Open Collections

School rankings and student demographics : an investigation into the Fraser Institute School Reports

University of British Columbia. Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education; University of British Columbia. Faculty of Education

Each year the Fraser Institute produces a report card on British Columbia’s elementary Schools, which includes an individual school rating allowing the public to compare schools’ performance. These figures receive a lot of publicity from the local media; however, there validity as an indicator of school performance is debatable. The ratings often favour affluent, private schools with low English as a second language (ESL) student proportions. This research examines the impact of average parental income and ESL student proportions on the Fraser Institute’s elementary school ratings. A two-way analysis of variance was performed comparing the effect of income and ESL on school ratings. Results indicate statistically significant differences in school ratings between high and low ESL and income groups. [The Explorations & Education Conference is the collaborative effort of graduate student representatives from the Graduate Student Council for the Faculty of Education, the Department of Educational Studies and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. The goal is to "to create a safe space for the exchange of academic ideas and to create opportunities particularly for graduate students (at all levels of study) to present their ideas and research".]

Conference Paper

eng

2011-07-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/35882

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/