BICS report card

This week, the Fraser Institute issued its report cards for BC’s elementary schools based on the annual Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA). The institute’s website includes the name of the schools, their ranks and whether there is an upward or downward trend. You can locate the schools with the help of Google maps and the website also has an option where you can select a number of schools and compare them. It’s a nifty tool where you can pick up to six schools and the website generates a graph to show you their performances for the last four years.

Bowen Island Community School is looking back at four years of solid ratings that places it 170 of 860 for 2011. It is good to know that BICS has been landing in the “green” field (7.5/10) for the last four assessments. But what exactly is this assessment telling us?

“All schools and students in our district perform well on the FSA’s,” BICS’s principal Jennifer Pardee said. “The FSA scores and rankings provide a very narrow framework with which to measure a school’s learning environment, whether the school is at the top of the rankings or at the bottom. There are many factors at play, including socio-economic status, special needs, ESL, etc. BICS students performed well but, again, it is just a snapshot.”

And it is a sharply focused snapshot at best. It looks at the students’ skill with letters and numbers and not much else. It doesn’t take the school garden into account, or the beautiful artwork that adorns the hallways and classrooms. It doesn’t reflect island kids’ fundraising efforts and their hours spent with Grandfriends and at the museum.

I could go on.

But Pardee sums it up much better. She says, “We use a variety of classroom and school based assessments to help us monitor student progress that also helps to inform instruction and guide our plans as a school. As a school and a district, we remain committed to providing the best possible learning environment for all our students.”