Study
| EST. READ TIME 2 MIN.Alberta high schools can improve student performance despite challenges
- The Report Card on Alberta’s High Schools 2024 ranks 292 public, Catholic, independent and charter secondary schools based on eight academic indicators generated from Grade 12 provincewide testing, grade-to-grade transition and graduation rates.
- The Report Card offers parents information they can’t easily get anywhere else, about how schools perform over time and how they compare to other schools in Alberta.
- The Report Card collects a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one, easily accessible public document so that anyone can analyze and compare the performance of individual schools. By doing so, the Report Card assists parents when they choose a school for their children and encourages and assists all those seeking to improve their schools.
- Contrary to common misconceptions, the data suggest every school is capable of improvement regardless of type, location and student characteristics.
- Forest Lawn High School is one of the province’s fastest-improving schools, climbing from a score of 3.5 (out of 10) in 2017 to 6 in 2023, the latest year of available comparable data, despite 46.2 per cent of the school’s students being English Language Learners and 19 per cent of students having special needs who require additional support.
- Over the same period, Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, a private school in Okotoks, improved from a score of 8.2 to 9.7.
- The findings in the Report Card show that schools can improve student performance regardless of which communities and students they serve. Improvement is possible and worth celebrating.
-
Max Shang
Economist, Fraser InstituteMax Shang is an Economist at the Fraser Institute. Prior to joining the Institute, Max worked for the Food andAgriculture Organization of the United Nations as a statistician and University of Guelph as senior research associate. His past research work has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals including Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics and Computational Statistics. During his Ph.D. study, Max developed two more efficient statistical methods for calculating insurance premium. He holds a Ph.D. in Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Guelph.… Read more -
Peter Cowley
Senior Fellow, Fraser InstitutePeter Cowley is a Senior Fellow and former Director of School Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute. He has aB.Comm. from the University of British Columbia (1974). In 1994, Mr Cowley independently wrote and published The Parent's Guide, a popular handbook for parents of British Columbia's secondary-school students. The Parent's Guide web site replaced the handbook in 1995. In 1998, Mr Cowley was co-author of the Fraser Institute's A Secondary Schools Report Card for British Columbia, the first of the Institute's continuing series of annual reports on school performance. This was followed in by The 1999 Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools, Boys, Girls, and Grades: Academic Gender Balance in British Columbia's Secondary Schools, and The 1999 Report Card on Alberta's High Schools. Since then, Mr Cowley has co-authored all of the Institute's annual Report Cards. Annual editions now include Report Cards on elementary and secondary schools in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario and on secondary schools in Quebec.… Read more