Material Circumstances and Pandemic-Related Education Choices

Parents have faced difficult decisions regarding their children’s educational plans throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the findings of an original survey of parents from four Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec), this paper examines the influence of parents’ material circumstances on decision-making around schooling in September 2020 and June 2021. Our findings suggest that both income and material security played important roles in parent’s decisions to enroll their children in remote/in-person education and public/non-public education throughout the 2020–2021 school year, although there are noteworthy differences between the September 2020 and June 2021 periods. These findings have important implications both for the emerging cross-national research that examines the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated socioeconomic divisions when it comes to school choice, but also for the broader comparative literature on rising levels of educational stratification along socioeconomic lines and the effects of such stratification.