Good afternoon, everyone.
Thanks for having me.
I'm representing Focus Education Consulting today. It's what I do. I'm an education consultant as well as a teacher. I'm also volunteering with the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic), where I represent Canada. We currently have 50 countries involved in this commission. In our conversations when we refer to the kids who are living through this pandemic, we look at them using three buckets of schooling.
The first bucket is the physical classroom. That's the traditional classroom where kids usually spend most of their time. Then the virtual, online hybrid version is bucket two. Then there's bucket three: no longer in school.
The commission right now is focusing on bucket three, students living in that bucket where they are no longer in school. Right now the commission estimates that the number of students living in the third bucket is up to 500 million worldwide. More specifically, there are 10 million to 20 million in the U.S.; 60 million to 70 million in India; 24 million in Pakistan; three million to four million in Colombia; and here in Canada, the Institute for 21st Century Questions, the think tank connected to the commission, estimates there are 200,000 kids living in the third bucket between grades 1 and 2, which is about five million in total.
How did we come to this?
When I talk about this I try to paint the picture of a school experience pre-COVID. All of us take ourselves back, and I try to go there as well in this discussion, walking to school in the morning, taking the bus, showing up, standing in front of your school and then the bell rings. There are students who enter their classrooms for first period. Some people go to the study hall; some people go to the gym to work out and some people walk right through to the back of the school and exit. What's common, what's shared with [Technical difficulty--Editor] different experiences is a school space.
What we've moved away from because of COVID and the mandated restrictions is that space, the schools. Schools provide beyond just the sports and the relationships and the learning. These are commonly understood as to why kids come to school, but kids also come to school to avoid school. A huge bunch of kids come to that space and spend most of their time in avoidance and disruption and trying to find their place within a space that doesn't really welcome them.
What that allows for, however, is teachers, admin staff, anyone working in the school, friends, peers, an opportunity re-engage them because they're in a space and there are some barriers to leaving. We must understand students leave school mentally, spiritually, way before they leave physically. Online learning has made that speed of exit grow exponentially.
[Technical difficulty--Editor] classroom and they're in Mr. Mitchell's class. There's a tab with Mr. Mitchell's class and there's a tab a student will have for whatever former freedom they had. It could be gaming, it could be chatting, it could be exploring a new career. Now all they have to do when they're in Mr. Mitchell's class—and they don't have a relationship with me—is build walls first. For example, a student may be having a test in my class. The Internet goes down and they can't continue the test. They log back in, and because they don't have a relationship with me they feel they can't ask me for more time. Because of that they say that anxiety builds up. They say either they ask the teacher or they escape through this tab.
They close the Mr. Mitchell tab. They can't deal with that stress. They're not going to catch up. They'll never have a chance. They close it and they open that tab and they escape. That's the frictionless exit they experience nowadays because of the online space and the way the system has revisited online learning repeatedly over the last year and a half.
Pre-COVID, there were lots of advantages in coming to school. We had students who were engaged and who are still engaged. We had students who were “attenders”. They attended school, they showed up for class, but they really weren't really engaged. We also have the avoiders.
The third bucket is a combination of students who were avoiding and students who were on the margins, labelled as “behavioural”. Those students are often racialized—Black, indigenous, people of colour—and on the margins. They are excluded from school for behavioural reasons. Their behaviours don't follow the norm in terms of how they behave in class or how they behave in the halls. There's a slow-streaming push-out mechanism that doesn't allow them to be part of the classroom or maybe the school. They may be sent to a special school. Then there's an early exit.
That has been fast-tracked because of the easy exit due to online learning. We are seeing that grow at exponential rates. We now have 200,000 kids, and growing, in that population. Because of the recent closure, my concern is for the students that I usually work with and see walking around in school. That energy of avoidance and resistance is no longer there. It's an online space now, and you either fit in or you don't. There's no resistance. There's no place for them to sit. I don't see them in the halls and I don't see them online. I feel that even more kids, beyond those kids, are being excluded, and for various reasons.