If you've looked into your catchment school, you've probably seen a Fraser number — a single rating out of 10, published every year by the Fraser Institute. It's the most widely-quoted school figure in Alberta, so it's worth understanding plainly: what it measures, what it leaves out, and why it deserves context rather than worship.
FamilyRoost includes the Fraser score — it's one of four sources in a Roost Rating — but we weight it lightly and we always show the year it's from. This page explains why. The short version: a Fraser /10 is mostly a measure of how one year's Grade 6 students did on one set of tests, and that result tracks neighbourhood income closely enough that the ranking partly re-draws the income map of Calgary. It's a starting point for a conversation with a school, not a verdict on it.
What goes into the number
The Alberta elementary /10 is computed from one data source only: Grade 6 Provincial Achievement Test (PAT) results in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies. There is no survey input, no classroom observation, no growth measurement — just Grade 6 test marks, combined and standardized.
The seven indicators roll up into four weighted pieces:
| Component | Weight | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Average test mark (4 subjects) | 50% | Mean Grade 6 PAT score, weighted by number of writers |
| % of tests below the "Acceptable" standard | 30% | A re-count of the same low scores |
| Gender gap — Language Arts | 10% | Difference in mean score, boys vs girls |
| Gender gap — Math | 10% | Difference in mean score, boys vs girls |
(Source: Fraser Institute, Report Card on Alberta's Elementary Schools 2024.)
A useful thing to notice: all four pieces come from the same Grade 6 PAT data. The /10 isn't four independent signals — it's one signal (the test results) re-weighted four ways. So a school that already has its raw PAT scores reported doesn't learn much genuinely new from its Fraser number; it learns the same data packaged with a particular set of weighting choices.
The big one: it largely tracks neighbourhood income
This is the critique that matters most for a parent deciding where to live, and it's well-documented in the academic literature, not a FamilyRoost opinion.
Because the Fraser /10 measures where students land, not how a school is built or how far it moves its students, it correlates strongly with the income and education level of the families a school enrolls — its SES, or socioeconomic status. The Fraser score makes no adjustment for family income, English-language-learner share, or special-needs proportion, even though that data exists. One Vancouver analysis cited by Helen Raptis (Canadian Journal of Education, 2012) found that nearly 40% of the differences among schools can be attributed to household income alone.
Put plainly: a high Fraser score is partly a wealth signal, and a low one is partly a poverty signal. Rank Calgary schools purely by Fraser and you'll largely reproduce a map of which neighbourhoods are richer — which is not the same as which schools teach well.
What it doesn't measure
| The ranking ignores | Why it matters to a family |
|---|---|
| Student growth | A school that lifts kids from the 30th to the 60th percentile scores lower than a wealthy school where kids arrived at the 80th and stayed there. (Raptis 2012: "how much a student grows can be more important than where he ends up.") |
| Anything but 4 tested subjects | No art, music, French-immersion quality, PE, citizenship, well-being, or school climate. Edmonton's renowned Victoria fine-arts magnet sits in the bottom half of Fraser tables every year. |
| Kindergarten through Grade 5 | The /10 is built only from Grade 6 results — it says nothing about the early years your child would actually attend first. |
| Survey signals | Parent, student, and teacher experience (AEAM) — safety, engagement, education quality — is invisible to Fraser. We add it as its own source. |
There are also two structural quirks worth knowing:
- Low scores get counted twice. A weak Grade 6 cohort drags down both the average mark (50% of the score) and the "% below acceptable" indicator (another 30%) — the same students penalized twice, which compresses the score against schools serving struggling kids.
- The gender-gap weighting (20%) tends to reward single-gender schools (where the gap can't be measured, so the weight shifts) and small cohorts — both more common among private schools.
It's also less stable than it looks
A Fraser /10 is a single-year, relative score — your school's position depends on how everyone else did that same year. Small Grade 6 cohorts mean a handful of students can swing a school's rank by dozens or even hundreds of places between adjacent years. The 2024 Alberta report contains its own examples of schools whose single-year rank differs sharply from their five-year average. A swing that large in twelve months reflects cohort noise, not a real change in how a school teaches. Treat two schools within about a point of each other as a tie, and trust a multi-year average far more than the latest headline number.
Who's excluded — and why it isn't a quality signal
Many Calgary schools have no Fraser score at all, and it's easy to misread that as bad news. It usually isn't. The Fraser ranking requires a school to offer Grade 6 and to have enough Grade 6 writers. A huge share of CBE elementaries are K-4 or K-5 schools that feed into separate middle schools — they have no Grade 6 students to test, so they're structurally invisible to Fraser regardless of how good they are. We never treat "no Fraser score" as a low score; on a FamilyRoost profile a missing source shows as PND ("pending"), not a D.
A fair word on the top of the table
The schools at the very top of Fraser's list are dominated by private and charter schools. Some of that gap is real: a small number of selective private schools (Webber Academy is the clearest Calgary example) post genuinely exceptional results. But much of the apparent advantage is selection and methodology — these schools admit already-advantaged or pre-screened students, often draw small cohorts that benefit from the scoring quirks above, and start from a higher baseline. A top Fraser score frequently reflects who walked in the door more than the teaching that happened after. (For families weighing the private question specifically, our analysis found that below the very top, paid private schools often don't measurably out-perform free public and charter options.)
How FamilyRoost uses it
We don't ignore the Fraser score — it's a consistent, province-wide number that's genuinely useful for comparing across school boards, and it does surface how a school's weakest readers are doing. So we keep it. But we use it the way the research suggests it should be used:
- As one input among four, weighted modestly — never as a gatekeeper that decides a school's tier.
- Lightly weighted and contextualized, alongside multi-year PAT data, survey signals (AEAM), and human-checked Roost field research.
- With its limits stated, including the income correlation, on this page that every score links back to.
Alberta teachers and several school boards (the ATA and the Toronto District School Board among them) have long argued that ranking schools on a single test-based number misses most of what a school is. We agree — which is why the Fraser /10 is a quarter of the picture here, never the whole frame.
This page explains methodology only. A specific school's Fraser source, its year, and how it folds into the Roost Rating are shown on that school's profile with their own data-freshness date.