As someone who has been sounding off on all sorts of educational issues for over a decade now, it is not uncommon for some odd and interesting opportunities to come across my desk from time to time. I suppose that is the price one pays for, well, sounding off.
So when my phone rang this past July with an offer to speak at a conference in Toronto, I was not entirely unready to accept. What I was entirely unready for, however, was to find myself surrounded by a group of passionate and engaging advocates whose politics and positions, it turns out, were pretty far away from my own.
The conference, entitled The Global Summit of the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post-Pandemic) was put on by an organization called The Institute for 21st Century Questions which is headed up by Irvin Studin, an academic and editor in chief of Global Brief magazine. Studin has a long and impressive dossier of academic achievements, and toyed briefly with a run to become the leader of the federal conservative party in early 2020.
He is also connected with the Canada Strong and Free Network, a right of center think tank that aligns itself with the likes of The Fraser Institute and Parents for Choice in Education to name a few.
Did I mention politics pretty far from my own?
Obviously, it wasn’t politics that drew me to say “Yes” to Studin’s offer to speak, but rather the topic of conversation. Studin had managed to gather a wide range of voices from an impressive array of countries to come to Toronto to talk about an issue he refers to as “Third Bucket Kids”.
Studin’s premise is relatively simple. During COVID, in what Studin calls “the largest-ever simultaneous, largely improvised policy move in history”, schools right across the planet shut down. Once schools switched to online learning, Studin describes students as being divided into three categories, or “buckets”.
The “First Bucket” students were able to adapt quite well. When schools reopened, they re-engaged with their learning as seamlessly as was possible after the pandemic. The “Second Bucket” students were less engaged for a variety of reasons. However, once schools reopened, these students also re-engaged, although perhaps less successfully than their first bucket peers.
However, for Studin, the real failure of the post-pandemic education efforts lay in the abject inability of systems world-wide to find and support “Third Bucket” kids. These were students who, for one reason or another, completely disengaged from the system once schools went online, and simply never returned.
In order to address this issue, The Worldwide Commission to Educate all Kids (Post Pandemic) was formed. The commission included delegates from dozens of countries, and boasted some fairly recognizable names from here in Canada including the likes of Lloyd Axworthy, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Audrey McLaughlin, former leader of the federal NDP, and Susan Aglukark, Inuit singer/ songwriter. The group began formal meetings in 2021 and came up with several key goals to address what they saw as an “educational catastrophe”.
The first is to raise awareness to the issue of third bucket children, which, according to the commission, number in the hundreds of millions world-wide. They also want jurisdictions to immediately survey their nominal rolls to find these children, with the ultimate goal of reintegrating them back into schools. Finally, they want to ensure schools never close in this manner again, and to work with jurisdictions to help ensure excellence in education “in preparation for the demands of the 21st century.”
Those last two points almost caused me to politely decline Studin’s offer. I have made no secret over the years of my disdain for think tanks that tell schools how to “prepare” students for the future, and I am on record as supporting school closures during the pandemic.
I can’t imagine I will ever change my mind on think-tanks, but when it comes to school closures, I may have a bit more wiggle room. Here in Nova Scotia, for example, ventilation and ability to distance were pretty major sticking points. If schools of the future were built with such contingencies in mind, I could, perhaps, get behind that particular stance.
Where I have no issue in standing up and cheering the commission’s efforts are in regards to the first three points.
The numbers presented at the conference were staggering. According to Shantha Sinha, former Chairperson of the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights in India, that country has an estimated 32 million third bucket children. Fiona M. Kiggundu, Executive Director of the Project Princess Initiative in Uganda, shared estimates that somewhere in the vicinity of 55% of school aged children did not return to formal education after the lockdowns. Canute Fagan, a Dean of Discipline in Jamaica reported similar numbers, and spoke of how, post pandemic, officials went door-to-door, yard-to-yard to find children who had stopped attending during the pandemic in order to bring them back into schools.
If the commission’s numbers are accurate (and I have no reason to believe they are not) then every single jurisdiction on the planet lost students during the pandemic; students who were able to easily disengage from school during online learning and simply never returned.
The obvious question for Nova Scotians is “Where are ours?”
Prior to winging off to Toronto, I did some preliminary research into our own public education numbers, and could find no evidence that we had any third bucket students. Enrollment rates remain consistent, our drop out rates did not spike during COVID, and even comparing year over year data, (i.e. number of students in grade 10 one year versus number of students in grade 11 the next) I could find no pattern to suggest our system had suffered the same fate as others.
However, enrollment numbers never tell the whole story. They are digits, not children. As well, Nova Scotia has seen unprecedented population growth over the past few years, which may have hidden the trend. If we lost one hundred kids to “third bucket syndrome”, but gained three hundred due to population growth, enrollment increases could reflect a false positive. Considering the widespread nature of the issue, it would be the height of hubris for us to think we escaped unscathed.
The facts are this. COVID happened. Schools shut down. Students disengaged. Some never came back.
I find myself wondering to what extent we have tried to find them.
frostededucation 