The prolonged closure of schools due to the strike will cause learning delays and compromise the validity of ministerial tests, an expert has warned.
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“You can’t say that missing 20 days of class out of 180 has no impact on people’s learning. We might as well say that in Quebec, we are going to take away 20 days of class from everyone each year, and that there will be no problem!” said the psychologist and specialist in academic success, Dr.r Egide Royer.
However, if negotiations do not conclude in the coming days, students could find themselves deprived of much more than 20 days of school. As of Thursday, establishments whose teachers are members of the FAE will have been closed for 18 days, which already represents 10% of a school year.
And in the scenario where classes do not resume until after the holiday break, students will have spent almost as much time at home as during the summer vacation (7 weeks versus 8).
Even without getting to this point, it will already be difficult, if not impossible, to catch up on all the material that was not covered during the days already lost, according to Mr. Royer.
“There are elements of content in certain courses where we will place less importance. This is what we did during the pandemic: we focused more on essential learning as we had lost weeks of school, he explained. It’s a bit of the same phenomenon, exacerbated by the fact that this time, there was no distance learning. There’s nothing, it’s closed.”
This situation is all the more worrying as it risks accentuating the gaps between students, because the weakest will have more difficulty catching up, worries the psychologist.
“Students are not all equal when it comes to school closures. When you have money and you hire a tutor at home […]it’s not the same as if you are in a disadvantaged environment and you don’t have the money to pay for tutoring,” he lamented.
An aggravating factor is that some students are more affected than others by the strike. Those who attend private school have not missed any class time, while students whose teachers are affiliated with the FAE have missed more days than the others, a state of affairs that will cause problems when school time trials of the ministry will have come.
“In principle, ministerial exams are standard exams, which assume that everyone has had 180 days of school. We are going to have a problem,” he said.
To repair the broken pots, the Dr Royer is of the opinion that it will be necessary to plan educational activities next summer for the many young people who will then need additional support and to prevent the weakest students from being left behind. And before the next negotiations, he concluded, the services offered to young people with severe disabilities must be recognized as an essential service.