MORRISBURG – Elementary schools in South Dundas saw improvement in the annual Fraser Institute Report Card on Ontario’s Elementary Schools. Morrisburg Public School saw the largest improvement and St. Mary-St. Cecilia nearly made the top-100 schools in Ontario.
The report, issued by the British Columbia-based think tank, ranked 3,046 schools across Ontario based on provincial standardized testing set by the Education Quality and Accountability Office.
St. Mary-St. Cecilia Catholic Elementary in Morrisburg improved from 8/10 in 2017, to 8.7/10 in 2018, an 8.8 per cent ranking increase. The school narrowly missed making the top-100 schools in Ontario. The report ranked SMSC at 102nd in the province. SMSC saw a 28.6 per cent decrease in results below provincial standard with 13.7 per cent of students not reaching that benchmark. SMSC was the highest ranked school in the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
MPS improved locally by 47.5 per cent, from 4/10 in 2017 to 5.9/10 in 2018. This is the second year in a row that MPS has seen a significant improvement in scores. The school has seen a 35.7 per cent reduction in testing below provincial standard over that same period, with only 29.2 per cent of students testing below the EQAO standards. MPS is ranked 1,686th in the report.
Iroquois Public School improved from 4.2/10 in 2017 to 4.8/10 in 2018, a 14.2 per cent increase in ranking. The results are a rebound for IPS which had dropped the previous year from 5/10 in 2016 to 4.2/10 in 2017. A total of 37.6 per cent of students who took the EQAO testing did not meet the provincial standard, a reduction of 22.2 per cent from 2017. The school is 2,361st in the ranking.
From this region, Upper Canada District School Board, Laggan Public School in Dalkeith was among 11 schools to score a perfect 10/10 ranking. Laggan was one of only two English-Public system schools to score 10/10 in the province.
The rankings by the Fraser Institute were calculated solely by data receive from the provincial EQAO agency. That data consisted of English and French results for Grade 3 and 6 EQAO testing in reading, writing, and mathematics. Testing was weighted based on grade, gender, gender gap, and the number of assessments that did not meet the provincial standards.
No data from other sources was used by report authors Peter Cowley and Stephen T. Easton.
