TORONTO — The Ontario government's new website containing the socioeconomic and immigrant backgrounds of students in the province's public schools has sharply divided educators and parent groups.
The government responded to the political uproar earlier this week by scrapping a contentious feature on the site that allowed families to shop around for a public school based on the income, education and immigrant backgrounds of students' parents. But the controversy has not gone away.
The Society for Quality Education, a group made up of parents and educators, is not happy the government deleted the online feature that allowed users to compare up to three schools at a time, said executive director Doretta Wilson.
It will not stop parents from comparing schools, she said, and this is particularly important for poor families who, unlike affluent ones, do not have the financial resources to send their children to the best schools, including private ones.
Demographic information - which will remain on the website - is crucial to help families select schools in poor neighbourhoods that are overachievers, she said.
"Don't they deserve a chance to find something better for their kids?" she asked.
But Annie Kidder, a spokesman for the parent group People for Education, disagreed. She said putting such information on a website promotes a consumerist approach to public education, and encourages parents to choose schools based on the demographics of the students.
"In small towns, it pits one school against another - the Catholic against the French, or the English against the Catholic - again based only on test scores in two subjects and the demographics of the parents," she said.
The intent behind the website is to encourage public schools to perform better, said Michael Fullan, Premier Dalton McGuinty's adviser on education and chief architect of the province's blueprint for raising numeracy and literacy levels.
The advantages to having demographic information out in the open far outweigh the disadvantages, said Prof. Fullan, who is also professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
"We said we should use the information to make all schools better, but I understand the fear," he said in an interview yesterday.
Prof. Fullan believes in setting targets for test scores, and in the idea of statistical neighbours, whereby schools with similar demographics can be compared with each other.
While Ms. Kidder said there is some merit to this, it is a big leap to put it on a website so parents can compare schools based on demographics and test scores.
"It seems to me it's more like the American No Child Left Behind model where it's actually getting the public to put pressure on schools that aren't somehow performing at the level the province thinks they should be performing at," Ms. Kidder said.
Premier McGuinty defended the move yesterday, saying the government is providing comprehensive information in one place that is already available for those motivated enough to find it.
"There are some really great stories about schools, given the number of new Canadians or household income, that are performing extraordinarily well," he told reporters.
