When Ontario published its yearly grades for elementary schools this morning, families, educators, and even the children themselves split sharply over whether grade 3 and 6 pupils should keep sitting the province-wide reading, writing, and math papers. The young ones grumbled about a long morning of exams, as expected, yet a clear majority of the parents who were asked spoke in favour of the annual check, whose scores feed a public league table that orders every school from best to worst. Marisol Vega, whose youngest has just started kindergarten at Birchwood Public School, is firmly behind the exam and follows the table closely. "I pay for these schools through my taxes, so of course I should be able to look this up.

My daughter deserves the strongest school I can find, and Birchwood is slipping, so I have my eye on Lakeshore instead." Owen Fraser, who runs Lakeshore Public School, confesses he is not entirely comfortable ordering his staff to hand out the required papers, though he accepts that families are owed solid figures on how a school performs, so long as nobody twists those figures to pit a school in a rich district against one in a poor one. "What the testing really gives us is hard numbers, and numbers are how we hold a staff answerable. Strip away the data on results and we have no honest way of knowing whether a school is delivering what the public pays for."