MONTREAL — Once again, the Snowdon campus of Herzliah High School, English section, is the top Jewish school in the Report Card on Quebec’s Secondary Schools, an annual Fraser Institute analysis of how the province’s public and private secondary schools are performing academically.

However, Herzliah’s ranking has dropped to 28th among the 474 schools under review, from the first-place position it held in the previous two years.

The report is based on the results of the 2007 uniform final exams in six key subjects, as well as several other criteria that the conservative think-tank considers objective indicators of how well a school is doing, such as promotion rates, number of exams failed and how girls’ and boys’ grades compare.

This is the ninth year the report has been produced for Quebec.

Herzliah Snowdon has also lost the institute’s perfect overall rating of 10 and is now given a 9.4. The school also merits only a C for what the institute calls “value added by the school,” an estimate of how much credit teachers and administrators can take for their students’ performance.

The institute takes into account such factors as family income, the number of students in the school who enter their senior years at an older age than average, the number of special-needs students, and total school enrolment.

The average family income of the 111 students at Herzliah Snowdon is $122,200.

Hebrew Academy has the second-best showing among Jewish schools, at 31st in the province, with an overall rating of 9.3 and a value added of A.

Bialik High School and Ecole Maïmonide, Jacob Safra campus, are tied for 36th place, as well as a 9.1 overall rating and a B for value added.

The other Jewish schools results are: Herzliah Snowdon, French section, 64th, 8.6, B; Herzliah, St. Laurent campus, 68th, 8.5, C; Belz Community School (for girls), 71st, 8.4, A; Beth Jacob School, 104th, 7.7, B; Maïmonide, Parkhaven campus, 177th, 6.5, D; Yeshiva Gedola Merkaz Hatorah, 131st, 7.1, B; and Beth Rivkah Academy, 197th, 6.3, D.

The report names Beth Rivkah as, statistically, the second-fasted declining school in the province, according to data collected between 2003 and 2007.  

The institute highlighted the 10 schools in the province that are in the sharpest downward trend in order to spur parents to act.

“Declines like this call for immediate action, and parents should encourage school administrators to redouble their efforts to ensure that all the school’s student’s succeed,” said the study’s co-author, Peter Cowley.

Beth Rivkah, a French-language school under Lubavitch auspices, has 165 female students. It has a policy of accepting all Jewish students, regardless of background or abilities. At $51,400, the average family income is one of the lowest among the Jewish schools.

Its average ranking between 2003 and 2007 was 83rd.

Beth Rivkah has a relatively high proportion of students starting Secondary IV at age 16 or more. By contrast, the English Herzliah Snowdon had no students entering that grade at that advanced age.

The dismal appraisal of the school is at odds with an award the Fraser Institute gave the school this past spring for “academic achievement in excess of expectations.” The inaugural Garfield Weston Award, of which three were awarded in Quebec this year, recognizes schools that ensure their students succeed regardless of the hurdles they may face and for their commitment to educate all children.

Two other Orthodox schools, Beth Jacob and Yeshiva Gedola, also slipped significantly in their relative performance over the past five years, according to the report.

On the other hand, another chassidic girls’ school, Belz, is showing improvement, having climbed to 71st this year from an 82nd average between 2003 and 2007. It also has a high proportion – 20 per cent – of students starting Secondary IV at 16 or over.

The two French-language Maïmonides are moving in different directions. Jacob Safra campus’s ranking jumped to 36th from an average 65th from 2003 to 2007, while the Parkhaven campus dropped to 177th from an average 89th in the same period.

Girls are outpacing boys at Jacob Safra in both the French and physical sciences exams, which are used by the institute to detect any gender gap.

Girls also scored higher marks in these subjects at Hebrew Academy, and were better or equal to boys at the French-language Herzliah Snowdon.

The report is described by the Fraser Institute as the only independent measurement of Quebec’s school system. This year’s edition is co-authored by Cowley, director of school performance studies at the institute’s Vancouver headquarters, and Tasha Kheiriddin, the institute’s Quebec director.

The results are available online at www.fraserinstitute.org.