Public education in British Columbia has long been under attack by the ultra-Libertarian Fraser Institute and their friends in big business and right-wing politics. Among other things, the number-crunching Randites publish yearly "school report cards" based on their analysis of standardized provincial examinations. This report consistently claims that exclusive private schools - especially those that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year tuition in addition to receiving partial public funding, and therefore are able to have tiny student/teacher ratios compared with public schools - are doing a better job of teaching students and preparing them for university education and employment.
However, a recent study published in the International Journal of Science Education found a very different result. The researchers examined how well students from different secondary schools actually do in first year physics classes at the University of British Columbia. As reported in the Vancouver Sun:
The researchers, who included George Bluman of the University of B.C. department of mathematics and Thomas Tiedje of the University of Victoria’s electrical and computer engineering department, looked at 4,569 students from 110 B.C. high schools with at least 10 students enrolled in UBC physics courses over the five-year period 2002-06.
They examined the correlation between school rankings in first-year physics and calculus at UBC and compared them with the Fraser Institute ranking over the same period.
They found the independent schools that did the best in the Fraser Institute ranking were significantly below average in the UBC physics rankings, with an average mark of 74 per cent for public-school students versus 71.99 per cent for independent school students. Students from east Vancouver fared the best (75.32), followed by west Vancouver (74.95), suburban schools (73.59) and schools outside Metro Vancouver (71.18).
The east side of the city of Vancouver is often presented - especially by the Fraser Institute - as having "less desirable" public schools than the more wealthy west side, and more so of course the massively expensive, west-side private schools.
One interesting potential contributing factor to this discrepancy arose from the issue of "accuracy" in the student assessment at the various schools:
In addition, students who did the best in first-year university physics received the lowest marks in Physics 12, with students from east Vancouver faring the worst and students from outside Metro faring the best. This suggests that a tough-love approach in high school leads to better university results, the authors said.
“Our findings suggest that more accurate student assessment in ... mathematics [and] physics leads to better performance in related university courses.”
Thus a question: Not, "Are our children learning?" but, "Can our private schools (and standardized tests) measure correctly?" The answer, it appears, is a solid, "No."