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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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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