performance information from school districts, colleges, and universities. 

AIMS has had several battles with Nova Scotia school boards to gain access to information on high schools in that province. Those battles are now paying off for everyone seeking more information about school performance. Nova Scotia now reports school-level results for provincial assessments in Grades 3, 6, and 9. The Department of Education collects Grade 12 provincial exam results, and in response to last year’s High School Report Card announced it will release school-level results for all Grade 12 exams this year. Things are looking up, but there’s still a long way to go. The next step is to give students, parents, the public, and even school staff the power to use that information. Students and parents need the ability to choose from a variety of schools or programs, whether privately or publicly delivered, that best suits their needs, rather than being forced into a government school with a cookie-cutter approach. At the same time, giving schools authority over budget decisions to make the changes needed to improve the performance of their students and best serve the needs of their school community is just as crucial. These are all things the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported as important factors in improving school performance.

Provincial School-Performance Summaries

New Brunswick anglophone
Upper Miramichi Regional High School in Boiestown achieved an A and returned to the top spot in New Brunswick’s anglophone sector, the same spot it held in AIMS’s Fifth Annual Report Card. Last year it was unranked because there wasn’t enough information on its students’ results at post-secondary institutions. Kennebecasis Valley High School maintained a B+ to take second place. Hartland Community School improved from a C+ to a B+ to rank third. Sir James Dunn Academy also saw a notable improvement, from B- to B+. 

A few schools saw marked declines, including last year’s top school. Grand Manan Community School dipped from an A- to a B- primarily due to a drop in achievement by its students in university and community college. Nackawic Senior High School fell from a B to a C, also due largely to a decline in post-secondary achievement.

New Brunswick francophone
As was the case last year, grades remained relatively consistent for schools in the New Brunswick francophone sector. École Marie-Gaétane stayed in the top spot for the third consecutive year, maintaining an overall grade of A-. École Sainte-Anne in Fredericton ranked second, also maintaining its grade of B+. Only École secondaire Népisiguit saw a change in grade of more than two levels, falling from a B to a C+ with a small decline in both achievement and engagement measures. This also marks the first time we have enough information to grade Moncton’s École L'Odyssée since its opening in the 2005-06 school year, and it garnered a C-.

Newfoundland and Labrador
J.M. Olds Collegiate in Twillingate moved up a grade level this year, from B+ to A-, to become the top-ranked school in Newfoundland and Labrador. Bay d’Espoir in Milltown kept its B+ grade and moved up one place to second, while last year’s top school, Gonzaga High School in St. John’s, maintained a B+ grade but fell to third overall. Clarenville High School saw the biggest improvement from last year, rising from a B- to a B+. No schools saw their overall grade fall by more than one grade level. 

Perhaps the biggest story in Newfoundland and Labrador is the low number of schools receiving a final grade. In many cases this is because there are a large number of small schools, and we are unable to receive students’ results from university and community college for those schools as a result of protection of privacy rules. This includes two private schools, St. Bonaventure’s College in St. John’s and Eric G. Lambert All Grade in Churchill Falls, which volunteered all of the data their schools were missing from the province’s publicly available information but didn’t receive a final grade because we couldn’t collect the data from at least two post-secondary institutions with results for at least five students. 

Nova Scotia
We have a couple of highlights in Nova Scotia this year. The first is the addition of four new measures. Thanks to AIMS’s many battles with school boards over access to public information about school performance, everyone now has access to attendance rates, along with teacher-assigned grades in math, science, and language arts in Nova Scotia schools, information that was previously kept private. Even with the additional measures, the top two schools from last year’s report card remain the same. Cape Breton Highlands Academy in Terre Noire and Charles P. Allen High School in Bedford both achieved A- grades to maintain first and second place in the Nova Scotia rankings. Cape Breton Highlands maintained its grade from last year, while C.P. Allen improved upon last year’s B+. Barrington Municipal High School improved from a B and joined the top two schools with an A- to take third spot.

The second highlight is the separate ranking of schools in Nova Scotia’s Conseil scolaire acadien provincial. Differences in provincial exams had kept us from doing a full comparison of these schools with their English counterparts in the past. While only a couple of schools have a final ranking this year (mainly due to the small enrollment that brings privacy issues into play), a separate analysis of these schools allows us to provide a wider range of data for anyone examining the performance of these schools. École du Carrefour in Dartmouth received a final grade of B, while École secondaire de Par-en-Bas in Tusket earned a B-.

Prince Edward Island
As in Newfoundland and Labrador, several schools in Prince Edward Island missed out on a final grade due to a lack of information on the achievement of Island students at university and community college. However, in Prince Edward Island this is more an issue of the lack of transparency, as the freedom of information laws don’t apply to the Island’s publicly funded post-secondary institutions. This has allowed the University of Prince Edward Island to opt out of providing data for the report card. 

As a result of this lack of information, two of the top three schools from last year’s Report Card did not receive a final grade this year, including last year’s top school, Souris Regional High School. Kensington Intermediate Senior High moved up a grade level from a B- to a B and into top spot. Charlottetown Rural High School maintained its B and second spot in the rankings. No school saw a significant change in its overall grade.

Discussing change isn’t change
Have we turned a corner? Perhaps, but only to find we’ve got a few more to get around. Having the information out in the open is great, but now it’s time for the next corner. Look at the performance information found in the insert in this edition of Progress or at the AIMS online Report Card at www.aims.ca; remember that you need to consider more than just the final grade for any school. Check results on a variety of measures both relative to other schools (“absolute” grades) and against reasonable expectations for your particular school (“in context” grades). 

If you find your school, your child’s school, or your community’s school is falling behind others in your province, ask why. Ask the principal and teachers what’s getting in the way of making changes. Then ask yourself what you can do to make a difference and help our schools and our children make it around that next corner.

Click here for the full AIMS Report Card

Bobby O’Keefe is the research manager for the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.