A FamilyRoost Roost Rating is a single 0–100 number, but it is built from four independent sources so you can see why a school scores the way it does — not just that it does. Every source is shown on the school's profile with its own "last updated" date.
The four sources
- Academic achievement (PAT). Provincial Achievement Test results from Alberta Education, averaged over three years to smooth out single-year noise.
- Fraser /10. The Fraser Institute's school ranking, included for comparability — but contextualized, not taken at face value (see the critique below). Roughly 40% of schools have no Fraser score; we never silently treat "no score" as a low score.
- School-survey signals (AEAM). Accountability-pillar survey measures (student engagement, citizenship, education quality) that capture experience, not just test scores.
- Roost field research — operational signals. Human-checked adjustments for things a spreadsheet misses: recent leadership churn, grade-configuration changes, capacity pressure, or unusually strong community signals. Each flag is logged with its rationale.
From sources to a tier
The blended score is capped at 95 (no school is treated as "perfect"), then mapped to a tier:
| Tier | Name | Score |
|---|---|---|
| S | Superior | 80 and up |
| A | Advanced | 72–79 |
| B | Beneficial | 65–71 |
| C | Adequate | 55–64 |
| D | Developing | below 55 |
A missing score is shown as PND ("pending"), never as a D. If we don't have the data, we say so.
Where we disagree with single-number rankings
Test-score rankings correlate heavily with neighbourhood income — they often measure the families a school enrolls more than the teaching a school does. That is why PAT and Fraser are two sources among four here, why we surface the survey and operational context alongside them, and why every score links back to this page. The goal is a starting point for a conversation with a school, not a verdict on it.
This page explains methodology only. Specific school scores come from the live dataset and show their own data-freshness date on each school profile.