I noticed that Peter Cowley at the Fraser Institute has published the latest report card for secondary schools. In interviews I’ve had with him, Peter has always focused on the report card’s ability to compare schools with similar socio-economic data, parent’s average income for example. He plays down the fact that the rankings always show the wealthy, private schools at the top, and the poor rural schools at the bottom. He merely says that when teachers protest the rankings as unfair, they are really just making excuses for their inability to inspire and motivate the students. There are smart children everywhere, he says, and if the public schools and their teachers were doing a good job, that would be reflected in the rankings. Peter reminds me a bit of a retired farmer I knew in Saskatchewan a few years back, Derwood “Dusty” Musburger. Like Peter, he had spent years developing a system to determine which schools were the best. Unlike Peter’s system, though, Dusty’s did not take into account the percentage of students going on to university, or the percentage taking government exams, or how many years it took them to graduate, or even how high their grades were. “Irrelevant,” said Dusty. “It’s all about which schools make the best farmers. Acreage is what matters. And yield! Who produces the most grain per acre. The schools that teach the kids who end up with the top farms are the top schools! ” Dusty kept all the information about yield and acreage and annual prices in a large notebook. “I record it all,” he said. “Who bought what, sold what, grew what and how much. Plus, what town they grew up in and what school they went to. When I plug all that information into my secret agrorithm....” You mean algorithm? I asked. “I do not! It’s my own ‘agrorithm;’ a few calculations, and ‘presto,’ out comes the ranking for each school.” I was curious to learn what school had the highest rank in all of South Western Saskatchewan. “Piny Creek,” Dusty said immediately. “No question. Their score is 9.3495 out of 10. Average for the whole area is only 6.2236.” I was going to ask for an explanation of how Dusty arrived at those very impressive sounding numbers, but instead blurted that I thought the students in tiny Piny Creek, from, if my memory served me correctly, a grand total of four families, might have an advantage since they were raised on farms, encouraged to be farmers by their families and would likely inherit their families’ farms and not have to start from scratch. “Horse hockey!” Dusty said. “Statistics don’t lie and Piny Creek has a statistical record without equal! You can’t beat 9.3495!” I was curious what school had the lowest ranking. “Don’t remember the name,” Dusty said. “One of those ‘Academies’ in Saskatoon where they all wear blazers and brag about college entrance. They got a .00442. Only farmers they ever graduated were two guys in 2008 who planted 900 square feet of medical marijuana in a greenhouse outside of Kindersley. Lasted six months till the hail hit. Idiots.”