Week 2 – “what colour would you like it to be?”

• How will this site improve public education?

• How will it improve student achievement?

• What is the purpose of the site?

Once again we were told that we would get to these “existential” questions at the end of the discussion. First we would talk about what kind of demographic data and achievement data should be on the site.

Basically we were told, “Yes, we know not one single member of this table wants this site, so – would you like it to be red or blue?”

We learned that indeed background characteristics of students (their family income, their mother’s educational attainment, their immigration status, their first language, sometimes their race and ethnicity, their mobility etc.) “account for a substantial proportion of the variance in student outcomes.”

Then we received a very enlightening report on how schools overcome the demographic destiny of students. We learned that what made a difference in schools is high quality leadership, high expectations for students, effective teaching, use of data, positive school culture, professional development, parent involvement, external support and adequate resources.

None of those things will be included on the School Information Finder website.

We learned at the meeting that the province was concerned about the simplistic ranking of schools done by institutions like the Fraser Institute. The School Information Finder was seen as a way to counteract that sort of ranking.

But many questions remained unanswered. People asked questions like this:

• Is there research which shows what kinds of decisions parents make based on the information they find on sites like this?

• Is this site designed to make me a more effective parent?

• Is it designed to put pressure on schools?

Finally a member of the staff explained that the purpose of the site was to provide the public the ability to make apples to apples comparisons among schools. The staff did not agree that there is a very fine line between “comparing” and “ranking.”

There is a theory behind comparing and encouraging competition among schools. Though his work was not quoted by the staff, Michael Fullan, the Premier’s special advisor on education, has written a number of books on the importance of what he calls “pressure and support” – particularly focused on scores in literacy and numeracy. He says “In comparing apples with apples, we are able to identify disadvantaged schools that are performing well, and identify lessons learned. Equally important, we can identify schools, which are relatively well off, but underperforming compared to its peers and examine why this is the case. The notion of the evolution of positive pressure is to arrive at the situation where discussions of performance are experienced as fair and reasonable and where the goal is to make improvements.” (Annual Lecture in Honour of R.W.B. Jackson October, 2005)

A number of possible new models for using the demographic data have been described by Ministry staff. (none of the models include not having the demographic data about schools) The possibilities include the creation of a “composite index” approach – where you put all the demographic factors that affect student performance together into one measure i.e. provide points for the % of students living below the low income measure; % who are recently arrived in Canada; % whose parents have some university education; % whose first language is not English – then add them together to create one “score.” The composite could be a number score or range, a description (low, medium, high) or a percentile (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th quartile).

Next week, we’ll be discussing what other indicators could go on the site to describe a school and how those could be used to compare schools. The idea being that a user of the site could find “schools like mine” and then compare the student achievement in those schools.