The solution to all this missed school? Bring back Grade 13
Students have lost roughly a third of their school year. That will have consequences unless we buy them more class time
Since we’ve been out of school for a while, our math might be a little rusty. But let’s try some anyway.
By the end of this week, it will have been 10 weeks since students and teachers were last in class. That’s 50 teaching days. Minus the March break, it’s 45. Throw in a couple snow days and four or five strike action days from earlier on the calendar and we’re back up to 50. Then, add the five weeks remaining that were cancelled on Tuesday, and it’s 75 days — give or take — students will be missing when all is said and done.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. The Ontario government mandates that 194 days is the minimum number required to complete an academic year. Yet, after all those reductions, kids this year will get only about 119. So what’s the solution? Bring back Grade 13.
Just for a few years. Just long enough for the students in Grades 7 through 11 right now to have a real opportunity to get caught up and not be paying the price for something that was never their fault.
Crazy? Maybe. But a lot less crazy than the current destined-for-failure plan.
The answer now is to offer online courses, hope kids take advantage, give them report cards with the marks they had on March 13 and push them through to the next grade in the fall. This learning-athome model that’s been cobbled together under fire is the best we have right now, but it’s hit and miss. Probably more miss than hit.
“There are some classes where I had five of 22 kids logging in,” says St. Thomas More Secondary School Grade 12 guidance counsellor, Michele Vesprini. “There is a senior math class where the whole class is participating.”
Chatting with other high school teachers, the anecdotal evidence is similar. Some students are working hard from home. Many have checked out and appear more than happy to take the grade they had on March 13 as their final mark. But what happens in the fall?
We could let the stragglers who miss out on a third of their year’s education reap what they sow. If they stumble, it’s their own fault. The material was there for them if they’d been diligent enough to use it. If they choose not to, that’s on them.
That’s tempting because it’s all true. But imagine class resuming and teachers now having to spend so much of their time bringing all those who are now hopelessly lost up to speed, leaving the hard workers twiddling their thumbs and wasting their time.
Now they’re being penalized for being productive.
“Every grade level is going to be playing catch up,” Vesprini says. That scenario offers no winners. So yes, we could try to fix things by failing these students and make them take their year over. Except educators don’t favour such things these days. We could let them fall through the cracks, but that seems antithetical to everything the system is supposed to be about. We could make everyone take an exam at the end of June and require those who come up short to do their learning over the summer. Good luck with that.
Or we could add the lost semester plus whatever catch-up time is needed — let’s round it off to a year — at the back end of high school. Grade 13.
“I don’t think it’s an insane idea,” Vesprini says.
Grade 9 students would advance to Grade 10 where they’d solidify the foundations they should have gained this semester before launching into traditional Grade 10 stuff. Same with Grade 10 to 11, and 11 to 12. If there’s a student who’s far ahead of the rest of the class, he or she could be advanced to the next grade.
It’s simply taking the voluntary victory lap and making it standard for everyone. For a few years, anyway. Buying everyone time to catch up. It wouldn’t require a whole new curriculum, just a tweak on the current one.
It matters. A 747 pilot who needs two kilometres of runway to land would never think there’s be no harm in attempting a touchdown at a runway only two-thirds that length. That would be insane. These distances have been established by experts who presumably know what they’re talking about. Just like the experts who say those 194 days are needed to cover the curriculum.
Suggesting we can lop off a third of that without causing harm would be too scathing an indictment of the system to contemplate. How flabby and ineffectual would the curriculum have to be for that to be true? That’s far more troubling than the idea of attaching an extra year at the end to compensate for this issue that was never requested or expected.
There’s a good argument to be made that we never should have eliminated Grade 13 almost 20 years ago.
There’s an even better argument to be made that we should bring it back today.