With schools closed again, are N.L.'s kids falling behind? Here's what the experts say
CBC
Students across Newfoundland and Labrador have spent an unprecedented swath of the last two years learning from home at least part-time, as the pandemic approaches its third year.
No school means no recess, face-to-face socializing or in-person support. For children in Grade 6 and under, it also means a severely curtailed instruction period: just 90 minutes a day.
As announced by the Department of Education on Thursday, the education system will remain that way at least until mid-month as officials wait for the latest COVID-19 outbreak to subside.
But the province's reliance on virtual learning, according to global research over the last two years, may be holding those students back — and ultimately affecting us all — for decades to come.
Emerging evidence points to some significant shortfalls of remote learning. Perhaps the most quantifiable is a phenomenon called "learning loss," which undoes the gains made over a regular school year.
Learning loss is often seen during prolonged summer breaks, but studies around the world have found it's also occurring throughout the pandemic, despite the implementation of virtual classes.
In one study in Brazil, remote learners soaked up only 27.5 per cent of the knowledge in-class students did. Other studies found kids were, indeed, falling behind by margins of several months in the areas of reading and math.
Those losses aren't temporary, argues Prachi Srivastava, who teaches education and global development at Western University in London, Ont.
"We know that there are significant harms at an individual and a societal level," Srivastava said.
"The best education economists in the world have predicted that school closures even of … 14 to 16 weeks can result in a six per cent GDP loss.
"In a country like Canada, that is the equivalent of $95 billion. It is not small."
A Royal Society of Canada report, published in August last year, conveyed more dire news for virtual-only systems, suggesting that logging into class from home did little more for educational outcomes than simply skipping school altogether.
A systematic review of curricula around the world "concluded that the spring 2020 school closures negatively affected achievement, particularly among younger students and less affluent students," the report said.
"Indeed, their results suggest that the amounts of learning that arose from remote instruction was not very different from that which students can acquire without any instruction."
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch is looking for 50 substitute bus drivers, and it'll be recruiting at three job fairs on Saturday, June 8. The job fairs are located at the Atlantic Superstore in Montague, Royalty Crossing in Charlottetown, and the bus parking lot of Three Oaks Senior High in Summerside. All three run from 9 a.m. until noon. Dave Gillis, the director of transportation and risk management for the Public Schools Branch, said the number of substitute drivers they're hiring isn't unusual. "We are always looking for more. Our drivers tend to have an older demographic," he said.