Lisgar students say they benefit from the range of extracurricular activities offered at the school.
Staff and students at Lisgar Collegiate Institute say there is a lot more to a great school than good performance on standardized testing.
The Fraser Institute recently ranked Lisgar the top school in Ottawa and 12th in the province. By comparison, Immaculata ranked 221st, while Glebe Collegiate ranked 244th.
The think tank publishes an annual report card of schools according to their performance on Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) math and literacy tests.
“We want (our students) to be productive citizens in the community,” said principal Karen Gledhill.
And that means finding a balance between academics, athletics, the arts, volunteerism and extra-curricular activities.
Grade 12 student Graham Erskine seems to have found that harmony.
He plays on the rugby, hockey, golf and rowing teams, sits on the student council and has a part in the school musical.
“Being well rounded,” is what makes a great school, said Erskine.
“I don’t want to say (the Grade 10 literacy test) is a joke,” he said. “But when one of the questions on the practice test is ‘how is a bear like a train?'”
Erskine said although the test was easy for him and most of his fellow students at Lisgar, it is valuable because it helps teachers identify students who are really struggling so that they can intervene early.
EQAO puts out two tests each year.
In Grade 9, students are required to write a math test based on the provincial curriculum.
In Grade 10, every student writes a literacy test that they must pass in order to graduate from high school.
The Fraser Institute ranks schools out of 10 based on several different measures of performance on the standardized tests annually.
This year, Lisgar received a rating of 9.2. The school has been improving steadily since getting 7.9 in 2003.
Last year, Lisgar came second in the city, behind Colonel By Secondary School.
At Lisgar, said Gledhill, about one-third of students have been identified as gifted.
And while many of the students speak languages other than English at home, the school has no English as a Second Language programs.
“We recognize that the Fraser Institute is comparing apples and oranges,” she said.
Not only does the ranking system compare schools with vastly different linguistic, cultural and socio-economic populations, she added, the ratings do not take into account students’ state of mind, schools’ sense of community, extracurricular activities or other factors that make a school successful.
Lisgar’s goal is to nourish the “three A’s” – academics, athletics, and the arts.
“The arts are the perfect balance in education,” said Richard Arrigo, head of the fine arts department.
“Athletics re-energize your body while arts re-energize your brain,” he said.
Arrigo said he has students who are taking three math and three science courses, then come to his advanced music course for a refreshing change of pace.
“I think it’s all the extracurricular activities that you can do,” that make Lisgar a great school, said Grade 12 student Emily Miller. “It’s very open. We have a lot of choice.”
While Gledhill said she is proud of her students and her school for doing well on standardized testing, and especially for improving upon previous years, she gave the overall rating process a “thumbs down.”
She said the Fraser Institute rankings pit schools against each other, and create a public image that some schools are inferior to others.
“There will always be schools that will rank much lower,” she said.
“But that doesn’t mean kids aren’t getting a great education.”