The Ontario government has bowed to pressure from educators and scrapped a contentious feature on a website that allowed parents to shop around for a public school based on the income and immigrant backgrounds of students.Education Minister Kathleen Wynne agreed to remove the "shopping bag" function from her ministry's website, following a heated meeting yesterday with school principals, directors of education and parent groups who make up the education partnership. Many at the meeting asked the minister to get rid of the School Information Finder website, which was launched on the weekend, altogether. [...]
However, Peter Cowley, the Fraser Institute's director of school performance studies, said the website as initially designed would have armed parents with precisely the kind of information that should be easily accessible for them. He said such socioeconomic information is already available in every province for those who know how to find it.
"Having comparative information is very good for everybody," he said in an interview. "I think it should be a model of transparency."
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