Understanding the rural - urban reading gap - November 2002

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Students from urban schools in Canada performed significantly better in reading than students from rural schools, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment. The rural-urban reading gap was particularly large in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Alberta.

Students in rural schools in Alberta, while not performing as well as their urban counterparts, had reading scores above the national average and better than urban students in some other provinces.

This study uses data from the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to examine the difference in reading performance between students in rural and urban schools and to investigate why the rural-urban reading gap exists in some provinces.

The study found that rural students were more likely than urban students to come from families with lower socio-economic backgrounds. The parents of rural students tend to be less well-educated and less likely to be employed in professional occupations, such as doctors, lawyers and bankers. These differences, however, do not explain the gap in performance between rural and urban students. Even if one were to compare rural and urban students whose parents had the same level of education and the same occupation, the reading difference would still remain.

Moreover, the rural-urban gap cannot be attributed to differences in rural and urban schools because, for the most part, rural and urban schools are much the same. In fact, Canadian students ranked high internationally, in part, because there are few significant differences between Canadian schools overall.¹

Instead, this study shows that the difference between rural and urban reading performance is most strongly related to community differences. Relative to the urban communities, rural communities were characterised by lower levels of education, fewer jobs, and jobs that were, on average, lower earning and less likely to require a university degree. The rural-urban reading differences are linked to community differences in levels of adult education and the nature of work. The community characteristics are based on both the education and job level of the parents of all of the school's 15-year-olds, and on the educational and occupational characteristics of the adult population of the school's municipality.

While family background is important, it is the community background in which students learn that explains the rural-urban reading gap. That is, the child of someone in a professional occupation will likely perform well in either an urban or rural school, but will likely perform even better in an urban community. In fact, every child will likely do better in an urban community because of the nature of the urban labour market and the overall higher levels of education among the adults. It is important to note that, because changes in school factors would affect both rural and urban students, they are not likely to reduce the rural-urban gap.

Because changes that might reduce the reading gap between rural and urban communities are not short-term measures, the study examined a variety of school characteristics that were not reported at the highest levels in rural schools in order to identify which of these characteristics has a strong relationship with student achievement. After controlling for individual socio-economic background and community conditions, the most important of these school factors were disciplinary climate, student behaviour, student-teacher ratios, teacher support, offering of extracurricular activities, and teacher specialisation.

• ¹According to the OECD preliminary results of the Programme for International Student Assessment, Canada is one of the countries where the range in student achievement is due less to differences between schools, than to differences in students within schools. The countries, like Canada, where these "between-school" differences are relatively small, tend to be the highest performing countries. The fact that Canadian schools are relatively uniform is therefore seen as one of the reasons why Canada performed so well compared to other countries. (Knowledge and Skills for Life, OECD, Paris, 2001)

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