Paul W. Bennett is the director of Schoolhouse Institute and the author of The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools.
Recent calls to cancel March break in Ontario have caused a furor, especially inside the school system. One of the province’s top doctors, Dr. Paul Roumeliotis, touched off the frenzied public debate back in late January when he claimed that this year’s March school break should be cancelled in order to prevent a postholiday spike in COVID-19 cases.
Calling for the cancellation of March break is anything but popular, but Dr. Roumeliotis has brought a vitally important issue to the fore – the need to make better use of the approaching March break downtime. While cancelling holidays sounds punitive, it is, in fact, the opportune time to offer “catch-up academy” programs, preferably in-person, to students struggling mightily to make up for lost learning in our school systems.
COVID-19 news: Updates and essential resources about the pandemic
As Eastern Ontario’s medical officer of health, Dr. Roumeliotis’s advice carries considerable weight, and it prompted Ontario’s Education Minister Stephen Lecce to consider the proposal and its merits. The idea had barely come out of their mouths before two Ontario teacher union leaders, the OSSTF’s Harvey Bischof and ETFO’s Sam Hammond, summarily dismissed any such plan as a tone-deaf response that ignored the plight of classroom teachers still reeling from a series of educational upheavals and abrupt schedule changes. The Ontario government is expected to make a decision about delaying or cancelling March Break later this week.
The idea is not as outlandish as it sounds, especially when you consider students’ learning losses. Students in K-12 schools in many of Ontario’s major metropolitan school districts have just missed six more weeks of regular in-school schooling, in addition to the loss of three months last spring.
Missing that much in-person schooling has to have some impact on student learning, especially for those already struggling to keep up because of learning challenges, sociocultural disadvantages or language barriers. Yet, sadly, the extent of what’s been dubbed the “COVID slide” has been largely undiagnosed and poorly researched here in Canada.
A McKinsey & Company research summary published in December, 2020, provided reasonably reliable estimates of the total potential learning loss to the end of the school year in June, 2021. While initial American statistical forecast scenarios of massive learning loss have not materialized, the cumulative impact is still substantial, especially in mathematics, with students on average likely to lose five to nine months of learning by year’s end. Among Black students in the U.S., the learning loss in mathematics averages six months to a year. All students are suffering losses, but it’s more acute among those who entered the pandemic with the most disadvantages.
International research corroborates the early American projections and demonstrates conclusively that school closings contributed to an actual COVID slide. Studies conducted in September and November of 2020 in the United Kingdom and Belgium, where students missed two to three months of in-person school, confirm that students in the middle grades have suffered learning losses in mathematics and language, and writing skills have actually gone backward.
Canadian research on learning loss is hard to unearth, but there have been two Alberta research studies. Conducted by University of Alberta educational psychology professor George Georgiou, these studies demonstrate that young readers are lagging behind the learning curve in the wake of the pandemic.
A properly designed and implemented catch-up academy program might well be what students, teachers and families need right now. It would also be aligned with the best evidence-based research on what works in closing the knowledge and learning gap after lengthy school disruptions. The best option would be to have such programs delivered by regular teachers in schools, but failing that, the responsibility would fall, by default, to tutors hired by parents.
Supplementing learning time offered over weekends or during student holiday breaks is one of three recommended responses to cumulative learning loss. What works best is high-dosage, one-on-one or small-group tutoring tied directly to helping students master subject content in math and reading. When that’s not possible, the next-best thing is catch-up programs during holiday breaks offered by highly trained teachers who provide subject-specific small-class instruction, particularly intensive math instruction. Such an approach is preferable to patchwork remedial efforts undertaken by tired and exhausted teachers on top of their regular teaching assignments.
The COVID slide is real, and it’s time to consider catch-up programs designed to shore up students’ educational foundations in mathematics, reading and writing. Eleven months into the pandemic, we need some constructive innovation to provide the pandemic generation with more focused learning-loss recovery programs.
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