Provincial differences in high school achievement: Do schools matter? - ARCHIVED

Controlling for differences in student populations, we examine the contribution of schools to provincial differences in the reading, math and science achievement of 15-year-olds in this paper. Using a semi-parametric decomposition technique developed by DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) for differences in distributions, we find that school differences contribute to provincial differences in different parts of the achievement distribution and that the effect varies by province and by type of skill, even within province. For example, school differences account for about 32% of the difference in mean reading achievement between New Brunswick and Alberta, but reduce the difference in the proportion of students performing at the lowest reading proficiency level. By contrast, school differences account for 94% of the New Brunswick-Alberta gap in the 10th percentile of the science distribution. Our results demonstrate that school effectiveness studies that focus on the first moment of the achievement distribution miss potentially important impacts for specific students.