ATM: AERR 2022-2023 – A Final Word
When you read through the AERR, you may wonder what the colours and categories mean on page 9. This page provides a visual summary of the school division’s results. It is an ‘at a glance’ understanding of how we did as a school division – based on the feedback of parents of students in Grades 4, 7, and 10 in the various measures and diploma and PAT results.
Ideally, we want to see lots of blue and green, and not very much yellow, orange and red. That is not the case this year. Part of this is we have lived through a global pandemic, and it has had an impact on learning. We offer this not as an excuse, but as a piece of important context.
We also ask you to consider the context of how these colours and categories are determined. A quick look at the table and reading of a few of the categories reveals some inconsistencies.
Take for example the 3-year high school completion rate. This year’s result is 87.2%. Last year’s result was 91.6%. This is a decline of 4.4% and this is coded in orange and categorized as ‘Declined’ despite being above the provincial average of 80.7%.
FSD’s result on the Citizenship measure declined from 78.6% to 75.6%. This drop of 3% - a smaller percentage than the high school completion rate - is coded in red as ‘Significantly Declined’.
How does a larger drop in percentage earn better coding? A bit of a mystery.
The ‘Parental Involvement’ measure saw a decrease of 0.9%, Alberta Education’s evaluation? ‘Declined’ - the same evaluation as the 3-year high school completion rate.
What do the evaluations of ‘Declined’ or ‘Significantly Declined’ really mean? Conversely, the same can be said about the ‘Improved’ evaluation. FSD saw the 5-year completion rate increase by 0.6% and was evaluated as ‘Improved’.
There does not seem to be consistency in the application of Alberta Education’s measures of evaluation - begging the question of how each code and category are really assigned in a manner that isn’t simply arbitrary.
Food for thought as you read through the results.
Chris Fuzessy
Superintendent of Schools
