Wow you opened a whole other can of worms there! But definitely a big one. Many years ago, Manitoba instituted provincial standardized testing for grades 3 & 6 & 9. It rattled a lot of cages, but it’s still going on (based on my sources in the industry

That concept of percentage-style or letter grades for young students has always really irked me. And I think it’s because it’s fundamentally flawed, because early learning is way more about competence than about gradients of quality. If a child only knows 80% of the 9×9 multiplication tables (yeah down from 12), that’s a big problem when they get asked to do something more complicated.

At best, I can see three reasonable “grades” here:
- Can do (really fast)
- Can do
- No can do (a sign I may be failing English)

I don’t want to start teaching kids volume if they don’t understand the mult tables perfectly.

Much of this knowledge is cumulative and some of it is “experiential”. Trying to “grade it” seems kind of pointless, shouldn’t the system be about achieving specific cumulative aptitudes? (where specific aptitudes need only a pass/fail)

But hey that’s just back to my original reply. It’s about repetition and consistency. (for the computer geeks it’s about continuous integration and testing). It honestly kind of baffles me how we organize these grades. Esp. b/c there a different types of skills we expect children to acquire.

We should be grouping kids one way for “goals to achieve” (learning multiplication tables, reading / writing) and another way for activities to undertake (playing sports, doing crafts…)

But hey that’s just one of my many rants against the education system. I’d probably end up home-schooling my kid just so I can have fun

I was quite the bookworm as a child as well.

All I can really use as an example is myself.

I didn’t go to a great grade school.

I don’t remember having any outstanding teachers that stick out in my memory (except for a French teacher in my later high school years and I’m still horrible at French).

My parents didn’t even check my homework, much less help me with it (my mom was taking ESL classes while I was in grade school and she only completed up to grade 6 in “the old country”, my dad – grade 3).

My parents never encouraged me to go to university (although they learned to be quite proud when I did). My mom’s ambition for me was to be a secretary or a nurse (no offense to either profession of course).

But still I went to university and obtained two Science degrees and eventually became a mechanical engineer (my dad’s initial reaction was that it was for men ).

In grade school I was a huge bookworm. I remember winning a read-a-thon contest (I read the most books in my entire grade school ). All the books were borrowed from the library that I was never encouraged to visit. My prize was a shopping spree at a book store. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

Maybe I’m naive but I can’t help but think that sometimes we’re just wired a certain way, regardless of the school, the encouragement received, etc. When I look back, I’m glad my parents let me be who I wanted to be. They let me have fun and never pressured me to read or do homework and maybe that’s why I actually liked school.

Just an idea but take this with a grain of salt from someone with no children of course.

As someone once wrote, there’s lies, damn lies and statistics. Most people I know who are well-adjusted in life attended good and bad schools (the smartest person I knew in undergrad went to an absolute terrible school in Malton). The only common factor is that their parents didn’t abdicate the responsibility of raising their kids to others and created a stable home environment. I am not sure how you capture that in a ranking.

The school that our little darlings will attend sounds the same as the one near you with grade 3 scoring better than grade 6. I think your guess may be correct. 14% people moved into the area in the last year and 43% in the last 5 years.

I can’t really recall my grades before high school, but I sure can remember my best and worst teachers. Alas, we never got knitting at school. Did you keep it up?

Apparently the school around the corner from me is really good at grade 3 and really bad at grade 6. Now what are we to make of that. I wonder if the influx of all the reasonably high-earning yuppies (presumably buying into the Toronto Life striving) round here over the last few years will change the results up or down. Or at all.

You know, I didn’t do a single exam (or recieve a grade beyond “good”/”fair”/”bad” – bad was knitting, in case you’re wondering) until I was 13 years old. I wonder what my results would have been like in third frickin grade.

Here’s a link about the social aspect of the schools.
http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/ebrief_39profilesupdate2007.pdf