Chinese-speaking parents are more likely than others to transfer their children out of elementary schools that ranked poorly in the Fraser Institute’s controversial report card, according to a study released today.
Parents from low-income neighbourhoods also moved their students out of low-performing schools but they did so based on test scores released by the Education Ministry three years before the Fraser Institute began ranking schools in 2003, says a report from the Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Education Research and Policy (CERP).
“Both these groups responded to the information about school tests scores when they received it, ” principal author Jane Friesen said in an interview, but non-English-speaking families didn’t receive or absorb the information until it was presented in the form of school rankings by the Fraser Institute.
English-speaking families in wealthier neighbourhoods showed little or no reaction to the ministry’s release of school-by-school test scores, which started in 2000, or the publication beginning in 2003 of the Fraser Institute’s rankings.
“These families may have already had a good idea of where students were doing well, and did not learn anything new from the publication of test scores to make them change their minds,” the centre says in a summary of the study.
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Although it’s long been suspected that school rankings influence decisions about school choice, this is the first study to examine the extent of that influence and to suggest the ministry’s release of school-by-school test results had as much of an impact as the rankings but on different groups of parents.
Educators and school trustees say the rankings are meaningless because they are based on one set of reading, writing and math tests known as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA). The teachers’ union has been sending pamphlets to parents urging them to pull their children from the tests when they begin later this month, and recently began targeting non-English-speaking parents in particular.
The SFU study looked at school-exit decisions of almost 75,000 students in Grade 4 who were enrolled in 14 public schools between 1999 and 2004. It compared the exit behaviour of children attending schools that received good news from the FSA with those in schools that received bad news.
In low-income neighbourhoods, exit rates increased by about 18 per cent in schools that received “very bad” news from the FSA in 2000 and 2001. That means a school with 50 students in Grade 4 that would normally see five of them relocate over the summer would, instead, lose six students.
Families in other neighbourhoods and non-English-speaking families did not change their behaviour as a result of the ministry data. But in 2003, after the Fraser Institute rankings were published for the first time, the latter became 25 per cent more likely to exit a school that was ranked near the bottom.
“There were enough parents whose decisions were affected by this information that schools would likely notice it,” Friesen said. “The effect is large enough that its consequences should be considered pretty carefully.”
The SFU centre plans to extend its study this year to look at what impact test scores have on school enrolments overall, given that some of the top-ranked schools are full and can’t accommodate more students. Researchers will also examine whether students who move to schools with higher test results get better scores themselves as a consequence.
Friesen said she hopes the studies will reduce the conflict over the FSAs and the school rankings. “We’re not going to sort this out by telling stories and calling each other names. We’re only going to sort this out by doing some very careful, systematic evaluation of how people respond to information and what the consequences of that behaviour is.”
jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com
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