From leaders to laggards in five short years

It was five years ago that the N.B. anglophone schools ceased to administer provincial exams. At the same time the government stopped collecting and releasing other high school assessment data.

So once again, parents, students, administrators and the general public have no provincial exam scores or teacher assigned grades for New Brunswick’s anglophone high schools. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this is not the right recipe for success.

An in-depth study in 2007 by the OECD found a direct link between a country’s achievement on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) and the publication of performance results at the school level. The performance improvement was significant even when socio-economic and demographic variables were considered.

The AIMS 6th annual report card for Atlantic Canadian high schools makes the best of a bad situation. It has a rich post-secondary achievement indicator to measure the academic performance of New Brunswick’s anglophone students after graduation. Additionally, several important measures of academic engagement are available on a school by school basis.

Unlike anglophone high schools in New Brunswick, high schools in the New Brunswick’s francophone system still have provincial examinations in both math and language arts. The francophone system also collects and reports teacher assigned grades in these subject areas. So while the testing regime has been reduced in the past few years, it is possible to maintain a greater depth of reporting on academic achievement for francophone high schools to go along with several measures of academic engagement.

“New Brunswick laments the fact that its students are not performing well on international tests, yet it is ignoring the OECD’s advice on how to make things better,” says Charles Cirtwill, AIMS executive Vice President and co-author of the report card.

“The province needs the benchmarks provided by provincial exams to help identify problems and solve them,” he says. “And now by not collecting and reporting teacher assigned grades they are completely turning their back on data that can help them assess and improve student performance.”

In the New Brunswick anglophone school system, Grand Manan Community School is this year’s top school despite a decline in its overall grade from an ‘A’ to an ‘A-‘. Kennebecasis Valley High School improved from a ‘B’ to a ‘B ‘ to take second place, while Fredericton High maintained its third place ranking. Saint John High improved from a ‘B-‘ to a ‘B ‘ to take fourth place. Other notable improvements include Sir James Dunn Academy (‘C’ to B-‘) and Chipman Forest Avenue School (‘C-‘ to ‘B-‘). Schools with marked declines include North & South Esk Regional High School from a ‘B ‘ to a ‘B-‘ and Harvey High School from a ‘B-‘ to a ‘C-‘. A few schools, including last year’s top school, Upper Miramichi Regional High School in Boiestown, are unable to be ranked due to insufficient data from post-secondary institutions.

For the second year, the top-ranked school in the New Brunswick francophone system is École Marie-Gaétane in Kedgwick, though its overall grade fell from an ‘A ‘ to an ‘A-‘, the largest grade change in the New Brunswick francophone sector. École Sainte-Anne in Fredericton ranked second with a ‘B ‘ overall, improving from a ‘B’ last year. Polyvalente A.-J.-Savoie in Saint-Quentin maintained both its ‘B ‘ grade and third place ranking.

AIMS encourages everyone to look beyond the overall rankings to explore the performance of each school across all of the categories. The on-line report card on the AIMS website (www.AIMS.ca) provides the public with all the available measures for 312 high schools in Atlantic Canada. The on-line report card allows users to access individual school data, compare schools, and also compare results based on specific criteria.

Again this year, AIMS mailed individual report cards to every high school, parent-teacher association, student council and school board in the region so they could have the information before it became public. Similar packages were sent to municipalities and Chambers of Commerce throughout the region.

The individual school report cards remind recipients that AIMS is always happy to visit to discuss the report card and how it can be used as a tool for reform. The AIMS high school report card is published annually in Progress business magazine and a complete copy can be found as a centre insert in this month’s issue. This is the sixth year the magazine has dedicated an edition to the AIMS Report Card.