Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen says his intent is to raise the bar. He is explaining his reason to resume the practice of publishing the results of Grade 12 provincial exams for each school division. The practice was discontinued by the previous government in 1999, but he feels it is very important that this information is made public in the interests of openness and transparency.

"It never made sense why we didn't release it by division. It's my understanding every other province in Canada either releases it by division or even by school and we weren't doing that. So both for transparency and the ability to have input when we get to the K-12 review, I think this is important."

Goertzen says the intent here is not to threaten divisions but to encourage them to become better.

"This is about saying, these are the areas where we might have challenges, these are the areas where things are going well. There are probably good reasons in the different areas why we might have more challenges but if we don't shine a light on it, if we don't talk about it, if we're scared to even release the results, well then things aren't going to get better. You rarely make progress if you aren't able to actually measure things and talk about them in an open way. We need to be able to be open about what's happening in our education system and talk about it. It isn't about comparing division by division, or school by school, or classroom by classroom, but it is about how do we raise the bar overall in the province and in the individual divisions so that everybody is doing better which, ultimately, means our children are doing better and they will do better when they get out of the school system."