reports

Is the class half empty? A population-based perspective on socioeconomic status and educational outcomes

IRPP Choices 12:1-30.

Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

The purpose of this report is twofold: to provide a model for those jurisdictions that have the potential to implement similar population-based methods in their own provinces or school districts; and to outline the insights and implications of population based work for researchers, educators and policymakers. We begin with a brief summary of the relationship between socioeconomic status and social outcomes. We follow with a discussion of the importance of building information systems to make better use of existing data in order to inform policy; the data repository at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) is used as an example of what can be done. We then provide examples of how population based analyses in Manitoba have revealed far greater socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes than had been previously realized. Analyses are divided according to region of residence (Winnipeg versus the rest of the province), socioeconomic status and sex. We finish with a discussion of the policy implications of the research and the recommendations that follow from this work.