Brownell – language arts results

I mean that was when we first began working with the education data and what we were particularly interested in, up to that point the Department of Education had used these data, and basically what was there were grade 12 standards tests. So this is a test that all grade 12 students take in language arts and mathematics. I’ll use the language arts as an example. It’s worth 30% of the students’ marks, and they need language arts, they need that course to graduate from high school. So it’s a pretty good indicator of, you know, where this kid’s go after or is this kid going to graduate from high school. So we thought, ‘well let’s look at them and rather than doing a school by school comparison, let’s group people into socioeconomic status and see if we see what’s known as the gradient, the social gradient. And basically that says it’s not just that the poor do more poorly than the rich, but that with every increase in socioeconomic status you see this increase in performance. So that’s the first thing we did. We looked at these education data we got from the Department of Education and ran this analysis and sure enough, we found our very lowest socioeconomic status group-we split into five groups, about 76% of them passed the test-and with every increase in socioeconomic status you saw this increase in performance so that 96% of kids from the highest socioeconomic status neighbourhoods were passing the test. And we thought, okay, if the gradient is there, not nearly as steep as we were expecting. And so, you know, we kind of looked at it for a while and we said, ‘You know, I don’t think we’re getting the whole picture here. What about the kids who never made it to grade 12? What about the kids who are struggling to make it to grade 12? They’re not represented in what the schools are seeing and what we’re seeing here.’ So by using our link data, we were able to look back and say, ‘Let’s take a cohort of kids, born in Manitoba, who lived in Manitoba all through’ and in the year that we were doing the, the test was given, these kids should have been writing if they had progressed through the school system on time. So that, you know, they all start kindergarten the year that they turn five and they all start grade one the year they turn six and if they progress through the school system they should be in grade 12 writing this standards test in the year we looked at. And because of this population-based registry we were able to look, link to, we knew the kids who had moved out of the province, so obviously we didn’t want to look at them. So we knew these kids were still living in the province, that they didn’t show up in the test, we could find them somewhere in the province. So that’s what we did. And when we did that, when we took that look with the entire population that should have been writing that test, it was a massively different story. Now, only 11% of the kids in the lowest SES compared to 76% of the that we saw in our first analysis-only 11% are passing that test on time, compared to, I think it’s about 85% for the highest SES. So the gradient is, it just becomes so much steeper when you add in that other information and basically what’s driving the difference, was the kids who had been held back at least a year or more so they were either in grade 11 or lower, and we know that kids who are held back somewhere along the way in their school career are less likely to complete high school. And then about a quarter of the kids from the lowest SES families had dropped out of school all together. Compared to, I think it was about three percent in the highest SES. And that too showed a gradient. With each increase in socioeconomic status, you got a decrease in the kids who had dropped out. So it provided us with a much truer picture, we felt, of socioeconomic status. And it really, I mean, knocked our socks off. It knocked the socks off the Department of Education. And it really, you know, it sort of went all over the nation. People kind of going “Wow. We knew there was a gradient but we had no extent, no idea of the extent of this gradient.”