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Notes

1. Marie-Andrée Chouinard(2000). Palmarès des écoles secondaires: l'école privée profite de ses bonnes notes. Le Devoir (Montreal), December 13.
    
   
2. The poll was conducted by Ad Hoc Recherche for Les Affaires magazine and the results were reported in the article: Kathy Noël (2001). Pour une école plus traditionnelle. Les Affaires 73, 9 (March 3): 9.
    
   
3. See for instance: Michael Rutter et al., Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Peter Mortimore et al., School Matters: The Junior Years (Wells, Somerset: Open Books Publishing Ltd., 1988); and, Joseph F. Johnson, Jr., Case Studies from the National Study of High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (STAR Center at the Charles A. Dana Center University of Texas at Austin; digital document: http://www.starcenter.org/priority/casestudies.htm (August 7, 1999).
    
   
4. The Web site for the Beacon Schools program is http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/beaconschools/.
    
   
5. The uniform examinations results that are presented and analyzed in the Report Card are: Language of Instruction, Secondary V level, English or French; Second language, Secondary V level, English or French; Physical sciences, Secondary IV level; and History of Quebec and Canada, Secondary IV level. The term "uniform examination" refers to those examinations set and administered by the Ministry of Education in courses that are required for certification of studies or that are pre-requisites for important post-secondary courses.
    
   
6. The general program is pursued by most students. It equips them to continue their studies after graduation at a CEGEP or other post-secondary institution.
    
   
7. EHDAA is the abbreviation for "Enfants handicapés ou en difficulté d'acquisition et d'apprentissage." EHDAA students have been assessed with any of a variety of physical, emotional, mental, or behaviour disadvantages and the public schools that they attend receive additional funds for use in the EHDAA students' education.
    
   
8. The student data from which the various indicators in this Report Card are derived is contained in databases maintained or controlled by the Government of Quebec, Ministry of Education.
    
   
9. It would have been useful to know the proportion of pupils progressing without delay through all five years of secondary. However, a significant proportion of the schools in the Report Card offer only the last two years of secondary instruction. For this reason, it is impossible to use five-year promotion rates to compare all the schools in the Report Card. In any event, it is probable that dropout rates are highest after most of the students have reached the age of 16 years, after which school attendance is not mandatory.
    
   
10. See http://193.51.6.240/ival/brochure.html. The French ministry uses the expression "fictitious cohort" to distinguish the group of students from a real cohort. We prefer the expression "instant cohort" because it expresses not only the fact that it differs from the real cohort but also that this concept is based on a single year's student results. If the main advantage of using the instant cohort is that it relates student promotion to the efforts of a single school in a single year, the disadvantage is that it disregards possible differences between the student groups--Secondary IV and Secondary V students--that make up the instant cohort. However, since we intend to report this Promotion rate annually, it will be possible to mitigate this problem through analysis of a time series of data.
     
    
11. Note that in previous years, this indicator measured courses failed rather than uniform examinations failed. For this reason, the raw values for the school year 1999/2000 are not strictly comparable with the fail-rate values reported for previous school years.
     
    
12. Peter Cowley and Stephen Easton, Boys, Girls, and Grades: Academic Gender Balance in British Columbia's Secondary Schools (Vancouver, BC: Fraser Institute, 1999): 7.
     
    
13. In school years previous to 1999/2000, this indicator measured the difference between male and female students in a statistic that compared the students' average school-derived and final examination marks. Thus, the raw values for the school year 1999/2000 are not strictly comparable with the gender gaps reported for previous school years.
     
    
14. In this context, we have used the 90% confidence level to determine statistical significance.
     
    
15. Census 1996 data for the custom geographies used in the development of the socio-economic measures were provided by Statistics Canada.
     
    

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