Reference: Brownell, M., Roos N., Fransoo R., Guèvremont A., MacWilliam L., Derksen S., Dik N., Bogdanovic B., Sirski M. (2004) How Do Educational Outcomes Vary With Socioeconomic Status? Key Findings from the Manitoba Child Health Atlas 2004. Manitoba Centre for Healthy Policy. Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The graph on the left reflects what schools see when they review the performance of students taking the tests: 92% of students who live in the High SES areas passed, along with 75% of those from Low SES areas. Sounds pretty good. The problem is, this just reports results for those who are in school, in grade 12, and writing the standards tests.

But who should be writing the standards test and isn’t? Very different story told by the graph on the right side. Here we identified all children born in Manitoba in 1984 who remained in Manitoba since then (84%). For those residing in Winnipeg in 2001/02, we figured out where they were in the school system (in what should have been their last year in school).
The graph on the right captures a different reality: only 27% of the youths in the Low SES areas who should have been writing the standards test that year passed. A very large group (almost 36%) were behind at least one year (in grade 11 (S3) or lower), and almost 20% had withdrawn (not enrolled in school for at least 2 years). For all 4 SES groups, if students were in grade 12 and writing – the great majority passed, but many of the kids from Low SES areas had not yet made it to grade 12 (and many were not in school at all).