The Digital Divide on Parental School Choice: A Comparative Analysis of Post-Pandemic Trends

• In Event: Education and the impact of digital interventions on children: digital libraries, cultural identity, and future trends

Proposal

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous Canadian parents are experiencing exacerbated economic hardships. Despite the COVID-related financial support the Canadian government provided, it is becoming increasingly difficult for materially insecure families to remain in the public education system, and homeschooling is the preferred educational method for most parents who have withdrawn from nearby public schools as knowledge can be accessed more easily in the digital age (Ventrella & Cotnam-Kappel, 2023). Due to the differences in family backgrounds in this digital parenting of school choice, parental income and educational attainment have a significant impact on digital parenting readiness, further compounding difference in children's access to public education (Bosetti et al., 2017; Yoon, 2019; Ventrella & Cotnam-Kappel, 2023). By way of contrast, China's education market shifted during the pandemic towards parallel marketization and knowledge commodification (Chen, 2023). Although the national education law stipulates that all children between the ages of 6 and 14 can receive nine years of free and compulsory education in a nearby public school (He & Huang, 2021), the tension between social isolation after the pandemic and concerns about the interactions of online school triggered parents' school choices (Zhang, 2020). There is a leading tendency for more parents to turn to private tutoring as compared to public education (Guo et al., 2018; Han et al., 2022).

Current research on school choice heavily relies on the pre-pandemic situations, which leads to the fact that researchers may not be fully aware of where the parents’ emerging considerations and sense of belonging come from in digitalized school exposition (Liu, 2014; Xiang et al., 2018; Yoon & Lubienski, 2017).

My proposed research questions focus on this niche area where there is a looming research gap: (1) What contextual factors do Canadian and Chinese parents consider when making school choice decisions following the pandemic? (2) What are the impacts of trending competitive and complementary education markets on the public education system in the post-pandemic era?    

To answer these questions, I plan to conduct this research project in two phases using a mixed-methods case study approach. The second phase will be sequential based on the first phase. For the first phase, I will design an online survey for Toronto, Canada and Shanghai, China, respectively aimed at collecting information about the combination of factors Canadian and Chinese parents consider when choosing a school in the wake of the pandemic. Thematic analysis will be conducted using NVivo software, focusing on device and internet access, digital skills and parental inequalities in school choice empowerment. This will help to confirm whether the discourse on school choice after the pandemic corresponds to the anticipation of the process as identified through interviews in the second phase. The second phase of the project consists of 28 semi-structured one-hour qualitative interviews with parents in Toronto, Canada, and Shanghai, China, selected from the survey respondents. Both cities have the highest migrant populations in their respective countries. Half of the interviews will be with parents in Toronto, Canada, who have chosen to keep their children out of the local public education system due to digital impacts, and the other half will be with parents in Shanghai, China who have given up the public education system due to digital impacts.

I utilize two theoretical frameworks to address the research questions. One is spatial capital as an analytical tool through which I examine how parents are capturing the appropriation and accumulation of spatial control that is unequally distributed by social class (Barthon & Monfroy, 2010). This will help me understand how groups of parents in the same region who make school choice choices have different levels of resources in terms of positioning information. The other is Jonathan Baron's (2008) search-inference framework to examine the interdependence between evaluating evidence, life circumstances, and parental beliefs concerning school choice.

Through identifying school choice complexities in post-pandemic Canada and China, my research can contribute timely insights for policy and curricular reforms in public education as opposed to the challenges stemming from the evolving shift towards privatization and marketization in the global landscape (Yoon, 2023).

Author

• Liwei Liao, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education OISE, University of Toronto