Annual rankings by the Fraser Institute peg Dover Bay Secondary School as the top public school in Nanaimo.
But local educators say the institute's analysis is flawed because it lacks information about individual student growth.
The think tank's annual report card comparing the academic performance of B.C. and Yukon secondary schools, released Sunday, includes all six public secondary schools in Nanaimo. As in previous years, Dover ranked in the top 50 of 274, while the remaining schools are much further down the list.
The ranking is based on seven statistics collected for each school: average exam mark, percentage of exams failed, the difference between school mark and exam mark, gender differences in English and math, graduation rate and how long it takes students to graduate.
For Derek DeGear, president of the Nanaimo District Teachers' Association, it is just the same narrow measure that brings back the same result year after year.
"The Fraser Institute story is a little tired," he said. "It's such a narrow measure and I think more and more people are just choosing to ignore it. There's much more authentic data being collected at the school level."
DeGear said the report card ignores a more important measure – growth of individual students – in favour of how different grades stack up to a couple of standardized tests.
For example, missing from the Fraser Institute report is how an English 10 teacher who is dealing with a class of students writing at a Grade 8 level brought those writing skills up a full grade level or more.
"You're missing out on those students who go through substantial periods of growth, but haven't caught up," said DeGear. "Students learn at different rates. You have to meet kids where they are at."
Mike Munro, superintendent for Nanaimo school district, said if the report uncovers any new data that might be useful in helping the district improve student achievements, staff will look at that, but the district doesn't generally respond to the report card.
"It doesn't tell us what we need to do in our efforts to continue to improve learning," he said.
Munro said the district is developing better ways of tracking student growth through its assessment task force. The district wants to use agreed-upon tools to assess students, share that information, but also ensure it is not being used to rank schools, which Munro said is not helpful to improving student outcomes.
Peter Cowley, the Faser Institute's director of school performance studies and co-author of the report card, said the document is important because it gives parents and educators an idea of how their school measures up compared with other schools.
"You can't improve unless you compare," said Cowley. "It's continued popularity is a reflection of the fact that there is a need for information that can enable people to compare schools."
In the first three months of this year – before the new report card was released – almost 80,000 individual school results from last spring's report were downloaded from the institute's website, he said.
The report card can be found at www.compareschoolrankings.org.