Counting, measurement, and the Fraser Report
This year’s Fraser Institute report is in.
For those of you unaware of what this means, the Fraser Institute is a private Canadian “think-tank” that concerns itself with education and statistics, attempting to create “a free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility” by ranking Canadian schools.
Every year, the Fraser Institute releases “report cards” for both elementary and secondary schools, assessing high schools on “diploma examination results, grade-to-grade transition rates, and graduation rates.” All this data is carefully collated and schools are given a score out of ten. My school’s staff room is in a tizzy because our school is not just in the top 20 out of 276 schools in Alberta, but we’ve beat out every other school in our division by 70 points or more.
I looked at what made up this year’s score, and what I’ve discovered has made me laugh, in some cases literally out loud. To put things into perspective, our graduating class last year was 24 students. That’s right: our prestigious score was based on a massive sample size of 24 students. In the top 10 schools, one school had a
For those of you unaware of what this means, the Fraser Institute is a private Canadian “think-tank” that concerns itself with education and statistics, attempting to create “a free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility” by ranking Canadian schools.
Every year, the Fraser Institute releases “report cards” for both elementary and secondary schools, assessing high schools on “diploma examination results, grade-to-grade transition rates, and graduation rates.” All this data is carefully collated and schools are given a score out of ten. My school’s staff room is in a tizzy because our school is not just in the top 20 out of 276 schools in Alberta, but we’ve beat out every other school in our division by 70 points or more.
I looked at what made up this year’s score, and what I’ve discovered has made me laugh, in some cases literally out loud. To put things into perspective, our graduating class last year was 24 students. That’s right: our prestigious score was based on a massive sample size of 24 students. In the top 10 schools, one school had a