K-12 Education Reform in British Columbia finds that from 2012/13 to 2021/22, per-student spending (adjusted for inflation) increased in BC from $13,839 to $14,767, but over the same 10-year period, student performance declined substantially. In fact, the average scores for BC students on the international Programme for International Assessment (PISA) tests in math dropped from 522 in 2012 to 496 in 2022. Scores also declined in reading (535 to 511) and science (544 to 519).
| By: Yanick Labrie, Peter Cowley, Joel Emes and Max Shang
The Report Card on Quebec’s Secondary Schools 2024 ranks 465 public, independent, francophone and anglophone schools based on provincewide test results in French, English, science and mathematics during the 2022/23 academic year, finding that the province’s fastest-improving school— de la Rive in Lavaltrie —improved its rating from 1.4 (out of 10) in 2017 to 4.6 in 2023.
A Tale of Two Provinces: Economic and Fiscal Performance of Ontario and Quebec in the 21st Century is a new study that finds Ontario’s economic and fiscal performance over the past two decades has been comparatively weak and noticeably worse than neighbouring Quebec, as Ontario’s GDP-per-person in 2000 was the 2nd highest across the country before falling to 5th in 2022.
B.C.’s Descriptive Grading on Report Cards Has Parents Yearning for the ABCs finds that the vast majority of parents in Canada easily understand letter grades on report cards but are confused by the new “descriptive” grading recently adopted in British Columbia.
