A Measure of Performance for Secondary Schools
The Keys to Success
Three essential ingredients for effective schools are a well-designed curriculum, practical, well-informed counselling, and effective teaching.
Curriculum
A well-designed curriculum will provide the students with a selection of courses that is relevant to their educational needs.
Counselling
Without advice and encouragement, few students are able to take full advantage of the learning opportunities provided by a school. While parents have a significant role to play, school counsellors also play an important part in encouraging and assisting students in making informed and reasoned decisions about education.
Teaching
It is the teacher's role to develop the learning plan, select resources, and present the material in a way that will enable each student to master the skills and assimilate the knowledge to be derived from a course.
The Available Data
Although British Columbia's Ministry of Education, Skills, and Training is timid about measuring school performance and publishing the results, each year it generates a substantial database that can provide clues about what is being achieved in our schools. Ideally, a measure of school performance would assess the quality of all three components of a successful school. As a first step toward a comprehensive measure of school performance for the province's schools, we have combed the limited data that the Ministry collects for useful and relevant indicators of secondary school performance. Unfortunately, the statistics available from the Ministry allow us to assess only teaching and counselling and The 1999 Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools attempts to measure only the extent to which each school offers effective teaching and practical, well-informed counselling.
The Five Indicators of
School Performance
We have selected this set of indicators because they provide systematic insight into a school's performance. Only indicators that are generated annually were used so that we can assess not only each school's performance in a year but also its improvement or deterioration from year to year. We have looked only at indicators available to the public--to parents and taxpayers. These indicators are contained in publicly accessible databases maintained by the Ministry. Because these databases were not created by the Ministry of Education for the evaluation of the performance of schools, they are not entirely suited to the purpose and the indicators derived from them are far from perfect. Nevertheless, the databases include valuable information from which we have been able to extract five statistics for The 1999 Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools. These indicators provide the best available picture of the performance of British Columbia's secondary schools.
Selection of the Indicators
We have a limited selection of indicators of school performance available from the Ministry. To make the indicators as transparent as possible we have kept manipulation of the Ministry's data to the very minimum required. The process by which the five indicators are developed involves no significant editing of the Ministry's raw data. Thus, parents, administrators, teachers, or other interested parties can replicate our measures with a minimum of effort.
In the construction of the indicators (1) average provincial examination mark, (2) percentage of provincial examinations failed, and (3) difference between examination mark and school mark, course-by-course outcomes are aggregated into an overall average that is weighted by the number of examinations written in the course divided by the total number of examinations written in the school. In the case of indicator (3), the difference between examination mark and school mark, the average mark in the examinations for each course and the relevant average school mark are compared and the absolute value of the difference is determined. It is this value that is weighted and summed over all courses.
The other two indicators, (4) graduation rate and (5) provincial examinable courses taken per student, are essentially unaltered Ministry data.
As noted above, it is our intention that subsequent editions of the Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools will include more indicators from a greater variety of sources. We invite comment and suggestions from interested readers. Please contact us via mail to the Secondary Schools Report Card Project, Social Affairs Centre, The Fraser Institute, 4th floor, 1770 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, V6J 3G7, or via electronic mail to info@fraserinstitute.ca.
President William Jefferson Clinton, State of the Union Address, United States Capitol, Washington, D C, January 19, 1999.
The data from which these indicators are derived is contained in publicly accessible databases maintained by the Ministry for two purposes. School-level statistics describing student enrollment, programs offered, and certain characteristics of the school district provide the basis for determining the annual per-student operating grant each district will receive. Analysis of this same material aids Ministry staff in the assessment and planning of proposed capital projects as well as general policy planning. This data is collected by the School Finance and Data Management Branch and much of it is available to the public on the Branch's web site (http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/k12datareports/standardreports/frames/). The nature and extent of the data is indicated by the School Level Data Collection Manuals also available on site. Statistics on individual student performance are captured in order that the Ministry is able to produce a transcript of marks for each student upon graduation from grade 12. This transcript lists all the grade-11 and grade-12 courses that the student attempted and the result achieved. These results include the school mark for all such courses as well as the provincial examination mark for any provincially examinable grade-12 courses. This data is collected by the Evaluation and Accountability Branch and summary data files (at the school, district, and province levels) are available for public perusal on the Branch's web site (http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/exams/standrep.htm). Values for the relevant statistics, for all public and independent secondary schools, for each of the six school years between September 1992 to August 1998 are provided by the Ministry.