Pandemic School System Shutdowns: Was Closing School for Months a Forgivable Blunder?

Preventative health measures, such as masking, vaccines and rapid tests were effective at stopping schools and daycares from becoming vectors for the spread of COVID-19 during the peak of the 2020-2022 pandemic.  What’s less recognized is that school closures themselves had a negligible effect on containing the virus, the whole rationale for the shutdowns.

Closing schools for so long, it now appears, was a mistake because of the attendant and unanticipated problems that arose in its wake – measurable learning loss, teen mental health issues, social isolation, and disrupted services for society’s neediest children.

Those earth-shaking claims are not really new, but they have now found confirmation in the final report of a McMaster University study, published in February 2024, in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading academic journals in medical science. It was based upon actual evidence from studies, databases and websites from May 2020 and then updated 18 times over the pandemic before finalizing the conclusions.

McMaster health researcher Sarah Neil-Sztramko and her team rattled a few public health and education authorities with their definitive findings. Children and teens belong in school, supported by preventative measures (proper ventilation, vaccines, masks and rapid tests) and school system shutdowns were simply less effective in infection prevention and control.

What was the role of schools and day cares in COVID-19 transmission?  Armed with the evidence-based research, we now know that children and teens can stay in the classroom when these infection prevention and control measures are in place because it didn’t result in spikes of the corona virus in the community or put pressure on the health-care system.

Lead researcher Neil-Sztramko and her team were refreshingly honest about the biggest blunder.  When COVID hit, Ontario provincial and public health decision-makers were not only caught-off guard but unprepared, but unsure about how and when to safely re-open and operate schools and daycares.

“There was so much about the COVID-19 virus that we didn’t know at that time,” Neil-Sztramko told the Hamilton Spectator. “At the very first phase of the pandemic, we were working blind. We knew that the virus was causing a real strain on the health-care system and so extreme measures were put in place to curb the spread while we really didn’t have much information to know what measures might be most effective.”

Provincial and public health leaders were severely handicapped by the near absence of sound medical research evidence upon which to base their decisions about school closures during the pandemic, resulting in different responses across the country.

Provincial premiers, education ministers and deputy ministers claimed to be following “public health directives” which, it turns out, were backed-up by partial or inconclusive evidence. Public school systems were shut down for between 8 weeks and 27 weeks, with Ontario leading the pack at 135 days. What’s worse – that number doesn’t include individual classroom closures or time away from school because of exposure to the virus, COVID symptoms or a positive test.

The academic and social costs of suspending school for so long has come home to roost over the past two years. “We definitely saw the downside and the unintended consequences of school closures,” Neil-Sztramko confirmed in the media.  “At the student level in terms of social, emotional and mental health, and some of the learning outcomes down the road. We also know the negative impact that it had on parents and caregivers who are trying to work from home while taking care of children in that balancing act.”

Preconceived ideas about the spread of the virus and the susceptibility of children were not borne out during the COVId-19 period. As time went on, medical experts and health professionals discovered it was air-borne and did not affect children as severely as adults. The report is conclusive: Whether schools were opened or closed didn’t have any effect on how COVID spread.

“When schools were reopened or closed down again, it really didn’t have a huge impact on levels of community transmission,” says Neil-Sztramko. “Rather, the patterns that we saw in school were really reflective of the patterns of transmission that were occurring in the communities already.”

Without sound, evidence-based research, policy-makers resort to ‘making it up as they go along’ or, put in clearer terms, muddling through a crisis. What’s the big lesson?  The McMaster research lead put it this way: “The importance of being able to incorporate data into the decision-making as time goes on rather than just sticking with that initial decision… (based on not a lot of information), but being nimble and adaptive as new scientific evidence becomes available.”

All of this research begs a deceptively simple question – is it all a forgivable error and what are the chances it may happen again?

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Post-Pandemic Student Absenteeism: Where’s the Canadian Data?

Chronic absenteeism has reached crisis proportions.  One in five children in the United Kingdom are persistently absent from school and now described as “lost children.” The “staggering figure” has been identified as a national education crisis.  In a rare show of unanimity, Education Secretary Jillian Keegan and Labour shadow secretary Bridget Phillipson both agree that it threatens the “life chances” of today’s generation.

Opening the London Sunday Times of January 7, 2024, a front-page news story grabbed U.K. readers attention.  “1 in 4 parents now think it’s fine for kids to skip school.”  That startling statistic was based upon a YouGov poll conducted in December 2023 for a national thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). It revealed, according to CSJ chief executive Andy Cook, that there was “fundamental work to be done in rebuilding the contract between families and schools.”

Everywhere you look education systems are now coming to terms with the new reality.  “Chronic absenteeism” defined as missing 10 per cent of the school year (i.e., 18 days or more) has been normalized in post-pandemic times. What student data we have presents a consistent pattern across North America and from province-to-province across Canada.

Student absenteeism rates have more than doubled.  American school data, compiled by Stanford Education professor Thomas Dee, confirmed that the national average was 28 per cent of students in 2020-21, double that of 2018-19.  In Michigan, it rose to 39 per cent during the pandemic.  More recent data shows some improvement, but some cities still report absenteeism rates of 40 per cent.

Finding reliable Canadian data requires considerable digging.  In Ontario, the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board is fairly representative. It’s regular student absenteeism rate rose from 3 to 4 per cent in 2020 to between 8 and 14 per cent in November 2022.  That same month, Manitoba’s largest school district in Winnipeg reported that 1 in 5 students were absent, considerably more than the typical rate of 12 to 14 per cent.

Provinces claim that they do not track rates of chronic absenteeism, but raw attendance data is reported in most cases. In New Brunswick’s Anglophone School District West, the average absentee rate in early 2023 (February to April) hovered around 2.4 days per month for grades 9-12 and around 1.8 days for K-8 students. Projected over 181 school days, record numbers of students were in danger of being chronically absent from school.

Until recently, Canadian researchers and school districts have been essentially “absent” on the matter of tracking student absenteeism. That very point was made quite effectively in a rather provocative September 2021 Canadian Journal of Education article by University of Ottawa researcher Anton Birioukov.

Student absenteeism in Canada tends to run higher than that in comparable Western countries. The number of Canadian students reporting skipping school on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has grown by 5.4% between 2015 and 2018 (OECD, 2018, 2019). During the same period the United Kingdom saw absenteeism drop by 5.6%, and the United States saw a tremendous 18.8% decline. Up until 2018, both countries reported lower absenteeism rates (UK 18.8%; US 19.9%) than Canada (23.2%).

Birioukov’s review of faculty profiles revealed that “no Canadian educational scholar investigates absenteeism as their primary area of research,” and he saw that as a critical policy issue. “The lack of empirical knowledge concerning student absenteeism,” he claimed, “is a contributing factor to the high levels of absenteeism evident in Canada.” His article was essentially “a call to action” for Canadian academics to provide the research to assist in addressing the problem.

Current rates of student absenteeism do threaten to undermine our relative success in instilling in the populace a commitment to ensuring school-age children are in regular attendance.  Alarming rates of absenteeism suggest that parents as well as children do not prioritize school attendance to the degree they did a generation ago, when compulsory school attendance was generally accepted by a cross-section of school communities across the socio-economic spectrum.

Persistence of high absentee rates demonstrates that it is not a passing phenomenon. Schooling is becoming optional and it will have dire consequences for the “life chances’ of the pandemic generation. Winning students and their parents back is the strategic education issue of our time.

Why have Canadian researchers and school authorities been “absent” when it comes to tracking rates of chronic absenteeism?  Without accurate data how can we assesses the seriousness of the problem?  What role do parents play in ensuring regular school attendance? What can be done to reinstitute school-community attendance officers with a mandate to win students back to regular attendance?

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Measuring Up and Down, PISA 2022: Whatever Happened to the Education Superpower?

Six years ago, a positively gushing August 2017 BBC News story anointed Canada as an “education superpower” on the basis of its recent Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in mathematics, science and reading. Today, after the release of the PISA 2022 assessments, such a claim would be dismissed as preposterous.

On the latest round of tests for 15-year-olds, Canadian students continued to slide in mathematics, reading and science.  In Mathematics, the prime focus of the 2022 global assessment, our students dropped again from 512 in 2018 to 497 in 2022, a 35-point decline since 2003. Concerns about taking a “COVID Hit” raised in my November 29 research report, Pandemic Fallout (Cardus Foundation) were borne out in the latest scores.

Our national education agency, the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC), demonstrated, once again, its tendency to denialism. Crowing about finishing in 9^th place in Mathematics means little when we are steadily losing ground to the global leaders, the Asian powerhouses of Singapore, Macau, China (Taipei), Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, and three fast improving European states, Estonia and Switzerland.

What’s more concerning is that the decline is consistent from 2000 to the present right across the board in reading and science as well as mathematics. Canadian student skills in reading mirror the downward trend, dropping from 524 in 2009 to 507 in 2022, a decline of 17 points. It marginally better in science but still consistent with the pattern of steady decline over the past two decades.

Apologists for Canada’s declining performance are running out of rationalizations.  Cherry-picking the mathematics data the best the CMEC communications team could come up with is that some 78 per cent of Canadian students achieved Level 2, signifying that they are functionally numerate. The overall decline in mathematics, reading and science is, rather sadly, explained away because of the “trend seen in the majority of participating countries and economies.”

The PISA 2002 Study report is a rather thick, almost impenetrable, quantitative research study that takes weeks to digest and analyze even for veteran researchers. The Canadian national sub-report, Measuring Up: Canadian Results, OECD PISA 2022, is helpful in summarizing Canadian student performance levels with provincial/territorial breakdowns.

The pandemic fallout was expected, but all the PISA 2022 results did is accentuate and accelerate the longer-term downward slide.  It’s serious when the OECD Education tsar, Andreas Schleicher, describes the Canadian student decline in mathematics as a legitimate concern.

Two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Quebec, are responsible for keeping our PISA results from being a “mission-critical crisis.”   In Mathematics, Quebec students continue to head the class, scoring 514, some 10 percentage points above Alberta. When it comes to Reading, Alberta leads the pack at 525, albeit down from 532 in 2018.  All of the Atlantic provinces tanked on the PISA 2022 tests in Mathematics with Newfoundland (459), New Brunswick (468), and Nova Scotia (470) falling below the OECD average.

Canada’s “learning province,” Ontario is in a slow downward spiral, in spite of its mammoth education budget.  On PISA 2022, Ontario students sunk to new lows in Mathematics registering a 495, down 35 points over 20 years. Reading scores in Ontario were better at 512, but some 19 points below 2009. With the Ontario Right to Read reforms underway in K to Grade 3, student reading competencies should be higher from 2028 onward, when that initial cohort turns 15-years-of age.

Learning loss is real and the pandemic generation has not rebounded.  What the PISA 2022 student scores reveal is that, in Canada, and worldwide, it there is a “significant learning deficit” and it continues four years after the COVID-19 outbreak and massive school disruption. Recognizing the problem is the first step in shattering the complacency and getting past the “pandemic fatigue.”

Getting our students ‘back-on-track’ will take courageous educational leadership, significant changes in school culture, implementation of the “science of learning” in classrooms, and new policies aimed at reclaiming the minds of students far too absorbed in cyberworlds. It’s all a matter of improving the effectiveness of classroom instruction and being better prepared for the next major disruption in the years ahead.

Why does the public release of PISA student achievement results attract so much global attention?  How have the PISA scores in mathematics and reading become proxies for the quality of school systems? Whic are the most important revelations – the actual scores, country rankings, or the longer-term trends?  Do we focus too much on the math and reading scores and miss out on some potentially more significant findings buried in the technical reports?  

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Education Fallout: Where did Canadian School Systems fall short in responding to the Pandemic?

Students in Canada’s K-12 schools have not bounced back.  My latest report, Pandemic Fallout: Learning Loss, Collateral Damage, and Recovery in Canada’s Schools, (Cardus, November 29, 2023) identified the root of the problem and challenged governments, educators, and parents to recognize and respond to the deep and lasting effects of pandemic disruptions on education.  

A week later, my essential analysis and conclusions were borne out in the latest Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) report (December 5, 2023)  testifying to the serious decline in the performance of Canadian students in mathematics, reading and science from 2018 to the end of 2022.

Nearly four years after the first COVID outbreak, my report shrugged-off the prevailing ‘pandemic fatigue’ and tackled a few important questions: How much learning loss have students suffered, and how can we respond? How did the pandemic impact students’ social development and mental health? How was the response of schools different across the educational spectrum? How can we do things better next time? 

What happened during the education disruption?  Surveying the comprehensive, albeit admittedly dense, heavily footnoted study, these were the essential findings:

• Learning loss is real, and a substantial learning deficit arose early in the pandemic and has persisted over time.
• The ‘knowledge gap’ is affecting students from elementary grades through high school, and is more pronounced in mathematics than in reading.
• Children with special needs and those from marginalized communities suffered the most and continue to do so.
• As many as 200,000 Canadian students went missing from school at the height of the first COVID-19 wave of infections.
• Lower-income families were disproportionately affected, increasing the knowledge gap between students from affluent households and those from disadvantaged households.
• Smaller and more autonomous schools fared better and provided more consistent, mostly uninterrupted, learning.
• No one emerged unscathed and but students in some settings were cushioned, challenged, and better supported.

Canadian provincial and district education authorities, the report demonstrates, were caught completely off-guard by the pandemic crisis, minimized the potential impact of prolonged school closures, abandoned system-wide student testing and generated little or no data on its impact on students, teachers, or families. Compared to most other OCED countries, Canada suffered from what I termed “data starvation” – flying blind though the pandemic while closing schools for extended periods of time, averaging 130 lost days (more than 25 weeks) from province-to-province across Canada (UNESCO 2023).

Large-scale assessment research—which is used to draw reliable and comparative measures of student achievement and system-level judgments—was either suspended or limited during the pandemic across Canada. This is both shocking and critical, as without the benefit of aggregated student data, researchers and policy-makers are left to piece together the pandemic’s impact on student achievement. Importantly, this has damaged Canada’s longstanding reputation as a global leader in education.

Instead of stopping with a diagnosis, the report does review best practice in implementing immediate learning recovery programs and in addressing the critical need for a broader future ‘education crisis’ response strategy.

Best Practice in Implementing “Catch-Up” Initiatives

Recognizing the problem is the first step, but tackling learning recovery is a greater challenge. Three immediate responses come highly recommended by leading experts (Srivastava, 2021, McKinsey & Company, 2020):

1. Revamp the entire K–12 curriculum to facilitate students catching up.
2. Focus on the core competencies of reading & literacy as well as pro-social skills.
3. Initiate targeted interventions, including intensive tutoring & summer catch-up sessions.

Best Strategy for Longer-Term Recovery

First and foremost, Canadian education ministers and school leaders need to be much better at tapping into research and strategies from elsewhere, and, in particular, from leading systems and research institutes in the EU, the UK, and the United States.  

Our overall strategy, modelled by UNESCO and World Bank researchers, should be informed by a “crisis-sensitive approach” (Srivatava, 2021). Effective, evidence-based pandemic educational-policy planning recovery should involve four key considerations:

1. managing a crisis and instituting first responses
2. planning for (interrupted) reopening with appropriate measures
3. sustained crisis-sensitive planning, with considerations of assessing risks for the most vulnerable
4. adjusting existing policies and strengthening policy dialogue

Most important of all – break down the silos and get to the heart of the problem. Cage-busting leadership will be needed to disrupt established routines jealously guarded by the institutional gatekeepers. Collective planning exercises with cross-sectoral collaboration and community engagement from marginalized groups should be a sustained part of pandemic-recovery planning exercises.

Conclusion: Prepare Now for the Next Global Disruption

Consistent, reliable, and evidence-based data is needed if we are to effectively respond to the full range of the pandemic’s longer-term impacts on children, teachers, and families. A new Canadian education-research agenda will be necessary for that to happen. Tackling pandemic learning loss, tracking student progress, and getting students back on track are of vital and immediate strategic importance because we are still engaged in a recovery mission, with no room for complacency. Those are the biggest lessons of the pandemic education fallout for education policymakers, school district leaders, parents, teachers, and families.

Where did Canadian education authorities go wrong in responding to the global pandemic?  How well did we prepare for such a calamity?  Who really called the shots – provincial public health authorities?  In hindsight, were schools closed for far too long?  How well did we address the widespread “learning loss” and its collateral damage affecting students, teachers, families and schools?  What have we learned and will we be better prepared the next time?

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Confronting “Long COVID” in Education: Why are Schools Flying Blind in Canada?

A new form of “Long COVID” has recently been diagnosed – a learning gap with collateral damage affecting the entire pandemic generation of school children. A systematic review and meta-analysis of learning progress across 15 countries, released in January 2023, revealed the existence of “a substantial overall learning deficit.” That “learning loss” amounting to one-third of a school year arose early in the pandemic and has persisted over time, and the so-called ‘knowledge gap’ adversely affects children from disadvantaged households. Most global pandemic learning impact studies, so far, do not include Canada and “learning loss” remains a largely undiagnosed problem and an understudied research topic in Canada’s K-12 school system.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis impacting student learning registered with the popular media, students and families, but not with most education policy-makers or researchers.  One of Canada’s best known education researchers, Andy Hargreaves, went so far as to deny its existence. Don’t call it “learning loss,” he advised. Educating students was about far more than ‘mastering the basics’ and the psycho-social impact of school disruptions was of greater concern. Missing weeks of school and covering less during scheduled school time was not a catastrophe. Student well-being took precedence over academic pursuits. Besides, ‘learning loss’ was a misnomer. It’s just “unfinished learning.” Do not put too much emphasis on short-term losses because what really matters is longer-term transformation in teaching and learning. The implicit message: Students learn outside of brick-and-mortar schools. Most kids will catch up quickly. They’ll be fine.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that was the prevailing view held and espoused by many of Canada’s leading education researchers. Most were totally immersed in studying student social well-being and addressing the inequities affecting marginalized and racialized students.  Then, the pandemic dragged on and on, claiming between 8 and 20 weeks of school from March 2020 to June 2021.  In the end, Canadian schools were closed for a total of 51 weeks during the pandemic – placing the nation in the highest bracket globally for school closures.

Yet only one article commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) for the August 2021 study, Children and Schools During COVID-19 and Beyond – produced by Scott Davies and Janice Aurini –focused on the direct impact on student learning and levels of achievement.  A year into the pandemic, three of the original RSC researchers, led by Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, conceded that parental worries about learning loss and teachers concerns about widening inequalities were not only justified, but warranted further study to assess the collateral damage affecting children and teens. That mission-critical research is now underway,

Large-scale assessment research, which is used to draw reliable and comparative measures of student achievement and system-level judgments, was either suspended or limited during the pandemic. The administration of international, national, and provincial assessments was all adversely impacted, largely as a result of the extraordinary extent of school day cancellations and regular disruptions during the initial waves of the pandemic. Those assessment programs that did occur met with high levels of non-participation, impacting sampling designs. That was revealed in the 2021 PIRLS results for Canadian Grade 4 and 5 students in reading.  Taken together, such conditions conspired to make it almost impossible to provide authoritative provincial comparisons of the pandemic’s impact upon student achievement from province-to-province across Canada.

Canada’s provincial school systems collect student data, but rarely apply it in addressing student learning challenges or unmet needs.  Far too much education policy is driven by school change theories, pedagogical biases or policy agendas, often providing solutions to problems that don’t really exist. A great deal of what passes for education policy debate is also narrowly circumscribed by subterranean ideological arguments which turn issues like student testing into proxies for recurrent battles between the Left and the Right. That also explains the undercurrent of resistance to system-wide student assessment, even in times of crisis.

A clearer picture is beginning to emerge: School lockdowns and the unscheduled default to ‘emergency home learning’ upset the lives of some 5.7 million students and their families. Schools across Canada, from province-to-province, toggled back and forth to online learning, as education authorities, acting mostly on public health directives, struggled to provide a modicum of ‘continuous learning.’ Three years on, the staggering consequences of system-wide school closures and ‘disrupted learning’ for the ’pandemic school generation’ are becoming more visible in the form of measurable learning loss, stunted social development, and mental health side-effects, including increases in school violence and lingering student absenteeism.

Confronting the immensity of the COVID-19 fallout, provincial and district school systems are now committed to “keeping schools open.” The 2021 Royal Society of Canada research study claimed that the school shutdowns precipitated a “mental health crisis” for children and teens and issued a new dictum – “schools should be the first to open and the last to close.” From March 2020 to June 2022, students, teachers and families were in a near constant state of disequilibrium. Public sector school systems were not only caught off-guard by the global upheaval but mostly ineffective in their ‘pivot’ to the ‘new normal’ in the lingering post-COVID-19 era. Whether smaller and more autonomous schools outside the system performed better and students experienced better instruction in alternative educational settings warrants further study.

Learning loss is real and, so far, our rather intermittent, uncoordinated learning recovery strategies have proven either ineffective or petered-out in province-after province.  The latest research from the American North West Education Association (NWEA), released July 11, 2023, is disconcerting.  Some $118-billion was invested in U.S. catch-up programs and most of it has gone for naught. Teacher fatigue and student resistance to undertaking extra studies or attending summer school have been cited as key factors. The bottom line: The identified “learning loss gap” has not been bridged for this generation of students. Upper elementary and middle school students studied by NWEA have actually lost ground during 2022-23.  It will take months of schooling to enable them to reach pre-pandemic levels in reading and mathematics.

The critical disconnect is becoming more visible to parents, students, and the informed public.  Digging our way out of the hole will require sound, consistent and effective responses from provincial and district education authorities. That, in turn, would be greatly enhanced by good quality evidence-based research assessing the impact of pandemic school shutdowns and disruptions. For that to happen, it would have to exist.  It’s time to get our research-to-policy act together.

Three years after the onslaught, here are a few critical and unresolved questions: Why did education policy-makers and most faculty of education researchers misread the situation and underestimate the academic impact of the school closures?  If closing the gap was a systemic priority, why did students with social disadvantages or complex needs get left behind in public government-funded schools? What can be done to end “data starvation” and begin developing and implementing strategies that work in getting students back on track and in closing the learning gaps? 

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The Unranking of Canada in Reading: Why were Canada’s Students Unable to Keep Pace?

Canada was nowhere to be found on the latest major international literacy study comparing the reading ability of nine and 10-year-olds in 57 states, covering 43 countries. Administering the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment during the COVID pandemic in 2020-21 proved to be challenging for governments, students and teachers.

Grade 4-5 students in countries, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Russia continued to top the rankings in reading, while England took fourth place, leapfrogging Finland, Poland and many other countries. Six Canadian provinces were scheduled to participate, but two – Ontario and New Brunswick – dropped out, unable to perform, largely because of lengthy school shutdowns.

Some Canadian provinces did manage to administer the PIRLS 2021 assessment and were benchmarked, and most of the scores reflected declines in reading competency. Among Anglophone provinces, Alberta’s fourth graders fared the best, but scores dipped from 560 in 2006 to 548 in 2011, and further down to 539 in 2021.  In British Columbia, the decline was steeper – from 558 in 2006 to 535 in 2021. Quebec was, once again, an exception, with reading scores rising from 533 in 2006 to 547 in 2016 and 551 in 2021. The Quebec score comes with an asterisk because students wrote their test at the beginning of the fifth grade because of pandemic disruptions.

The most glaring absence was Ontario, Canada’s self-proclaimed “world class” school system. As one of Canada’s two PIRLS pioneers, along with Quebec, the province has participated since the first cycle back in 2001. Finishing among the top performers was once a badge of pride for the Ontario Ministry of Education.  In November 2007, the official Ontario news release, entitled “Ontario Students Are World Class,” heralded the PIRLS 2007 student results as proof of that claim. Bowing out of PIRLS 2021 ranks as quite a come-down for Ontario.

Student scores fell compared to PIRLS 2016 in most countries, except for Singapore (up from 576 to 587) and Hong Kong (569 to 573), while England shot up the rankings by holding its own, dropping marginally from 559 to 558. Finland’s score went down from 566 in 2016 to 549, while Poland’s dropped from 565 to 549, still well above the international average of 520 and the European average of 524.

England’s fourth place ranking was front page news and produced its share of crowing in the United Kingdom.  The UK schools minister, Nick Gibb, attributed England’s success to the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012 and the establishment in 2018 of the English hubs programme, a scheme designed to develop expertise in teaching reading in schools. Girls still outperformed boys on PIRLS 21, but the margin narrowed, averaging 562 in 2021, down slightly from 566 in 2016.

Reading scores in England have been on an upswing since PIRLS 2006. That point was reaffirmed by Dr Dirk Hastedt, the executive director of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which administers PIRLS, in his reaction to the latest results.

“Overall, we have to admit that teachers in England obviously did a good job despite COVID,” said Hastedt. “They were able to teach students so that they were among the countries without losses. That’s a significant achievement, so we can definitely congratulate teachers and schools for the amazing job they did during COVID-19.”

Jon Andrews, head of analysis at the UK-based Education Policy Institute, put it in perspective: “Today’s PIRLS results resonate with our own findings that outcomes in reading have been recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. However, our analysis also suggests that in mathematics, primary school pupils remain around one and a half months behind pre-pandemic norms in their learning.”

The most buoyant response to England’s success came from Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL): “This is a badly needed piece of good news for an education system that feels beleaguered. These excellent results in reading standards of nine-10-year-olds are testament to the hard work, skill and dedication of primary school teachers and leaders.”

The big question: Why did Ontario register an INCOMPLETE on the most recent global reading assessment?  The PIRLS 2021 “Country Report” for Ontario, Canada, is very convoluted and full of rationalizations but quite revealing.

Ontario was scheduled to participate in the spring of 2021 but PIRLS administration was impossible because “three modes of delivery” were in place in 2020-21 and schools were closed for much of the year.  Unplanned local classroom and school closures scuttled the second attempt in April 2021.  A third effort, October 18 to November 26, 2021, was stymied by “high rates of staff absenteeism and a shortage of certified teachers.” Thus ended Ontario’s full participation and once stellar reputation burnished by PIRLS rankings.

The latest PIRLS assessment proved to be a litmus test of how well school systems fared in weathering the COVID pandemic. The vast majority of students and most countries were adversely affected by school shutdowns, nowhere more evident than in Ontario. Ontario and New Brunswick were both unable to perform on PIRLS 21 and school closures were a major contributing factor.

The “unranking of Canada” in the international reading ‘league tables’ can be attributed to many factors.  Missing that much school was perhaps the most critical and it’s recently been borne out in a May 2023 World Bank research study, produced by Harry Patrinos. Among the world’s Western nations, Canada lost the most school days to COVID-19 school closures. In a table of lost school days, Canada’s mean number was 26, with Ontario leading the way.

It all boils down to a simple conclusion. “The longer the duration of closures,” Patrinos shows, armed with the data, “the greater the losses.” For countries, like Canada, with reasonably reliable data, school closures of 21 weeks produced average learning losses of 0.23 standard deviation, almost a whole year’s worth of learning. That is, in large part, why most Canadian provinces dropped in their mean scores and why Ontario and New Brunswick failed to report.

Whatever happened to Canada’s bragging rights on global reading assessments?  How did Ontario go from being “world class” to “incomplete” from PIRLS 2006 to PIRLS 2021?  Why does Quebec now ‘head of the class’ in reading as well as mathematics?  Most significantly, why have the Canadian media gone to sleep on the issue of pandemic learning loss?

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Learning Erosion, the Pandemic and the Long-Term Trajectory: How Representative is the Downward Spiral in Nova Scotia?

The worst kept educational secret is leaking out: most Canadian K-12 students in all provinces suffered setbacks during the Pandemic.  The latest province to report on the decline in student test scores is Nova Scotia, a middling Canadian province widely considered a bell weather for national trends. Right on forecast, that province’s students performed dismally on the latest 2021-22 battery of results.  Alarming student test score numbers in reading, writing and mathematics generated considerable media attention, but it remains to be seen whether they will light a fire under the gatekeepers of the provincial schoolhouse.

One in three Grade 3 students (32 per cent) cannot read with comprehension, and half of those students cannot write properly. It doesn’t get better by Grade 6 in reading or mathematics.  Two out of five in Grade 10 fail to meet acceptable standards in mathematics. This is not new at all, just worse because of school shutdowns, periodic interruptions, and absenteeism.

Signs of flagging student progress are everywhere in that province’s classrooms. Students are still guessing at words while reading in the early grades. Most elementary kids are rarely asked to write more than a sentence or two. Left on their own to master mathematics, students’ skills have eroded to an alarming degree. Getting kids to turn off their cellphones saps a lot of energy.

Confronting the hard data on the downward spiral, Education Minister Becky Druhan and the Department were quick to blame the pandemic.  Abysmal post-COVID student test scores were posted, the pandemic was offered up as the explanation, and –two days later — a reactive plan materialized out of thin air.

The “education crisis” escape plan was thrown-together in reaction mode. Provincial education officials must have been banking on no one bothering to look any deeper, track student data trends, or question why the department is still entrusted with evaluating its own effectiveness in teaching, learning and curriculum

Reading and writing skills have actually been in steady decline for a decade or more. Some 68 per cent of Grade 3 students in 2021-22 met minimum standards in Reading, down 8 points from 76 per cent in 2012-13. Student writing standards in Grade 3 have deteriorated significantly in all aspects of writing proficiency (Ideas – from 88% to 50%; Organization -from 80% to 38%; Language Use – from 83% to 43%; and Conventions – from 71% to 32%). Two out of three Grade 3s are familiar with Snapchat but exhibit little proficiency in  grammar or spelling and most can barely write a complete sentence.

Student proficiency by Grade 6 is critical because, as the recent October 2022 World Bank report on Pandemic Global Learning Loss claimed, students unable to read by 10 years-of-age are considered to be living in “learning poverty.” Until recently, that problem seemed far removed from the lives of Nova Scotian and Canadian children.

Six out of 10 kids in the world’s low-income and middle-income countries are now classified as “learning poor” putting their future in jeopardy and their lives at risk. In Canada, the World Bank estimates that from 4.3 to 8.3 per cent of 10 year olds in Canada qualify as “learning poor.” It’s much higher in Nova Scotia, where 29 per cent of our 10-year-olds (in Grade 6) lack basic proficiency in reading.

Math standards tend to fly below the radar in Nova Scotia, and the Education Department is culpable. Thirty per cent of Grade 3s lack proficiency in math skills, but it’s impossible to track past trends.  Shifting the tests from Grade 3 to Grade 4 and back again since 2011-12 deprived us of comparable data. It’s not as concealed in Grade 6 where student scores have dropped from 73 per cent (2012-13) to 64 per cent a year ago. One third of Grade 6s fall below provincial math standards.

Buried in the latest batch of published results are “disaggregated” student test results for two groups of students, those of African heritage and Indigenous ancestry.  That reflects the department’s recent focus on supporting students and improving results among those in racialized and marginalized communities.

While it’s been a major priority, the pandemic disruption has wiped out previous gains. Grade 3 Reading scores for African students held firm at 57 per cent meeting standards, some 12 per cent below the provincial average score. Writing remains a serious problem with fewer than half of the cohort of 695 students meeting expectations. A similar sized cohort of Mi’kmaw/Indigenous students in Grade 3 suffered similar setbacks during the pandemic.  In high school, African and Indigenous students at Grade 10 level performed far better in Reading than in Mathematics, where both cohorts of students have lost significant ground in comparison with their peers.

So far, Druhan and her Department have fumbled the ball during the pandemic disruption.  Cancelling school for 22 weeks between March 2020 and June 2021 put students and teachers in a much-weakened position. Since then, provincial authorities have been essentially asleep, waiting – it now appears – for hard evidence that students, at every grade level, are far behind in their progress and poorly prepared to progress to the next level.

Nowhere is the Education department’s ‘muddle-through’ mentality better exemplified than in in its slow-footed, ad hoc response to the deepening literacy crisis. After ignoring the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read report upon its release, Druhan and her officials finally – six months later– produced a “Six Pillars” framework for discussion in June of last school year. The document endorsing ‘structured literacy’ was issued, but implementation was voluntary and earmarked for a number of “pilot schools.”

Provincial literacy experts were taken-aback when the “Six Pillars” framework surfaced again, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous scores. Conventional reading and writing strategies, including “balanced or levelled literacy” and “Reading Recovery” remain in place, even though they were rejected months ago in Ontario and other provinces. The just-announced “new plan” for Grade 2 literacy is nothing of the sort. After keeping the “Six Pillars” under wraps, it’s just now being introduced to teachers, delaying implementation for another full year.

Establishing a Nova Scotia Student Progress Assessment agency is now mission-critical in Primary to Grade 12 education. Learning erosion has worsened since January 2018 when Dr. Avis Glaze recommended creating such an agency reporting to the public, not the department. Delaying the release of student test data, resisting evidence-based policy making, and denying the pandemic’s impact may be the last straw. The department should not be entrusted with evaluating the success of its own policies, curriculum and practices. It’s high time for more public accountability and action plans informed by the best evidence gathered through student assessment.

Why are education authorities blaming the “learning erosion” on the Pandemic disruption and treating it as an aberration? How representative is Nova Scotia, where literacy and mathematics skills have been in decline for a decade or more?  What is the point of establishing ‘learning outcomes’ without implementing changes which might enable teachers to come closer to meeting those student achievement benchmarks? Is the irregular and uneven response to the Ontario Right to Read inquiry findings symptomatic of broader concerns?

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Competing Pandemic Education Priorities: Why has Top-Down Anti-Racism Policy Stalled?

The Pandemic upended Canadian provincial systems and school lockdowns at their height affected the lives of some 5 million students and their families. Three years after its onset, the impact of the COVID-19 disruption is beginning to show in terms of student learning loss, foundational skills deficits, and psycho-social after-effects. While initially disoriented and slow to react, education authorities and researchers now recognize that a new set of priorities has come to the fore –‘learning recovery’ and closing the learning gaps in literacy and numeracy, falling heavily on students from racialized and marginalized communities.

Tackling racism with new policy mandates, advocating for the hiring of more diversity, equity and inclusion officers and collecting race-based data have not only lost their urgency, but stalled in their implementation, especially outside the Greater Toronto Area and our more ethnically-diverse cities.  One elementary school principal from Central Ontario surveyed in the spring of 2022 by the Toronto-based funding advocacy organization People for Education put it best: “School closures and COVID interruptions have greatly impacted the depth of learning and conversations around anti-racism. Greater continuity would certainly be beneficial to those efforts.”  Simply stated, priorities have changed at the classroom level in Canada’s schools.

That is why the latest People for Education report (January 2023) surveying anti-racism policy in Ontario and elsewhere is problematic and raises more questions than it really answers. Written by two younger researchers, Robin Liu Hopson, M.A., Director, Policy and Research at People for Education, and  Kaushi Attygalle, Senior Research Associate for YouthREX, it focuses almost exclusively on rates of compliance with federal and provincial anti-racism strategy, legislation and directives. Most of the data is actually derived from two sources – data mined from the official websites of Ontario’s 72 publicly-funded school boards and self-reported survey responses from Ontario-based school principals. The report on “anti-racism’ policy, rather predictably, found “significant inconsistencies in the execution of these strategies.”

With the Pandemic still lingering and its after-effects increasingly visible, the report frames the fundamental problem as one of confronting racism and Indigenous injustices by taking “a closer look” at “discriminatory practices and the role that they play in perpetuating systemic racism.” It pivots off-of the findings of the 2022 Independent Special Interlocutor’s report, Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.”  Residential school atrocities and isolated acts of overt racism are identified as critical because they “triggered discussions on discrimination and signaled calls for equity in Canada.”

Much of this selective, qualitative, data-limited study is informed by the conception of “anti-racism” and supporting analysis of American academic Ibram X. Kendi, and his 2019 bestseller, How to be an antiracist.  Anti-racism, according to Kendi is: “Belief in equality among all races, and that racial inequality is an outcome of problematic policies and power imbalances.”  It starts with the assumption that “race and racism” is at the root of inequality rather than class or other disadvantages, racism is harboured in institutions, and “different treatment is necessary for equal outcomes.”

Provincial education authorities, school districts and individual schools are assessed in the 2023 People for Education report solely on the basis of their compliance with government mandates, stemming from the 2019 federal anti-racism plan, funded at $45-million and covering three years, to promote “long-term action towards increasing equitable access to and participation in the economic, cultural, social and political spheres.” Provincial anti-racism policy in Ontario actually dates back to 2017 when it was enacted into law in the final year of the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government. Since then, only two other provinces have followed suit, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, both in 2022. Overall, fewer than half (six) of our 13 provinces and territories have developed policy initiatives ranging from developing strategies and action plans, forming advisory councils or committees, to passing new legislation.

                Provincial anti-racism work (tapping into $30-million in federal funding for community programs and $3.3-million for public education programs) fell far short of its objectives.  A recent Toronto Star news report by Kristin Rushowy (January 15, 2022) parroting the People for Education media release claimed that progress was slowed by the pandemic. That’s only partly true because an earlier November 2020 Parliament of Canada review reported only modest progress, mostly funded by federal monies.

Securing racial profile data for school systems and most other public institutions is now part of the anti-racism policy agenda and figured prominently in the People for Education findings.  Out of some 1,000 Ontario principals surveyed, representing 20 per cent of all schools, 86.7 per cent self-identified as “white,” followed by 5.2 per cent Black, 3 per cent as South Asian, 2.7 per cent East Asian, and 2.3 per cant Indigenous.

“The numbers are so stark,” said Annie Kidder, the group’s executive director. “It definitely points to a problem in the system when you are thinking of all the results where race comes into play and how important it is that we work harder to have a system where the staff, all the staff, are reflective of the students.” That buttressed the report’s key finding: “the homogenous racial profile of school principals is in contrast to Ontario’s population, which comprises more than half of Canada’s ‘visible minority’ population.”

The overwhelmingly “white” Ontario school-level leadership is definitely more geared up for ‘anti-racist work’ than district school boards. Some 94 per cent of principals reported providing staff professional development “specific to anti-racism and equity,” and 73 per cent had included “anti-racism” in their local School Improvement Plans. School districts, guided by elected school boards ostensibly representing the public, were far less compliant. Fewer than two-thirds of school boards (64%) reported collecting “race-based  and/or demographic data,” only 28 per cent had an explicit “anti-racism policy, strategy or approach” and one out of four boards (26%) made no mention of “anti-racism” in their posted equity policies.

None of the survey questions posed by People for Education researchers actually focused on gathering data that really matters: the incidence of racial acts or race-related violence in the schools, the ‘reading failure’ connection, growth in anti-racism staff complements, local resistance to disclosing racial data, and teacher skepticism about the effectiveness of top-down policy initiatives.

Much of the passive resistance may be attributable to a broader awareness of the continuing education crisis. Student literacy is identified by Illuminate Education and many American school authorities as “a social justice issue” especially relevant to Black and minority students. Each year, over four million U.S. grade 4 students are added to the population of non-readers and, according to the World Bank, living in “learning poverty.” A year ago, the Ontario Human Rights Commission Right to Read Inquiry, found reading failure to be an urgent matter  of “social justice,” for children affected by learning disabilities, marginalized or struggling with “intersecting conditions.” What’s most peculiar is that– so far– the literacy crisis disproportionately affecting disadvantaged children has been brushed aside by the very organization now urging compliance with “anti-racism” mandates.

Why have federal anti-racism initiatives in schools been stalled in their tracks, even in Ontario?  Will ‘top-down’ anti-racism policy directives work to root out racism and, more importantly, reduce the incidence of racially-motivated discrimination and violence?  How much of the impetus for collecting race-based data comes from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and its GTA board allies?  Is there a danger that racial-profiling will backfire – breeding deeper ‘racial identity’ divisions and providing evidence which only reinforces harmful and debilitating stereotypes? 

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Pandemic Achievement Slide: Is the Learning Loss worse than has been reported?

School’s out and the first reliable reports on pandemic learning loss are appearing in the United States and, far more slowly, from province-to-province across Canada. In some school systems, education leaders and regional superintendents are breathing a sigh of relief and far too many are acting like the disruptions of two-and-a-half years of pandemic learning are over. But the first wave of student assessment scores reveals many students — especially from kindergarten to Grade 6, but all the way to Grade 12 — are behind with school closures, remote learning, and irregular school schedules to blame.

During the COVID-19 pandemic America’s schoolchildren lost out on from 16 to 70 weeks in the classroom. Most pupils received some form of virtual schooling which varied greatly in quality and quantity. While many parents recognized the risk to health posed by keeping schools open, they—and teachers—were concerned that lessons taken at the kitchen table were less effective than those in a classroom. Weathering one wave after another of the pandemic, and particularly Omicron, led to repeated schedule disruptions and reversions to remote/home learning. Early student test results show just how much childrens’ education has suffered during the pandemic.

            Standardized student assessment tracking in the U.S. was far more extensive during the pandemic and the Brookings Institution has reported lower levels of achievement, with younger children hit the hardest. Graduation rates dropped and fewer kids were pursuing post-secondary studies. It’s doubly difficult to identify and assess learning loss in Canada because our education authorities simply suspended provincial testing and, in many cases, final examinations.

Wilfrid Laurier University professor and researcher Kelly Gallagher-Mackay pinpointed the nub of the problem in Ontario and elsewhere: “we don’t have public data on how Ontario students are doing, so we are a lot more in the dark.” That’s problematic because “the risk with educational issues is that they can multiply if they’re not addressed,” she told The Toronto Star. It also has compounded effects: if students’ confidence or sense of preparedness have taken a hit, they may be more inclined to opt for programs they feel are easier, rather than more challenging ones that down the line provide more post-secondary opportunities.

Canada’s largest school district, Toronto District School Board (TDSB), produced Grade 1 Reading data that raised some alarms. TDSB data from 2020-21 for in-person schooling compared with 2018-19, reported students were 3 percentage points behind, while those in virtual schooling were 9 percentage points behind. The board is tracking student well-being and achievement, as part of its COVID-19 Pandemic Recovery Plan, to identify groups most impacted and where interventions are needed

An authoritative November 2021 American study of pandemic education impact, produced by Clare Halloran and a research team for the National Bureau of Educational Research, demonstrated how the shift in schooling mode to home learning adversely affected test scores tracked over 2020-21 across 12 different U.S. states. Student pass rates declined compared to prior years and that these declines were larger in districts with less in-person instruction. Passing rates in math declined by 14.2 percentage points on average, but somewhat less (10.1 percentage points smaller) for districts fully in-person. Reported losses in English language arts scores were smaller, but were significantly larger in districts with larger populations of disadvantaged students who were Black, Hispanic or eligible for free and reduced-price lunch programs.

Studies in Britain also show that the longer kids were in remote learning, the worse they fared. That’s particularly worrying in Canadian provinces like Ontario, where students lost out on about 27 weeks or more of in-person learning from March 2020 to the end of June 2022. Judging from the June 2021 Ontario Science Table study, Canadian provinces lost more days, averaging about 20 weeks, than similar jurisdictions in the U.S., U.K. or the European Union.

            The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is, as usual, a reliable bell-weather for K-12 education. Province-wide assessment was suspended completely in 2020-21 and then reinstituted in 2021-22.  The latest test results were embargoed until the last week of school in June 2022, posted on an obscure Nova Scotia Education website under PLANS, then released without any notice or comment. Putting them out at the tail end of the year all but guarantees that they escape public notice.

            Studying the latest installment of Nova Scotia provincial student results, covering the 2018-19 to 2021-22 period, it is easy to see why they are buried on an obscure public website.  Nothing was reported covering Grade 3, the critical first step in monitoring the acquisition of student competencies in reading, writing and mathematics. Instead, the province released Grade 6 results showing, as predicted, a pronounced achievement decline, most acute in mathematics and writing, but also affecting reading competencies and comprehension. 

            What are education authorities attempting to hide?  Grade 6 Mathematics results (2021-22) dropped to 64% achieving expectations, down 6 % from before the pandemic. In the case of Grade 6 Reading, some 71% of students met the standard, down 4% since 2018-19. Going back ten years to 2012-13, the achievement slide is actually gradual and continuing, perhaps worsened by some 22 weeks of COVID-related school closures from March 2020 to June of 2021.

From school district to district, student achievement in 2021-22 was also highly irregular, ranging in Grade 6 Mathematics from Halifax RCE (67%, down 6%) to TriCounty RCE (50%, down 14%). In Grade 6 Reading, the comparable figures were Halifax RCE (74%, down 3%) to TriCounty RCE (61%, down 6 %).

Some marked progress has been made in addressing the problem of underperformance among marginalized and racialized students. In Grade 6 Mathematics, for example, African Nova Scotian students’ scores have risen from 36% (2013-14) to 55% (2016-17) and then held firm at 54% (2019-20) before the pandemic.  For Indigenous students, Grade 6 Reading has risen from 64% (2013-14) to 65% (2016-17) and then reached 74% (2019-20), just 2% below the provincial mean score. 

            The declines in Grade 6 Mathematics and Reading in Nova Scotia post-pandemic are perhaps predictable. What is more concerning is the longer-term trend toward an “achievement slide,’ revealed starkly on publicly- reported provincial assessment results over the past decade. Grade 6 Mathematics scores, for example, have plummeted from 73% (2012-13) to 71% (2018-19) to 64% (2021-22), a drop of 9 points.  In Grade 6 Reading, the slide is gentler from 76% (2012-13) to 74% (2018-19) to 71% (2021-22).  In short, somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of all students are not functionally literate or numerate at the end of elementary school.

One of Canada’s leading international education experts, Paul Cappon, warned ten years ago that Canada was becoming “a school that does not issue report cards.”  Suspending student assessment during the pandemic, then re-instating tests on a limited basis is bad enough.  Holding-off on releasing student results until everyone is on the way out for the summer holidays suggests that Dr. Cappon’s prophecy has come to pass, even after the biggest educational disruption in our lifetime.

What was the full extent of the learning loss experienced by K-12 students over the past two-and-a-half years? How reliable are the initial assessments coming out of the United States, the UK, and the European Union states?  Why is it next-to-impossible to assess the pandemic impact on Canadian students?  By limiting student assessment, rationing the results, then issuing partial sets of results are Canadian school authorities cushioning the blow or merely deferring the day of reckoning?  

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Lagging Learning Recovery: Is Student Assessment Aversion the Source of the Problem?

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian K-12 education system is gradually regaining its consciousness after multiple shocks.  Three years ago, Ontario education occupied a bubble and the architects of its current school system were fond of routinely referring Ontario as “the learning province” with  a “world class system.”  Prominent Canadian school promoters who saw the COVID-19 education crisis as a golden opportunity to “build back better” with a focus on enhancing social and emotional learning are now beginning to confront the post-pandemic realities.

Now an Ontario education research report produced in April 2022 has dared to break with the official line.  “CANADA HAS BEEN A LAGGARD ON EDUCATIONAL RECOVERY” it proclaimed – and in capital letters. That report on “Educational Recovery” produced by the Laurier University Centre for Leading Research in Education spearheaded by Dr. Kelly Gallagher-Mackay confirmed what international education researchers, most notably Western University’s Dr. Prachi Srivastava, have known for some time. Venturing outside the Ontario-centric education world it’s clear that “other countries have invested far more than Canada in learning recovery and started sooner.”

Most of what Canadian educators know about COVID-19 school disruptions and “learning loss” come from evidence-based data research originating the United States, Britain, and the EU. So, it’s no surprise that the United States and the United Kingdom are way ahead of us in producing learning recovery strategies and programs.  The US has already allocated $2741/student (in Canadian dollars) and the UK $531/student, according to Britain’s Educational Policy Institute. Britain made its initial commitment in September 2020 and funding for learning recovery programs was flowing in the US by January 2021.  In comparison, Ontario has only committed $72/student divided up into support for learning recovery, special education and mental health.

The student data deficit was revealed for all to see in February 2022 in a very useful People for Education  pan-Canadian scan of Canadian K-12 COVID-related education plans conducted after two years of disrupted schooling. While all provinces and territories were found to have public health safety strategies for schools, few were engaged in “data collection” or had   anything approaching a vision or plan to manage, assess or respond to learning loss or the psych-social impact of mass school closures. None had allocated sufficient funding to prepare for post-pandemic recovery.

Why has Canada lagged behind in recognizing learning loss and getting its policy response act together? That’s not even a question raised in the report. The reason is self-evident to those familiar with Ontario’s educational gatekeepers, recognized stakeholders and researchers in that orbit: Most of the key education influencers and interest groups, particularly in Ontario, exhibit “student assessment aversion” and have resisted, for decades, system-wide student assessment aimed at monitoring and addressing learning gaps and shortfalls student achievement.  In normal times, it  passed unnoticed; but not now when we are facing a formidable learning recovery mission.

The Laurier University report is a credible piece of research, but it, too, came wrapped in what amounted to a politically-driven declaration. That “If I had 1.08 billion dollars” media release has to be one of the dumbest ever to accompany an education research report. Instead of addressing the absence of testing, data-gathering, and negligence in preparing recovery plans, it captured the collective “wish-list” funding appeals of the 34 system insiders assembled by Toronto-based People for Education as part of the background research.

Most of the “education leaders” invited to the January 2022 pre-report symposium were invited to “pitch interventions or approaches” – an open invitation to present familiar funding appeals and pet projects. The result was predictable – a panoply of the usual remedies, including more funding for student well-being, learning supports, supply teachers, psycho-social specialists, and equity initiatives. Almost crowded out on that list was the point of the whole exercise – launching “a renewed approach to educational data and evidence.”

The section of the report focusing on addressing the student data deficit is rife with contradiction. While there’s acknowledgement that “educational data” is now critical to addressing COVID-19 learning impacts, the proposed action plan is fuzzy and contradictory.  Collecting data may be desirable, but there was no consensus on which data or for what purpose. The University of Waterloo research of Scott Leatherdale is trotted out because his COMPASS study is “population-level, longitudinal data” youth public health study is conducted at a distance from the system.

What’s missing from the report is any reference whatsoever to the relevant research conducted on “learning loss” produced by OISE researcher Scott Davies and Janice Aurini, a colleague of Professor Leatherdale. When it comes to provincial testing, the report notes that some participants called for a “pause” or complete halt to the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) tests administered in grades 3, 6 and 9 in Ontario. That’s far from an endorsement of the one Ontario student assessment program capable of filling the data deficit identified as a critical policy issue.

Why is student assessment across the system still a bugaboo two years into an educational crisis with recognized adverse impacts upon student learning?  Is it a matter of ideologues opposed to provincial testing refusing to recognize the new realities? If “data collection” and “learning loss” is such a problem, can it be addressed without reinstituting provincial testing? Or is this essentially a smokescreen to stave off a day of reckoning when we actually see what COVID-19 school disruptions have done to the pandemic generation of students?

 

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