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Faith in Literacy
Last week, the EQAO released the results of this year’s grade 10 literacy test, expressed as the percentage of successful eligible students who took the test - as opposed to the percentage of successful eligible students. Since it would be possible for school boards to raise their scores by encouraging their weaker students to stay home on the day of the test, it is more meaningful to report the test results in terms of the percentage of successful eligible students. Here is our ranking of the major English-speaking Ontario school boards on the basis of the percentage of their eligible students who actually passed the test.
The Catholic school boards are highlighted in orange. They did much better than the public boards - and even the private schools, as the sidebar shows. However, there was a very wide dispersion of private school test scores and the poor results of a minority of schools masked the superior performance of the majority. Perhaps three dozen private schools appear to enroll mainly new Canadians who are not yet fluent in English or French. Typically, 100% of their students attempted the test, but only a few passed. When it comes to the majority of the private schools however, most (but by no means all) appear to have enabled between 90% and 100% of their eligible students to pass the test. You can look at the private school results by going here, then clicking on “Select a School or Board Report” and selecting “Private Schools” from the drop-down menu.