From the November 2024 Community and Belonging Survey
If curiosity kills, I’m on my deathbed as I review the results of our Community and Belonging Survey. With 90 participating schools involving 21,468 students, the opportunities to explore here are not small in number. Today, I’ll share just one little sliver of what intrigues me coming out of this project.
This survey included 4,820 Canadian students at 17 schools and 16,648 American students at 73 schools. When we did this survey two years ago, our conclusion was that kids are kids are kids, no matter which side of the border they’re on. What made a difference to overall satisfaction then – to sense of belonging, to emotional safety, to feeling respected and valued – all matched up perfectly between Canadian and American students. While we prepared full analysis reports for the two countries’ samples separately, in this respect, it was unnecessary. Our conclusions and recommendations did not vary between the two reports. Kids are kids are kids. What puts them in a happy place doesn’t care which side of the border you’re on. We’ll see what this year’s survey yields in the coming weeks.
This noted, there are differences in the total response groups between the two countries.
For example, Canadian students (at 34.9%) are much more likely to access outside tutoring than American students (at 21.8%). This caught my eye, so I dug deeper.
Here’s what I found: Canada is significantly more diverse (racially/culturally) than the USA. This diversity distinction applies both across society and to independent schools participating in this project. This distinction is unchanged from the 2022 survey.
Conducted just last month, among the current survey’s 48 closed-ended questions, only one was different for Canadian and American participants. Recognizing the different demographics and cultural conversations, we asked Canadian students to identify themselves in one of the following categories:
Black | 125 | 2.6% |
Indigenous | 35 | 0.7% |
Latin American | 110 | 2.3% |
White | 2024 | 42.4% |
Multi-racial | 374 | 7.8% |
East Asian | 1433 | 30.0% |
South Asian | 341 | 7.1% |
Southeast Asian | 55 | 1.2% |
West Asian | 97 | 2.0% |
Prefer not to respond | 93 | 1.9% |
Other | 92 | 1.9% |
Total Answers | 4779 |
For their part, American students were asked to identify themselves within one of the following categories:
Asian | 2143 | 12.9% |
Black | 1243 | 7.5% |
Hispanic/Latinx | 1020 | 6.1% |
Indigenous | 67 | 0.4% |
International | 120 | 0.7% |
Middle Eastern | 288 | 1.7% |
Multi-racial | 1247 | 7.5% |
Pacific Islander | 87 | 0.5% |
White | 10101 | 60.8% |
Other | 287 | 1.7% |
Total Answers | 16603 |
As an aside, I’ll add that, in both countries, coming up with agreeable categories was a bit of heavy lifting. It’s a sensitive topic with different schools in different places along the continuum of this conversation. In the end, life is full of compromises and we made executive decisions to come up with these two lists of categories. As Ricky Nelson sang in 1972, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”
While 38.3% of Canadian students described themselves as East Asian, South Asian, or Southeast Asian, the American figure for Asian students was just 12.9%. The small Canadian West Asian sample was left out of this comparison, as was the small American Middle Eastern sample.
How does this connect, you may ask, to the tutoring question? Asian families, most pointedly, East Asian families, are much more likely to engage outside tutoring for their children. This was true in the 2022 Community and Belonging Survey and it’s true with this 2024 iteration. In Canada, this distinction is more pronounced, prompting even more questions.
Canadian students of East Asian descent utilise outside tutoring at a rate of 45.8%. South Asians are at 34.6% and Whites at 28.6%.
While I find this fascinating, it doesn’t surprise me… and I expect it doesn’t surprise you either. Distinctions in outside tutoring exist in the States, but they’re not as profound, making me wonder why. Are American schools better at providing academic support? Not likely, but I don’t have the data to answer that question. Are Asian students in the States different, culturally, from Asian students in Canada? I suspect that our distinction in immigration patterns and policies make some difference on this front, but I don’t have the data to probe into that possibility.
Here's an angle of exploration that I did not see coming. Last week, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, the sequel to his first book from 25 years ago. In case you haven’t read it (you should), much of his discussion centres on the Magic Third. It’s about changes in outcomes sourced from changes in proportions.
As populations and sub-populations hit the Magic Third, things happen. As the proportion of women on boards hits one-third, for example, they begin to have meaningful influence as a group in making change to the corporate culture. While on one side, there’s the saying, “there’s strength in numbers,” on the other side, the shift in numbers sometimes results in what we call an epidemic. Gladwell treats this topic very well, covering issues as broad as crime, academic performance of minorities, and disease.
I wondered over the weekend if there was something in Gladwell’s exposition applicable to our study. So… we – my daughter Alana and I – crunched the numbers.
The overall proportions of Asian students in Canadian schools (38.3% compared to 12.9% in the States) provided a sample size more than adequate for this deep dive. As diversity continues to expand in the United States, it may not be unreasonable to anticipate our findings to hold for our southern neighbours (or is that neighbors?). As proportions continue to shift, and they will, a closer look may be warranted.
Here's what we found:
In short, as the Asian contingent (in particular the East Asian group) grew as a proportion of the total number of Canadian students at a school, usage of outside tutoring grew even more, disproportionately more. To be specific, in Canadian schools where the Asian population comprised less than one-third of the total, 36.7% of this sub-group utilized outside tutoring. When the Asian population comprised greater than one third, however, 46.9% of Asian students accessed outside tutoring. This is a profound difference, just within the Asian students.
Of particular interest, the very same increase in usage of tutoring is seen in non-Asian students. As the proportion of Asian students increases, not only does their own usage of tutoring increase in greater proportion, the same is true for non-Asians. For Whites, the usage of outside tutoring jumped from 24.9% to 34.1% when the Asian population became greater than one-third of the total.
We broke this shift apart for East Asians, South Asians, and Whites within these categories, finding that South Asian students were in the average range, closer to Whites than to East Asians, in proportionate usage of outside tutoring. Here’s what it looks like graphically.
What does it all mean? Good question. We know that there’s a cultural distinction in Canadian Asian families in favour of academic workload. That’s not news. What is news is that as their proportions in the population increase, their predilection for outside tutoring is not just greater – it’s contagious. Is this an example of keeping up with the Joneses? Is there a fear of being left behind? Are we about to see an explosion in usage of outside tutoring? Have we reached a tipping point?
Importantly, is there a third variable at play here that I’m missing? I remain open on this.
…………
What does this all mean to how we educate our children? I don’t have any policy answers to this question. I’m not an educator. I am just an interested party who spends all day looking at data in an effort to add value to conversations in education… in plain English.
Personally, I don’t see a great deal of benefit in outside tutoring. For individuals, it may add value but, in aggregate, it’s just not there. Among 36 rating-type measures in our survey, not one is higher for students who access outside tutoring. 35 of these 36 measures are, in fact, lower for students who access outside tutoring. The differences are not large, but they are consistent. Again, this is open to that unknown third variable. Even so, my suspicions don’t leave me favourably inclined.
Kids today, especially kids at independent schools, are over programmed by hard-driving Type A parents who want the very best for their children. What is the best for their children is the subject for another day. Suffice to say that kids need flop time. They also need diversity in learning experiences. Independent schooling prepares students well for academic pursuits beyond the necessary threshold. In the aggregate, we definitely don’t need to “kick it up another notch”. My fear is that we’re chasing this carrot well past its Best Before Date and our children are paying the price for it. Character and values, too often, take a back seat where they should be at the wheel. These pursuits (academics and character and values) are not mutually exclusive, but the clock only has 24 hours in each day.
The non-monetary price of outside tutoring, in my view, outweighs the benefits when kids are pressed to trade off the opportunity to “have a life” and related, to attain adequate sleep. We’ve spoken much in recent years on the need to attain adequate sleep and the need to engage in non-academic co-curriculars. These are, in truth, two of my favourite soapboxes, driven by and supported by almost three decades worth of data from our surveys. Outside tutoring, appropriately applied, may play a critical role in support of a particular child’s education. When imbalanced over-programming displaces engagement and/or appropriate levels of sleep, however, that’s another story altogether.
This is a conversation that needs actively to include parents who may not fully understand the implications of what they’re doing for and to their children. It’s admittedly a big boulder to push up a very steep hill… but I have a little blue train here, puffing away in a small village. Care to join me?
Kevin Graham (with Alana Graham)