Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY Inc.
by Wayne Campbell
“Learning is never lost, though it may not always be “found” on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement.” – Rachael Gabriel, Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Connecticut.
Former President Barack Obama called for increasing learning time and his administration gave almost 1,800 low-performing schools extra money, called School Improvement Grants. Most chose to lengthen the school day, generally by an hour, above the national average of six and a half hours.
But the extra time was coupled with other school reforms, such as teacher evaluations, which made it generally impossible to tell how much of a difference the extra time alone was making. One 2012 review of studies on learning time found that the extra time often didn’t produce academic benefits for students and when it did, the benefits were small.
“The findings in the literature indicate that simply adding time is insufficient,” the authors at Child Trends, a nonprofit organisation, concluded. (The Wallace Foundation, which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, commissioned this research review.)
The 38 studies in the review that focused on longer days or longer years sometimes found an academic gain for just one group of students, for example, third graders, or for just one subject. One study found higher achievement in science. One didn’t. However, when academic benefits were found, the researchers noticed that low-income and low-achieving students were more likely to reap them.
Researchers need to get a better handle on the amount of extra learning time needed to make a difference. Perhaps five minutes of extra time a day won’t do much but two hours might. Three hours could be too exhausting and counterproductive. Adding five days might be worthless but 30 days could really help a student catch up.
Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
Given the new norm of physical distancing many of us have been struggling with issues regarding our state of mental wellness. Children exposed to the traumatic experiences of a pandemic can suffer severe psychological and social consequences. Unfortunately, there is no data in Jamaica for us to gauge the emotional impact the COVID19 pandemic continues to have on our students.
This avenue of emotional scaffolding is clearly one in which the government through the Education Ministry can work to expand as we seek to have schools reopen face to face for the 2021/2022 academic year. Save the Children states psychosocial support helps maintain a continuum of family and community-based care and support during and after an emergency and prevents immediate or long-term mental health disorders.
Psychosocial support involves a range of care and support interventions. It includes care and support offered by caregivers, family members, friends, neighbours, teachers, health workers, and community members on a daily basis. It also extends and includes care and support offered by specialised psychological and social services.
According to the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) children often lack access to mental health and psychosocial support, with potentially devastating long-term effects. Anxiety, depression and other stress-related problems threaten their ability to grow up healthy and happy.
Violence can have a lifelong toll on the emotional health, physical health and social development of a student. If exposed in early childhood, the experience can even hamper a child’s brain development. For the most part students at the early childhood level do not have ready access to mental health support.
Guidance counsellors are not attached to most schools at the early childhood level. The student guidance counsellor ratio is unacceptable even at the primary level. Students with a compromised emotional state cannot learn.
Disrupting Learning Poverty
For those of us without trust funds or the proverbial golden spoon a solid education was the only way guaranteed for upward social mobility. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic has eroded almost an entire generation of learning and as such we must do all that is possible to stem and recover this educational loss.
A collaborative approach is needed to rectify the learning gaps experienced by so many of our students. Minister Fayval Williams in her sectoral presentation to Parliament mentioned plans to introduce an extra lesson programme to be financed by the State. This programme will positively impact all students regardless of their socio-economic background.
According to a World Bank report, following the massive school closures, as of February 2021, about 120 million school-age children had already lost or were at risk of losing a full academic year of face-to-face education, with serious educational impacts, according to the report, “Acting now to protect the human capital of our children: The costs of and response to the COVID-19 pandemic impact on the education sector in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
According to the World Bank report, learning poverty, defined as the percentage of 10-year-olds unable to read and understand a simple text, may have grown by more than 20 per cent from 51 per cent to 62.5 per cent. This could be equivalent to roughly 7.6 million additional “learning poor” primary education school-age children in Latin America and the Caribbean region.
Alternative Approaches to Normal
Undoubtedly, our students have suffered immense learning loss resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The online modality was offline for a significant number of Jamaican students. Education Minister Fayval Williams recently disclosed that schools have had no contact with approximately 120,000 students over the past year, due to the pandemic, despite the deployment of mixed modalities to deliver lessons.
“They are not engaged online, they’re not watching lessons on TV, they are not listening to the radio, they are not opening their books. They are not in contact with their schools,” she told a virtual post-Cabinet press briefing. In a recent radio interview, Education Minister Fayval Williams reported that approximately 61,000 students have joined the National Summer School Programme at the end of the first week.
The numbers regarding students participating in the National Summer School Programme are very encouraging as of the end of the first week. Students enrolled in the National Summer School Programme are engaged in both face-to-face and online modalities. The 2021/2022 academic year should not be business as per usual.
All stakeholders must join forces at arriving at workable solutions which will re-engage so many of our students who have not had much if any educational engagement in over a year. Sacrifices must be made for the good of the Jamaican State.
One can only imagine that our already high crime rate will worsen if we do not stop the hemorrhaging regarding educational losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perhaps now is the time for us to interrogate the one size fits all approach to standardised tests. It is critical that policy makers are flexible in ensuring that the curriculum is responsive to and in alignment with the needs of the society. Now is perhaps the time to ensure that the society work towards having a curated curriculum where students are met on their level.
It is only by ensuring we take this holistic approach that we will foster and develop among our students a long-standing love of learning. In many circles the notion of returning to normal is often spoken about. However, the coronavirus pandemic has showed us that there are alternative approaches to normal. The COVID-19 pandemic has upended classrooms and learning spaces.
The impact of COVID-19 has fallen unevenly on the nation’s children and has exposed and reinforced the learning disparities among the social classes in the society.
The time to re-shape education in a post-pandemic world is now.
There is no comparison to being in a classroom. In the words of Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy-Secretary-General, we are facing a human crisis unlike any we have experienced and our social fabric and cohesion is under stress.
Wayne Campbell is an educator and social commentator with an interest in development policies as they affect culture and or gender issues. waykam@yahoo.com
