Fifteen out of 22 local schools ranked below the provincial average in the Fraser Institute's annual report card on elementary schools, released on Monday.
Six of those schools were ranked amongst the 100 lowest-performing schools in the province, according to controversial report.
No local schools made the top 100 out of the 860 schools ranked in the province, but Vanway Elementary was named one of the top 20 most improved schools this year.
Prince George District Teachers' Association president Matt Pearce said the annual ranking provides little or no useful information to parents about the quality of education at local schools.
"I think it tells you very little about schools," Pearce said. "If you really want to know what the learning environment looks like, you should go to the school. That's the minimum amount of homework you should do. If all you're doing is reading a report in a newspaper, that's probably not enough."
The Fraser Institute bases its rankings on the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) test results. The Foundation Skills Assessment is administered to students in Grade 4 and Grade 7 to gauge their ability in reading, writing and numeracy.
That's simply too small a data set to provide a real understanding of how children in schools are performing, Pearce said.
"There is a reason the Fraser Institution's reports are published in newspapers and not education journals," he said. "They are a group that publishes reports of an ideological nature, and that ideology is opposed to public education."
The results could be used to identify schools where social and economic factors are contributing to poorer school performance, Pearce said.
"Many of our schools, particularly schools in our poorer socio-economic areas, are struggling," he said. "If we were using that to identify schools where there are needs, that would be a positive use. [But] the government doesn't use it for that. No school has ever gotten funding because of poor performance on the FSA test."
Prince George School District chairperson Sharel Warrington and superintendent Brian Pepper were not available for comment as of press time.
Fraser Institute director of school performance studies Peter Cowley defended the study as, "the only objective, reliable tool," available to parents.
"The Fraser Institute's school report card is the only source for long-term, provincewide school performance data that helps parents monitor the performance of their child's school and help educators identify key areas for improvement in their classrooms," Cowley said in a written statement. "But the teachers' union doesn't want parents to be able to compare schools based on how well they're doing academically. That's a great disservice to parents, and most importantly, to British Columbia's children."
The full report can be found online at www.compareschoolrankings.org.
