Comments?

Email

princerupert.com

NorthCoast's Regional Information Site

NATURE

Sea, land, river

ECONOMY

Regional

PLACE

Books+

PEOPLES

Community

For earlier materials see Table of Contents

Fraser Grades schools	Interesting evening
	1^st the presentation—then the critique

Peter Cowley defends his ‘report card’ before hostile Rupert audience--- but you’d never know that by local ‘news’ paper coverage --- the ‘reporter’ filtered out everything but the Fraser message:

(one suspects the media is only reason this flawed propaganda message is ever heard of --- read my critique after the presentation)

	Parent’s Choice – like in consumers
	Cowley said he began when he as a parent wondered how well his children’s school taught history – he could find no answer – no publicly available means to judge which school did a better job—so he set out to compare them on his own—which stuck a chord with BC Fraser Institute who offered him more facilities etc --- plus an SFU prof to give semblance of credibility to his statistics

	A second message--- ‘improvement’
	While he did not use the analogy – one could use basketball tournament results over time to judge how effective the coaching staff was – etc. Thus Cowley believes one shoud see a trend over time – or perhaps identify best practices etc --- (all this is dubious—but hear him out)

	Cowley counters ‘easy’ criticisms
	One had the feeling Cowley had been here before – standing in front of a hostile audience who felt ‘demeaned’ by his report --- he seemed basically a nice man on a mission --- so he led us thru the easy rebuttals --- like one to left – Report card meant to only address dimensions of reading writing, arithmetic etc

	But First --- 1^st Nations
	There was a special report comparing 1^st Nation schools/ students to rest of BC --- Notice that PR 1^st nations students actually scored better than there peer group at same school – and was similar for most local schools --- interesting especially as 1^st nations were often viewed as the reason for low scores locally (rather than simple poverty when compared to rest of BC – see below

	Here are a few samples from report – Westview does well – Kanata not so well

Before doing a critique lets look at detailed results for PR See this page	Before you take this seriously
	The methodology is so flawed that almost silly --- (hint—only 20 & 24 students – from which an ‘average’ taken--- perhaps in large Vancouver schools this would have been meaningful – but need minimum 30 students taking test to give any credence as an average--- otherwise good or poor performer will skew results

Created by LG on May 21, 2006

Last updated on Monday, May 22, 2006