The Sixth Estate

This week a tobacco industry-funded think tank in Vancouver, the well-known Fraser Institute, published its annual B.C. & Yukon secondary school report card, a ranking of schools in that region based on their performance on provincial exams. This means it’s time for me to publish my usual list of objections to these bogus statistical compilations, updated to the new material. As usual, I recommend that you peruse this report and then send it to its well-deserved location in the recycling bin (or the Trash can, for Mac users).

As usual, five of the reviewers of this report are actually dead, some others are in their 90s, and one of them is also the author, a conflict of interest if ever there was one. None of the authors are school teachers, although Michael Thomas used to be an education bureaucrat. (Now he runs a private school scholarship fund.) This year, it appears that the report card for BC has been paid for by the Hecht Foundation, which donates to a variety of right-wing causes, including a climate change denial group on the Prairies, the Frontier Centre. Such organizations usually fund the Fraser Institute’s work. Other report cards have been funded by the right-wing Donner Foundation, which created the Frontier Centre as well as the Montreal Economic Institute and the Atlantic Institute. Together with the Fraser Institute, these think tanks are responsible for promoting a consistent message of lower taxes, deregulation, and privatization of virtually all social services, including schools. Remember that when you read a Fraser Institute “report card” on schools.

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As promised, I return for a third time to the Fraser Institute’s dubious School Report Card series. But first, a quick question: raise your hands if you think the basic socioeconomic difference between a family with an income of $25 000 per year and a family with an income of $250 000 per year is roughly the same as the difference between a family earning $450 000 per year and a family earning $625 000.

I hope I know my reader pool well enough that I can safely assume you didn’t raise your hand. Oddly enough, though, at least six people did: Simon Fraser University economist Stephen Easton, Fraser Institute marketing consultant Peter Cowley, private school scholarship fund administrator Michael Thomas, and their three anonymous reviewers (not to mention four dead guys on the Editorial Advisory Board).

One of the most important amendments to the Fraser Institute report card series in recent years has been the inclusion of a “socioeconomic indicator.” There are many misleading things about this number, but the most misleading, as I’ve just discovered, is the Institute’s ludicrously skewed view of socioeconomic factors. What follows is, to a degree, going to be a little dry, and I apologize for that in advance. But the summary is: I believe the socioeconomic indicator is skewed in such a way that it unfairly punishes poor schools (exclusively public ones) and unfairly rewards wealthy schools (more often private ones).

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This weekend, the Fraser Institute celebrated the release of its latest school Report Card, this one on Alberta’s elementary schools. Last month I took a look at their BC report card, which frankly was not an impressive effort, but did have the surprising effect of catapulting one of B.C.’s most incompetent schools, in polygamous Bountiful, into the Number One spot. No more need be said, perhaps, about the reliability of these studies — except for my obligatory reminder that in the past the Fraser Institute has taken money from tobacco companies to argue that cigarette smoke does not cause lung cancer. No more need be said, perhaps, about the ethical maturity of the Fraser Institute.

So how does the Alberta Report Card’s quality compare with the B.C. one? Pretty much the same, I’d say, which is to say that it’s not a very helpful tool at all. This didn’t stop the first author, Peter Cowley, from earning an op-ed spot in the Calgary Herald this weekend, saying that Alberta needs to roll out the red carpet to “school chains” operating elsewhere in the world who would be interested in investing in Canada. School chains are the new pet project of the Fraser Institute. They even have a website for them, which, ironically, is offline as I write this.

Before I dive into the dubious nitty-gritty of the report, let me just point out Cowley’s first serious ethical lapse. Cowley claims to be particularly excited about a new American chain of schools expanding to Canada, called the Nativity Miguel chain. Really, Cowley? Nativity Miguel? I’m sure it’s purely a coincidence that the investor leading its Canadian expansion company, Mr. Paul J. Hill, just happens to be on the Fraser Institute board of directors, too. Is this yet another case of the Fraser Institute publicly touting “research” that just happens to directly benefit its lords and masters rich backers?

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