Officials with the Hastings Prince Edward District School Board are taking the annual elementary school rankings from the Fraser Institute with a grain of salt.
The Fraser Institute’s 2025 Report Card ranked more than 3,000 schools across the province out of a score of 10.
The document is said to assist parents when they choose a school for their children and encourages and assists all those seeking to improve their schools.
The top school in the Hastings Prince Edward District School Board is Stirling Public at 7.8, in a tie for 447 while Trent River Public scored 0.7, which is in the bottom 20 provincially, in a tie for 3,039.
The report derives its score for each school on nine indicators, all of which are derived from province-wide tests of reading, writing, and mathematics skills that are developed and managed by the province’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO).
Superintendent of Education, Curriculum Services Tina Elliott says the rankings need to be kept in proper perspective.
“For us as a system, we feel that the ranking undermines the valid evaluations and assessments that our teachers and school staff engage in on a regular basis within school that is based in the curriculum.”
Elliot says they are a strong supporter of EQAO.
“It’s a really good metric to use as a diagnostic tool to determine where are we seeing successes and progress and where are we seeing challenge or gaps, be that in achievement as a whole for our students in grades 3, 6, 9 or 10.”
However, she says when those numbers are used in the context of ranking schools against one another, that can be very devaluing and unmotivating.
The board also questions how Fraser Institute actually uses the data to come up with its grading saying it focuses on ranking rather than informing.
“When we actually get the specific results for students and the school and system data directly from EQAO, we can drill down and see where we have had students have success, where students have really struggled.”
When comparing schools, she notes there are many factors that could skew the scores, including population.
“If you have a small student population in grade 3, one student can constitute a higher percentage mark. Whereas Stirling, for example, it’s one of our largest elementary schools so you may have more students in that grade 3 class so one student’s performance is not going to have that same degree of impact on the overall percentage meeting standard.”
As for the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, the top-ranked school was Our Lady of Mercy in Bancroft, which scored an 8.3, putting it in a tie for 260th overall.
Second locally was St Joseph Catholic in Belleville in a tie for 392 at 7.9 while Our Lady of Fatima in Belleville was the lowest ranked Catholic school at 2.4.
