What prompts a teenager to leave school early, without having basic qualifications? Canadian researchers Éric Dion and Véronique Dupéré suspected that there had to be more than a lack of parental support, socioeconomic gaps, and limited institutional resources for students with learning difficulties, and so they set out to verify this by studying groups of students. young people from Quebec, a province where the early school leaving rate is 17%, almost the same as in Spain (17.3%). And indeed they conclude, in two articles that they have published as main authors between 2017 and last July, that there is a critical moment, during the last months before leaving school, in which the fact of live some disturbing and stressful event, and do it in an environment where abandonment is very common and, therefore, perfectly acceptable.
“It has been emphasized a lot that a person leaves the classrooms because they carry a series of problems for years. However, we have found that half of the secondary school students who gave up their studies had a smooth trajectory. That is why we think that there are events that influence a short time before making this decision ”, explains Dion, professor of Education at the University of Quebec in Montreal. The authors referred to them as the "discreet defectors."
In 2017, Dion and Dupéré - a professor of psychoeducation at the University of Montreal - showed in an investigation that 40% of a group of Quebecois adolescents who had dropped out of high school had experienced a major stressful event in the previous three months. Only a small part of these events (one in four) had to do with school performance, the rest were conflicts with other classmates or with teachers, changes in school, family crises, love breakups and even legal problems (as a defendant but also as a victim) or health. A few days ago, Dion and Dupéré completed the analysis with the publication of an article in The Journal of Educational Psychology in which they explained that dropping out of school can also be caused by “social contagion”.
Some academics had already pointed out the impact of a sibling or friend quitting the classroom. However, Dion and Dupéré decided to take into account these two actors in greater depth, but also the romantic partners to see what influence they could have and also know how long this critical period lasts. To do this, they worked with a sample of 545 students from 12 high schools in Montreal and its surroundings. Only one in four young people who had dropped out of school had all the members of their environment studying.
"When it appears as a possibility"
Dion affirms that the critical point occurs "when the idea arises that dropping out of school may be okay, when it appears as a possibility." The academic specifies: “It is not a decision made based on a long-term analysis. You may think that your friend no longer has school responsibilities, he got a job and is not doing badly, but without going any further ”. Dupéré adds: “In adolescence you are more sensitive to your surroundings. Researchers in other areas had already used the concept of 'social contagion' in young people. For example, in criminal acts. We have verified that it also occurs with school dropouts ”.
In their conclusions, Canadians indicate that the more cases of school dropouts there are in the social circle of an adolescent, the more likely it is that they will follow the same path. They also found that the critical period to "imitate" these behaviors was less than one year. The article mentions that the most numerous cases of "contagion" occur between friends, since the network of friends is generally the most abundant. But the influence can be stronger on the part of a brother or a sentimental partner.
Canada has a school dropout rate of 11%. Ontario is the province with the lowest rate (7%) and Quebec, where Dion and Dupéré investigated, has the highest, that 17% similar to that of Spain. A figure that makes it the country in the European Union with the highest rate, without having reached the 15% target set by the EU-2020 Strategy. Croatia has the lowest figure, below 3%. It should be noted that there are significant differences between the Spanish communities. It is enough to show the gap between the Balearic Islands (24.2%) and the Basque Country (6.7%).
Álvaro Choi, professor of economics of education at the University of Barcelona, comments that, despite significant progress over decades, the high rate in Spain is due to factors such as the educational and socioeconomic level of households; also to the very structure of the educational system: “For example, the obligation of having to pass all the subjects at the end of ESO in order to be able to take vocational training cycles constituted an obstacle for the maintenance of students within the educational system. The lower development and prestige of vocational training cycles does not help either. Another element would be the abuse of grade repetition as a universal recipe to 'improve' the performance of students with learning difficulties ”. He adds about the Spanish case: "In recent decades it has been observed that the rate of early school leaving increases in periods of economic growth, the opposite happening in times of crisis." This is due, according to Choi, to the emergence of job opportunities for workers with low levels of qualification.
Orientation work
Regarding how to reduce the “contagion” of school dropout, Dupéré points out: “There are existing tools that can be useful. For example, let's think about interventions after a suicide attempt, where people talk to the environment. We could do the same with desertion ”. Choi emphasizes: "The work of guiding teachers and, if there are any, school counselors, is especially relevant in environments where positive educational references are scarce."
According to experts, school dropouts could increase significantly as a result of the pandemic. “We are facing an unprecedented situation and uncertainty is fertile ground for leaving school. Some research already gives us clues. For example, many young people with learning disabilities find it hard to start the school year after the holidays. This is a driving factor. On the other hand, there are pull factors, like when one of your siblings drops out of school. All of this can be amplified with covid-19. Educational institutions must make an additional effort in these times ”, says Dupéré.
For Choi, the pandemic has had a negative effect on all students, although not in a homogeneous way. “The impact on students from households with fewer resources and a lower educational level has been more pronounced. In turn, there has been great diversity between educational centers when implementing online education . Therefore, this pandemic has most likely increased the educational gap by socioeconomic level. It should be remembered that students with a lower socioeconomic level already had, before the pandemic, a greater risk of early school leaving ”, she says.
Choi considers it serious that compensatory measures have not yet been vigorously proposed for the most vulnerable students. “It has been chosen to minimize the repetition of the grade, and it is good that this has been the case, but it is insufficient. If we do not reduce, and soon, the learning gap, aggravated by the pandemic, a good part of the most vulnerable students runs a high risk of leaving the education system ”, he adds.
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