{"id":719,"date":"2013-06-18T16:43:56","date_gmt":"2013-06-18T23:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/?p=719"},"modified":"2013-06-18T16:57:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T23:57:01","slug":"evaluating-education-great-schools-project-v-fraser-institute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/2013\/06\/18\/evaluating-education-great-schools-project-v-fraser-institute\/","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating Education: Great Schools Project v Fraser Institute"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great example of how fact becomes fiction, and in return how fiction becomes fact, a process critical theorists generally call reification, is the Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of schools in British Columbia. Yesterday, on 17 June 2013, the Fraser Institute published its rankings of secondary schools in BC<\/a>. The Fraser Institute’s annual\u00a0School Report Card<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is based on a single indicator in BC– “results of the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) exams in Grades 4 and 7 and provincial exams in Grades 10, 11, and 12.”<\/p>\n

Fact becomes fiction:<\/strong>\u00a0Individual students’ test scores on the controversial and hotly contested (by the BCTF, ICES, etc) FSA exams are aggregated and turned into a rating along a scale from 1 (worst) to 10 (best). A fiction of the quality of a school is generated out of the fact of individual students’ test scores.<\/p>\n

Fiction becomes fact:<\/strong>\u00a0The individual schools are then rank ordered, pitting school against school to capture the competitive nature of education, at the school level, in BC. The fiction of quality\u00a0is represented as fact\u00a0within the annual research-based\u00a0School Report Card<\/a><\/em>. The Fraser Institute exploits a fairly easy, common process.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are many alternatives for evaluating education or judging the quality of schools. One of the most comprehensive alternatives has been taken up by the\u00a0Great School Project<\/a>, headed up by a group of experienced, insightful educators and researchers.<\/p>\n

The purpose of the Great Schools Project<\/a>\u00a0is to develop methods to assess schools that support students, communities, and the public education system, so that we can provide the best education possible for every child\u2014so that we have a useful answer to that Mum\u2019s questions: How is our school doing? How well is our school meeting the needs of my child? It\u2019s also an attempt to live up to our responsibility to move beyond simply criticizing \u2014 to make concrete proposals we believe will improve the public education system for kids.<\/p>\n

Working methodically to offer productive ways of judging quality, the Great Schools Project<\/a> has offered a set of\u00a0Principles that ought to be at the base of any evaluation system<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great example of how fact becomes fiction, and in return how fiction becomes fact, a process critical theorists generally call reification, is the Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of schools in British Columbia. Yesterday, on 17 June 2013, the Fraser … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[406501,4772,2258,2259,635,2262,2265,364,2273,148,2275],"tags":[1469,1063390,1063372,1063359,1063374,1063379,2276],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bc-education","category-critical-education","category-equity","category-ethics","category-government","category-k-12-issues","category-organizing","category-research","category-students","category-testing","category-unions","tag-bctf","tag-critical-education","tag-equity","tag-faculty","tag-k-12-issues","tag-students","tag-working-conditions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/ices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}