Five education reports came out over the past few months, and together they sketch a clear picture of where students stand. An Ontario special-education audit. The newest EQAO scores. An American study on skipped school. A national teacher survey. And a tutoring trial honest enough to say where it came up empty. Five different subjects. One question kept surfacing in all of them: how are our kids really doing, and what actually helps?
On its own, each report is easy to shrug off. Together they keep pointing the same way. Needs are rising faster than the resources meeting them. The scores show where kids slip. And the help that works keeps turning out to be small and personal, the kind aimed at one child at a time. So here is what each one found, the actual numbers, and what it means if you have a child in an Ontario classroom. Every figure links back to its source and the date it was published. Check it yourself.
Ontario's Special-Education Audit: What It Means for Families
The Auditor General's report, released May 12, 2026, looked at how special education is funded and delivered. Auditor general Shelley Spence found that need is growing faster than enrolment. From 2014-15 to 2023-24, overall enrolment grew 4 percent, while the number of students with special-education needs grew 7 percent. Provincial funding rose 15 percent between 2019-20 and 2023-24, from $3.1 billion to $3.6 billion, and school boards' own special-education spending rose 19 percent over the same years (Auditor General of Ontario, 2026).
For families, the report puts numbers to a familiar wait. At two of the boards the auditor examined, roughly one third of the students who needed an assessment had waited more than a year, while families who arrange a private assessment, sometimes more than $5,000, often wait less (Auditor General of Ontario, 2026). The report also points to capacity pressures: about 60 percent of surveyed teachers had received minimal or no training in developing and implementing Individual Education Plans, and educational assistant absences averaged 18 percent in 2023-24, going unfilled by a qualified replacement between 49 and 72 percent of the time at the three boards audited (Auditor General of Ontario, 2026).
If your child is waiting on an assessment or on supports, the useful takeaway is perspective: these timelines are systemwide, not a reflection of your child. The practical move is to keep learning going in the meantime. A year is a long time in a child's reading development, so targeted help now, focused on the specific skills your child needs, keeps momentum while school supports are arranged.
Why Are EQAO Math Scores So Low? The 2024-25 Results Are In
EQAO put out its 2024-25 results on December 3, 2025. A bit better, same old problem. Scores ticked up in most grades, but math is still the weak spot. Only 51 percent of Grade 6 students hit the provincial math standard. That's up a single point from the year before. One point. Grade 9 math came in at 58 percent, Grade 3 at 64 percent (EQAO, 2025).
Reading held up much better. In Grade 3, 74 percent of students met the reading standard and 65 percent met writing, next to that 64 percent in math. If you follow these results, none of this is new. Math has trailed literacy on EQAO for a decade. The agency keeps finding the same thing: kids can do the arithmetic, then stall when they have to use it inside a multi-step word problem. And the slide started well before 2020, so the pandemic is only part of the story.
For a parent, the takeaway is narrower than the headline. Your kid can read right at grade level and still land in the rough half of Grade 6 students who miss the math bar. And the fix is almost never "more math" in some vague, do-more-worksheets sense. It is finding the one link that snapped, multiplication facts, fractions, or just slowing down to read the question, and rebuilding from there.
Do Home Visits Improve School Attendance?
This one is American, but the lesson travels. The Hechinger Report covered it on June 1, 2026. Researchers tracked about 2,700 Michigan schools from 2022 to 2025 and found a big spread in something schools rarely measure well. Kids at the schools best at getting students to show up attended about seven more days of class a year than similar kids at the worst ones (Hechinger Report, 2026).
What the strongest schools tended to have in common wasn't an app or an automated call home. It was actual home visits, daily or weekly. The schools that dropped by once a month or less saw almost no benefit. The researchers are careful here: this is a correlation, not proof, and a few schools doing weekly visits saw no gain at all. But the pattern was hard to miss. And seven days sounds like nothing until you remember the cutoff. Miss 18 days in a year and you're flagged for chronic absenteeism. At that scale, seven days is the gap between a normal year and a problem one.
The short version: attendance follows relationships. A kid who feels expected, who feels noticed, shows up. That's as true for a weekly tutoring session as it is for homeroom. Someone who notices you're gone and actually asks about it beats any penalty you can write into a policy.
What Are Teachers Actually Feeling in 2026?
A survey fills in the mood. EdChoice put out its 2026 Spring Teacher Survey on May 4, drawing on 1,030 nationally representative teachers polled with Morning Consult in early April (EdChoice, 2026). If you have spent any time in a staff room lately, the split it found will sound familiar.
Most teachers, 82 percent, said they were happy with how their own students were learning. Zoom out and the confidence drains away. Only 47 percent thought K-12 was going well in their own community. Nationally? Just 26 percent. On technology they were firm: 65 percent oppose letting students use AI for schoolwork. And only 22 percent would strongly recommend teaching as a career. Confident about the kids in front of them, less certain about the bigger picture. It echoes the Ontario audit: dedicated educators working hard to meet needs that keep rising.
Does Tutoring Actually Help Students Who Are Behind?
The most useful study of the five was also the most honest about its own limits. Ayman Shakeel ran a randomized controlled trial, posted to the EdWorkingPapers repository in late 2025, that followed 333 students in Grades 2 to 5 through a high-dosage literacy tutoring program (Shakeel, 2025). The headline result is a letdown. Across the whole group, the average effect on literacy was not statistically significant.
Stop there and tutoring looks like a failure. It is not. The breakdown flips the story. For the students who started furthest behind, the program produced a real gain, about 0.2 standard deviations. Stronger readers gained nothing. A few even slipped. So tutoring did not fail. It worked for the students who needed it and did little for the ones who did not, which is about what you would expect from help that is only as good as its aim. It is still a working paper, not peer reviewed yet, so treat the exact number as provisional. But the shape of it lines up with years of high-dosage tutoring research.
What This Means for Ontario Families and Teachers
So where does that leave a parent? The audit shows special-education needs are rising faster than resources, and assessment waits can run past a year. EQAO points to math as the spot where kids slip most. The attendance work says engagement comes from relationships, not pressure. And the tutoring trial ties the bow on it: extra help paid off for the kids who were genuinely behind, and barely moved the needle for everyone else. None of this points to more of everything. It points to the right help, aimed at the one thing your child is actually missing, from someone trained to spot it.
That's exactly the work Connect Education is built for. Connect Education works exclusively with Ontario Certified Teachers and ECEs in good standing, who build a learning plan around your child's real gaps and meet online, in person, or at a public library. The table below lays it next to a typical tutoring option. And if you're still waiting on school support that hasn't shown up, you can book a free 15-minute assessment or browse certified tutors to get started.
Questions Parents Ask Most
Why are EQAO math scores so low in Ontario?
Math has been the weakest subject on EQAO for years, and the 2024-25 results continue the pattern: only 51 percent of Grade 6 students met the provincial math standard, even though scores ticked up slightly across all three grades. Researchers point to a gap between students' basic arithmetic and their ability to apply it to multi-step problems. The slide predates the pandemic, so it is not simply a recovery issue. Targeted practice on the specific skills a child is missing tends to move the needle more than general review.
How long does it take to get a special education assessment in Ontario?
It varies widely by board, and often it is long. The Auditor General of Ontario's May 2026 report found that at two of the boards it examined, about one third of students who needed an assessment had waited more than a year, and that families who can afford private assessments often wait far less. If your child is on a waitlist, you can ask the school for interim accommodations in writing and arrange outside academic support in the meantime so they do not lose ground while waiting.
Does tutoring actually help students who are behind?
The evidence says yes, but mostly for the students who are furthest behind, and only when it is targeted. A 2025 randomized trial of a high-dosage literacy program found no significant effect across the full group, yet a real gain of about 0.2 standard deviations for the lowest-achieving students. The lesson is that tutoring works best when it is matched to a specific child's gaps rather than applied as a blanket fix for everyone.
What can I do at home if my child is falling behind in school?
Start with consistency. The attendance research out this year found that connection and routine, not pressure, are what keep kids engaged. Build short, regular practice into the week on the one or two skills your child is missing rather than long cramming sessions. If the gap is specific, such as fractions or reading fluency, a certified teacher can pinpoint it and work on it directly, which is more effective than general homework help.
Sources
- Office of the Auditor General of Ontario (2026), Special Report on Special Education (released May 12, 2026), auditor.on.ca
- Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (2026), ETFO responds to auditor's report on special education, etfo.ca
- EQAO (2025), Assessment Results for the 2024-2025 School Year (released December 3, 2025), eqao.com
- The Hechinger Report (2026), Proof Points: what Michigan schools reveal about reversing chronic absenteeism (June 1, 2026), hechingerreport.org
- EdChoice (2026), 2026 Spring Teacher Survey (May 4, 2026), edchoice.org
- Shakeel, A. (2025), Beyond the Classroom: Impact of a High-Dosage Tutoring Program on Student Literacy Achievement (working paper), EdWorkingPapers, edworkingpapers.com
