Celebrating and measuring success
from the P4E Annual report on Ontario’s schools 2008

pdf 328 kb Published 2008

People for Education, 2008.

This is a chapter from People for Education’s Annual Report on Ontario’s Public Schools 2008. It questions the narrow criteria for success in Ontario schools:

In order to measure for a broader range of factors, we must first decide what our goals are for our education system. What kinds of students do we want to graduate?

What knowledge and skills do we want them to possess, and are there some qualities we want them to have? Once we have reached a general consensus on a broad range of goals, then, and only then, we will be able to develop a set of criteria for measuring our progress.

The chapter outlines a variety of indicators of success in Ontario and Canadian schools:

  • Ontario has more university graduates as a percentage of the population than any other province in Canada.
  • Canada has more post-secondary graduates, as a percentage of the population, than any other country in the world.
  • Among all the English-speaking provinces, in testing of a random representative sample of 13-yearolds,Ontario came first in math, reading and writing, and second in science.
  • Ontario and Canada rank among the top OECD countries in having reduced the impact of family income on students’ success.
  • Only 13% of Canadians identify themselves as non-readers, compared to 43% of Americans.