Canada’s schools are among the least segregated in the OECD — and its poorest students score higher for it, study finds
Canada’s schools are among the least socially segregated in the developed world, and its poorest students do better because of it. That’s the conclusion of a study comparing Canada with Australia, a country with a very similar economy, population and culture that has gone much further in turning schooling into a marketplace.
The study, published in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, was written by researchers at Murdoch University in Australia, the University of Manitoba and Indiana University. It uses data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds every three years. The authors look at whether school choice and competition between schools help or hurt students.
Their finding: in Australia, where families shop for schools much more, students are far more sorted by family background. Schools serving poorer students have fewer resources. Poorer students score lower than comparable students in Canada, and wealthier Australian students gain nothing in return.
Two countries, two approaches
The authors picked the two countries because they are so alike. Both are wealthy, highly urbanized, multicultural countries with similar levels of immigration, similar Indigenous populations, similar income inequality and similar education spending. On many social measures, Australia does slightly better than Canada. Canada’s child poverty rate is higher, for instance.
Where they differ is how their schools are organized. More than 40 per cent of Australian secondary students attend private schools, nearly all of which receive public money even when they charge high fees. Australia publishes school-by-school test results nationally, and its schools compete for students more than in any other OECD country. In the 2018 PISA data, 42 per cent of Australian students attended a private school, compared with 8 per cent in Canada. Just 47 per cent of Australian students went to a school that admits only students from its local area, compared with 68 per cent in Canada.
Canada has school choice too: French immersion, specialized programs, publicly funded Catholic boards in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and partly subsidized independent schools. B.C. has the highest share of private-school students in Canada, at 13 per cent, and independent schools there can receive up to half of their operating costs from the province. But the authors note that Canada has no national system for ranking schools by test results. The Fraser Institute’s annual school rankings are the closest thing. Canadian provinces also don’t let funding differ widely from one public school to the next.
Less sorting by income in Canada
On the OECD’s 2018 measure of social segregation between schools, Canada ranked as the least segregated of 33 countries with data, tied with Norway. Australia ranked 25th, more segregated than both the United States and the United Kingdom.
In 2009, 60 per cent of Canadian students attended a socially mixed school, compared with 38 per cent in Australia. In Australia, 58 per cent of disadvantaged students attended a disadvantaged school, compared with 37 per cent in Canada.
Unequal schools
The study also compared school resources and learning conditions by how affluent each school’s students were. In both countries, principals at poorer schools reported more staff shortages, worse materials and more disruptive behaviour. But the gaps were 1.2 to 2.3 times larger in Australia. For student behaviour that disrupts learning, the gap between the poorest and wealthiest quarter of Australian schools was described by the authors as “enormous.”
Students’ own reports showed the same pattern. In Canada, the gaps between poorer and wealthier schools were too small to matter educationally on any of the seven measures of classroom climate and teaching. In Australia, they mattered on four.
Poorer students score higher in Canada
The clearest difference is in reading scores. In every PISA round from 2009 to 2018, students from the poorest quarter of families scored more than 20 points higher in Canada than in Australia. That’s roughly half a year to a full year of schooling. Students from the wealthiest quarter scored about the same in both countries.
As a result, the reading gap between rich and poor students was about 68 points in Canada, roughly 1.3 years of schooling, compared with about 89 points in Australia, roughly 1.8 years.
“Equity for the lowest SES students does not come at the cost of reduced achievement for the highest SES students,” the authors write, calling it “an important, and hopeful, finding.”
What it means
The authors argue the difference comes from how students are distributed across schools rather than from poverty, culture or teacher quality. The share of teachers with master’s degrees is almost the same in both countries, but Australia has a 12-point gap between rich and poor schools while Canada has none.
They don’t argue for ending school choice. Their point is that choice based on different programs, such as French immersion or arts and science specialties, can coexist with equity. Choice that leaves some schools with much better resources than others, as in Australia, hurts both equity and overall results.
Limitations
The study compares two countries, so it can show a strong association but can’t prove that marketization causes the differences. The authors treat each country as a single system, although education is run by provinces and states, and Canada’s provinces vary considerably. The analysis covers reading scores only, and the most recent PISA data it uses are from 2018. The study was first published online in January 2024.
Source: Perry, L. B., Yoon, E.-S., Sciffer, M., & Lubienski, C., “The impact of marketization on school segregation and educational equity and effectiveness: Evidence from Australia and Canada,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 67(1). doi:10.1177/00207152241227810 (open access, CC BY 4.0)
