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Significantly mixed.The overall impacts of charter schools are in some ways quite positive, and in some ways extremely negative.Separating Good Schools from Bad SchoolsIt’s important to first note that a charter school is not the same as a private school. Charter schools are public schools; they cannot charge tuition, are subject to church-state issues that parochial or private schools are not, cannot require entrance exams, and must participate in required state testing where private schools do not.However, there is incredible variability to how charter schools are organized, run, held accountable, funded, accept students, create and use curriculum, and more.I have a friend who works for Etude High School, a public charter school in Wisconsin. It’s a great learning environment that very much differs from the rigid sit-and-learn methods of traditional schools. It’s a project-based learning, discovery-focused model that allows a lot of work-at-your-own-pace education and challenges students to apply cross-disciplinary skills in every aspect of their education. It’s doing some incredibly innovative education, and it’s been quite successful. My friend has been there for six years and loves it. His students have gone on to be quite successful.Other charter schools fail spectacularly. A recent study found that many online-based charter schools fail to graduate even half of their students. Numerous charter schools have closed mid-year and without warning, leaving students, parents, and even teachers stranded in the middle of a school year with limited options.What divides the two?Largely accountability, organization, and effective resourcing.Some charter schools are “schools within a school,” or otherwise organized under the main public district, and overseen by the district’s publicly elected school board.These can vary from entirely separate “alternative schools” that follow specialized or experimental educational structures, such as Etude, to specific, isolated programs that operate in the same buildings as the regular schools.For example, a nearby city to where I grew up operates an alternative school for students who might otherwise drop out due to teen pregnancy, disciplinary issues, work schedules, and more. The dedicated building is open longer hours (7am to 7pm,) with teachers that operate more on shifts than a traditional school. The school has built-in child care for single teen parents. It is focused on a traditional high school diploma and not just a GED. It doesn’t generally offer extracurricular activities, though students can enroll in those with the main school. (Most don’t.)In contrast, a friend of mine from college who taught English for a number of years was tapped to run an isolated, dedicated program within her school that she created from the ground up for at-risk students who just couldn’t operate in a traditional educational framework. She was essentially her own principal, though she officially reported to the principal of the high school on the organization chart. (She’s been incredibly successful and recently was a presenter at a multi-state regional conference on educational innovation.) This program co-ordinates with traditional classes, replacing most entirely, but still operates within the same school.Both of these charter schools are funded by need. They receive state aid per pupil like public schools, but they also receive grants for specific programs and specific activities. Etude works with a number of local manufacturers who sponsor various projects, extracurricular activities, and courses that work in conjunction with their businesses where students learn to apply their school work to real-world applications.Both of these are accountable to the local public school board. Their books are public record and overseen by the district administration.Other charter schools are privately owned, for-profit organizations, and operate on a contract with local districts. These receive public funding, but are not directly overseen by the public school board. These schools receive grants, local, state, and federal, ranging from the standard state aid per pupil to specific grants for technology, curriculum, or personnel, to undedicated blocks of straight cash to be used as the school sees fit.Some of these are successful. There are numerous privately-run for-profit Montessori schools that operate on contracts with districts to ensure that program graduates can easily transfer right into the public school’s curriculum, and many of these are very successful.Others are essentially nothing more than get-rich-quick schemes or other criminal enterprises by organizers, just as they are in higher education. The fact that they operate on contracts with sometimes little or even no oversight from the public also opens them up to incredible waste, fraud, and abuse. Over a six-year period spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations, the Federal government alone investigated 53 charter schools that resulted in 21 indictments and 17 convictions.Steven Cox, a former insurance executive and the founder of the now-defunct California Charter Academy, at one point the largest chain of charter schools in the country, was indicted on 56 counts of misappropriation and theft for trips to Disneyland and stealing $42,000 from the school to pay his personal income taxes. Eleven years later, Cox’s case still has not been resolved as he continues to use his fortune to litigate it. Horizon Academy in Cincinnati essentially operated as a front for an immigration fraud ring for several years as the founder used it to get work visas for Turkish nationals with absolutely no background in education. The CEO of Philadelphia Academy Charter School admitted to stealing approximately a half a million dollars from the school in part through raiding its vending machines.These schools operate on loose contracts with little to no accountability to the public other than being required to publish graduation rates and test scores. They can often operate for years bilking the public before closing, sometimes abruptly, and absconding with the funds.Positive Charter School Models and OpportunitiesWhere schools are effectively resourced based on demonstrated need, and are publicly accountable just as the traditional public school, charter schools may be quite effective. They can be testbeds for new educational practices and reforms, or offer alternatives for students who need different educational models from their peers.Charter schools might be a great way to differentiate education or provide specialized educational applications, such as in-depth vocational education. Imagine if a student graduated high school ready or significantly far along the track to becoming a journeyman carpenter or a licensed electrician. While requiring specialization through tracked education may not be practical or even desirable (look at me, I was going to be an astrophysicist when I started undergraduate,) offering the opportunities might be quite beneficial.Offering this kind of differentiated education is already a goal of most public schools. However, a charter school with a specific mission, as opposed to the more general liberal arts education of a traditional K-12 school, could provide a more focused differentiated education that goes in-depth on a particular area, rather than more broadly on several disciplines.There are positives and negatives to this. A more well-rounded education has proven itself over time to benefit a person over their whole life. I had a poster up on my wall when I taught that had a picture of scientists running away from dinosaurs that read, “Science will teach you how to clone a T-Rex. Humanities will teach you why it’s a bad idea.”Now, a charter school could have a liberal arts education that is still focused on a certain topic. A charter school focused on churning out STEM educated graduates, for example, may have just as much focus on literature and art and music, but from an engineering perspective. The band students might take more time to learn acoustical physics or metallurgy for better instruments. The literature may focus slightly more heavily on technical documents and scientific literacy, but also include fiction geared towards engineering types. The math might be more practical-application-based.The Perception of Failing Public Schools and The Rise of ConsumerismJon Stewart hosted educational reformer Diane Ravitch several times on his show. Ravitch noted on multiple occasions that the majority of U.S. adults have bought into the narrative that public schools are failing. International benchmark test scores continue to fall for U.S. students, for example. Advocacy documentaries such as Waiting for Superman paint the public schools as a broken system where teachers’ unions continue to drive a status-quo at the expense of children, and charter schools as the revolution in education that would shake up the industry with competition and reform that public schools lack, but limited by lottery systems leaving the unlucky trapped.Yet, Ravitch also noted that on the whole, most U.S. voters surveyed also believe that their local public school is good and successful.Jon Stewart: These areas, so the families in these areas, because this gets into another issue you bring up in the book [Reign of Error]. The families in this area are rightly concerned with the performance of some of the public schools in their area. These schools can be dilapidated, they can be poorly performing and these types of things. There is this movement and the charter movement that says ‘what’s wrong with giving choice to those kids in those areas?’ because the schools around them are not are not serving their needs. What is wrong with that in your mind?Diane Ravitch: Well, what’s wrong with it is that there, it is part of, I believe, a purposeful effort to create a consumer mentality around education. Public education is the public responsibility. Whether you send your children to private schools, or to a religious school, or you home school them, that’s your right. And if you have no children at all, you’re still obligated to support public education. What they’re trying to do is to say that public education is not public, it’s a choice, it’s a consumer choice. They’re trying to destroy the sense of civic obligation so the next time there’s a…JS: So, turn it into a marketplace?DR: Yes, a marketplace, exactly. So, the next time a bond issue is up, you will say ‘well, I don’t have a child in school. I’m not going to vote for the bond issue.’ We’re going to destroy public education that way. . . . I think it’s all wrong. I think that the idea of you look on your school, you go shopping and you pick your school the way you pick your shoes or your automobile, that is wrong too. People should have a good neighborhood school in every neighborhood. One where they are very happy to send their kids because they know the teachers are terrific. The funny thing is if you look at poll data from Gallup, what it shows is if people are asked how is American education doing, they’ve heard thirty years of American education is broken, it doesn’t work, it’s obsolete, so they say ‘oh, American public education, no good.’ How is your school, how is your neighborhood school? ‘Oh, my neighborhood school is terrific. My teachers are great. I love my teachers.’JS: But it is like Congress, you could look at that, too, the same way. Oh, my Congressman is okay, but the institution – it does have issues… [laughter].The increasing narrative of “school choice” around charter schools continues to create a false premise of the consumer mentality towards education; we pay for the educational system, and so we ought to get what we pay for. And if we don’t like the results, we ought to buy something else.Yet, public schools are not allowed in many cases to compete on the same level playing field as private schools or even charter schools.Public schools are reliant on taxes, and obviously, few people really like paying more in taxes. They see their property tax levies as directly funding the schools. They often don’t think about those taxes also funding police, fire, and EMS services. So, when the municipality suggests raising taxes again, adding another bonding bill to the budget, passing another referendum, it gets voted down, often by those who no longer have children in the district.This happens because we’ve bought into this business-consumerism model of education rather than funding it as a public trust for everyone. It used to be that we all understood it was a public trust; even if you didn’t have kids in the school, it was important to fund it for everyone because it makes the public better off.As John Green notes:Public education does not exist for the benefit of students or the benefit of their parents. It exists for the benefit of the social order.We have discovered as a species that it is useful to have an educated population. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from public education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from public education.So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.Consumerism takes the approach that whatever is good for the individual is good for society. This is the absolute worst approach to something like education, and really even good governance or society.Civic Responsibility and Pride, and How That Impacts Government - Including Public EducationEducation is one of the great equalizers of humanity, and it was for that precise reason that the United States was one of the earliest innovators in providing a free, public education to every citizen, even mandating compulsory attendance. We were one of the first countries to achieve a >90% literacy rate.We did so because of the idea of civic responsibility for one another: that if we all contribute to the public good, we all receive back something greater than we put in.Education lifts millions out of poverty by creating a skilled workforce. That skilled workforce put a car in every driveway, a computer in everyone’s pocket, and a man on the Moon. The space program alone yielded innovations that dominate our daily lives ranging from memory foam to LASIK to infrared ear thermometers. It would not have been possible without a broad, skilled workforce, the product of public education.Whether it’s vocational education, professional education, or even general education, public education creates opportunities for every single person in the country to contribute to society. It was that kind of public access to education that turned the United States from a backwater rural agrarian society to the largest, most prosperous industrialized superpower in the world.And we took pride in that. We created state university systems that we wanted to become the envy of the world, publicly available to every citizen. We would produce the finest scientists and inventors and the world’s greatest artists. We would take pride in fostering the world’s greatest economy and the world’s greatest culture.We did that by investing in our people. Collectively. Public institutions would be cathedrals of civic pride. Public buildings such as schools and courthouses were marble and granite, built to last. They were also the centers of civic activity. The school was often the heart of the town, where meetings and debates and festivals and elections were held. The courthouse would be where critical matters of government would be decided and administered. These were buildings of respect, and everyone took pride in that. We built that.We don’t teach that kind of civic mentality anymore, not in our homes and not in our schools. Hell, we can’t even teach that in our schools anymore, because teachers would get fired for politicizing in the classroom.The school is not the center of civic life, because honestly, we no longer have a civic life.Consumerism has replaced that sense of civic responsibility to each other to make the nation better overall. Ayn Rand’s idea of selfishness as a virtue has become the guidestar of the nation: screw you, so long as I got mine.We no longer care about investing in society, trusting that we would reap the benefits. Instead, we only care about consuming from society; if we are not personally benefiting, then it must not be valuable.This is why, I firmly believe, it is so easy for certain people to believe in the idea of a “moocher class” of “welfare queens” who just exist to live fat off the public trough: it’s what they would do if they were allowed to. Why? Because they live from a mentality of consumerism, and not civic engagement.If we start from the premise that public schools are a public trust which we are all responsible for, the whole conversation changes. No longer is it about requiring education to fix itself by forcing it to compete over increasingly limited resources. Instead, it’s a matter of coming together as a culture to improve education. Every stakeholder has some degree of obligation, then.Some of it might be more funding. Maybe people without kids decide to invest their time in coaching. Maybe businesses do more joint ventures with the schools.Most of it is just shifting from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control.And that’s eminently evident in the overall impact of charter schools. The impact of charter schools is that they continue to further the mentality that other people are responsible for making a product that we want to buy and we’ll just keep demanding alternatives until we get what we want, rather than civic ownership of that product and collective work to improve it. If others are responsible for the quality control, then we as a society don’t have to have any responsibility for the outcomes.But if we are responsible for improving that product, that has a whole host of rather difficult implications for us. That’s going to require work.Look. If you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.That starts with understanding that in a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, the people are what make the difference. All of the people. Everyone is responsible for the public good. Everyone has to contribute and work at it.Charter schools are a cheap cop-out to avoid that responsibility. They continue to further an external locus of control that takes away the need for self-agency to work to improve the situation. Someone else can clean it up.Oh, we’ll pay for it. Grudgingly.So long as we don’t actually have to do anything.In BriefCharter schools do provide some valuable alternatives to traditional models of education, and testbeds for educational research. They can be excellent ways to differentiate student learning and provide unique opportunities for some students.They can also be incredibly detrimental to student outcomes and perpetuate a flagging sense of civic responsibility and a consumerist society that abdicates personal responsibility and self-agency for “more choices” and personal satisfaction.It’s difficult to say which of these impacts has the greater weight. Every situation in every place charter schools are implemented is different.Caveat emptor.Your mileage may vary.This is long and I didn’t add any pictures. Here. Have a baby raccoon.Mostly Standard Addendum and Disclaimer: read this before you comment.I welcome rational, reasoned debate on the merits with reliable, credible sources.But coming on here and calling me names, pissing and moaning about how biased I am, et cetera and BNBR violation and so forth, will result in a swift one-way frogmarch out the airlock. Doing the same to others will result in the same treatment.Essentially, act like an adult and don’t be a dick about it.Getting cute with me about my commenting rules and how my answer doesn’t follow my rules and blah, blah, whine, blah is getting old. Stay on topic or you’ll get to watch the debate from the outside.If you want to argue and you’re not sure how to not be a dick about it, just post a picture of a cute baby animal instead, all right? Your displeasure and disagreement will be duly noted. Pinkie swear.If you have to consider whether or not you’re over the line, the answer is most likely yes. I’ll just delete your comment and probably block you, and frankly, I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it.Debate responsibly.Thanks for the A2A, Habib.

Of late, this thought has crossed my mind many times. I often think, “If 2020 is declared as a zero academic year, would it have any adverse impact on the majority of the stakeholders?”I advocate for declaring 2020 as a zero academic session because of the following reasons.It will alleviate the risk of widespread infection.It will save students from a lot of mental and psychological trauma.There is a tradition in our country that there should be no gap in any student’s education. It is considered as bad. I seriously do not understand the rationale behind it. I think it is okay if someone has a gap in his education. Not everyone’s circumstances are conducive to continue education. So, I think this needs to be changed. And a zero year can change this status quo.If we declare 2020 as a zero academic year, it will provide every student with a level playing field.A zero academic year can also let students introspect about their career and future.For students preparing for the competitive exams, they will get more time for preparation, and hence the competition can also get fierce.The cons of a zero academic year:Yes, it can have a negative impact on some of the educational institutions, but I think they can survive that. There is a bleak chance of a non-operational getting them out of the business. At this juncture, the lives of our people are more important than anything else.A zero academic year can adversely impact the financial status of many teachers and other support staff of the private institutions. We will need to address this issue.It can be a setback for many students preparing day in day out to get admission into a good institute.

Let me tell you my story. I have been a proud Canadian citizen since I was 12 years old. I love this country more than you can ever imagine. Yet my life/experiences have put me in an unenviable position, where I know exactly what you mean by this question.I was born in Qatar, although I am not a citizen. I came to Montreal when I was 8 years old, on December 1995. I spent several years growing up in Montreal, I went to school at l’école secondaire Dorval-jean-xxiii and L’école secondaire des Sources. I fell in love with this place and everything about it. I always say, if it were ever up to me, I would have lived and stayed here for the rest of my life. But life does not always give us what we want. I had to leave at age 13 to live with my father, who put tremendous effort into affording my education at the Doha College, a British school in Qatar so I could come back here one day. Perhaps one of the best schools I had ever had the privilege of going to around the world.Unfortunately, I was unable to return to Canada to pursue undergraduate/graduate education. Indeed, I was accepted at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) back in 2004, but I was unable to go. Reasons mainly included finances, family situation/status and several others. I still remember my father walking into my room in 2005 with MUN’s re-acceptance offer. Seeing how much I wanted to go and my state at the time, he actually contacted the university’s admissions office to keep my spot for a year so I can go later when it may be possible/feasible. Of course I refused, since it would have cost us an arm and a leg to go there, metaphorically speaking of course. You might ask why couldn’t I apply for a student loan, well, I was not a resident in any Canadian province then (since I was residing in Qatar) hence I was not eligible, at least for student loans with affordable interest rates that I knew of at the time. I found myself in a position where my only choice would be to go to Cairo University-Egypt to obtain my medical degree, since I am also an Egyptian citizen and hence my education there would be free. This was the most difficult decision I ever took in my life, I do not wish it upon any 17 year old. Since prior to this point, I had never actually “lived” in Egypt for more than 1-2 months at any given time and I didn’t really think or feel like I would “belong” per sae. Nevertheless, it was an amazing experience which opened me up both culturally and intellectually. I also made friendships from across the world which will last me a full lifetime. If I could ever go back, in light of my circumstances back then, I still think it was my only feasible option.I graduated from Cairo University-faculty of medicine on January 24th 2011, one day before the first Egyptian revolution. I travelled to Canada on the 28th of January 2011, which was/is referred to as the “Friday of Rage” since it marks the point during which the revolution turned violent. I was lucky, since my ticket was booked several months earlier and the following day airports were closed. However, once things settled down, I decided I needed to go back to Egypt to complete my medical internship. Without my internship, I cannot receive or be awarded my graduation certificate (medical school in Cairo is 6 years + 1 year of medical internship/practice). While I know friends who decided to stay in Canada during this period, I also know other Canadian/Egyptians who went back to practice during this time since they felt like they had an exceptional responsibility on their shoulders. Given our sense of duty, love and commitment to medicine, we decided to go back to Egypt to practice during this difficult time. I felt like this was something I had to do, otherwise, I would regret not doing it for the rest of my life. I tell you this to simply point out what practicing this profession represents to me.I also did 4 months of externship during my internship year in Northern Ontario School of Medicine (OB/GYN) and in Tufts-Brockton hospital (Boston, USA-Psychiatry and Gastro) since I knew how important North American clinical experience would be for the start of my prospective career as a medical resident in Canada. I finally returned back to Canada on April 28th 2012. I had everything one would need; on a professional level, my career was ahead of me. On a personal level, I was in a happy relationship and I was finally back home. My whole life was ahead of me back then, I often think to myself about how it actually “felt” to look forward to something. I stopped looking forward to anything for nearly a year now. It was a different time, a time when I was happy, motivated, filled with passion and optimism towards my future.Things were still not easy though, I was living in a small apartment in Scarborough Ontario. I sold my car, and all my belongings in Egypt before returning to Canada since I was never planning on leaving again. I finally had a “full time/permanent” home where I could grow and equally contribute to society and medicine. With limited finances, I worked exceptionally hard to pass the Canadian equivalence exams in the first take since I could not really afford to take exams twice. I actually completed my first Canadian equivalence exam, the MCCEE during my internship in Egypt. I still remember sitting at the back of an ambulance doing a cross country campaign in Egypt to collect blood for the hospital I worked in during the aftermath of the first revolution while I studied Obstetrics less than 3 weeks before my exam. I eventually completed all required exams (MCCEE, MCCQE1 and NAC-OSCE) within 18 months (2012-2013). Unfortunately, I was unable to match to a residency in Canada (applied first to Psychiatry, then tried family medicine as well), nor was I able to go back to Egypt to pursue or commence a residency during the 2013 revolution given the escalating political situation back then and my Coptic identity (http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/11/14/violence-against-copts-in-egypt-pub-53606).I did not give up, I moved to Montreal and completed a master’s degree of science in clinical psychiatry (McGill University) on resistant depression and the use of mood stabilizers and atypical antipsychotics for augmentation therapy. I ended up writing my thesis on 78 patients, most of which I had been following during my time there. I also used to do patients assessments at the mood disorder clinic whenever second year residents were unavailable; under direct supervision much like any resident. I can even tell you that my evaluation/assessment notes were well recognised by my supervisors as being exceptionally well written, I was really adamant about learning as much as possible about psychiatry. I also gained a tremendous amount of clinical and research experience in bipolar disorders, major depression, substance use disorders, anxiety disorders, and the use of rTMS, biomarkers and endocannabinoids (2013-2016). I even rotated in the psychiatry emergency unit during my free time on night shifts. Yet, this was not enough and I still didn’t match. Ironically enough, a few weeks after my rejection, my master’s thesis gained recognition at the American Psychiatric Association (APA-2016) in Atlanta-USA and was hosted on Medscape-WebMD (till present date) as part of a report on novel forms of psychopharmacology in resistant depression under “Key Issues in Depression: Highlights from APA 2016”, Continued Medical Education (CME).Fortunately though, I still didn’t give up! I landed a clinical postdoctoral fellowship at Université de Montreal (since 2016) in addiction, where I wrote part of the first pan-Canadian research protocol for the current Canadian opioid crisis and I used to see patients on a daily basis who were started on methadone or suboxone treatments in our clinic. I can tell you that in this study and in capacity of post-doc, I recruited the first patient in Canada who received treatment the following day. I also trained first year residents on using SCID and MINI for psychiatric diagnoses and patient encounters. Since then, I also learnt how to speak French again by taking evening bi-weekly 3 hour courses after work for nearly a year, and I published over 8 clinical scientific papers in high impact journals since 2015. I also received multiple awards from both the Canadian and American Psychiatric Association (CPA and APA). Last award was from the APA in 2018, where I received the research colloquium award for young investigators, an award offered to 52 scientific researchers in psychiatry chosen from the world every year (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785098/). I was the only awardee from Quebec/Canada; one of 7 Canadian awardees and the only one who was still not a resident in the entire event, apart from a last year medical student from the US. I even received resident-fellow membership status in 2018 from the APA because of this award, which I originally received because of my work in Canada. Just last week, I also became a peer reviewer for a journal with an above average impact factor (IF: 2.6, average IF in psychiatry=2.0; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618825/). Essentially, everything I know about psychiatry is self-thought, mainly through experience at both McGill and Université de Montreal, the two most prominent Anglophone and Francophone Canadian institutes.Since my return in 2012, I have done over 10 interviews in psychiatry spanning all the way from British Columbia to Montreal, in both French and English Canadian institutes. Some were good, some were bad, a few were exceptionally good, but eventually you learn the hard way that it just doesn’t matter. No one really cares about what you have done or achieved so far, or your actual CV. This is the sad reality of the present system. I can even tell you that I went as far as trying to apply to medical schools in Canada in 2016. Queens for instance, seemed appealing to me since I wrote a recommendation letter for a science student during my time at McGill who was accepted into their medical school program. I did not needed an MCAT, and my cumulative GPA in pre-med + med school in Egypt was 3.8 (according to World education Services, Ontario) which was within/close to the required range. Yet, I was told that they do not accept applications from individuals who have already completed their medical education at accredited institutes. Well, if my undergraduate degree is from an accredited institute, why do you not treat it as one even after I present you with everything you need and much more? I can tell you that I even tried applying to the Medical Officer Training Program for Unmatched Students (MOTP Surge 2018) only for my application to be denied since it was only open to Canadian medical graduates (decision taken by the Canadian institutes offering these positions). By the same logic of having worked in Egypt during the revolution, I was genuinely passionate about the possibility of working for the Canadian armed forces anywhere, given that I essentially grew up in several countries spanning across three continents, and speak French, English and Arabic (in different dialects) fluently.I can tell you that I spent over twenty thousand dollars on my master’s degree (9,800$) and residency applications (over 8,000$), excluding travel and hotel expenses during interviews. In contrast, I lived off a 728$ biweekly pay during my time at McGill, which had a tremendous negative impact on my personal life and relationship at the time in light of my expenses. Not to mention, money related to Toefl/Ielts and ACLs exams which I took twice during the past 6 years (still trying to afford the third time!) since they all expire within 24 months and are required by many Canadian institutes.I still remember my first interview in British Columbia during March 2012, which I did online from Egypt as I was still completing/processing my graduation documents. Fast forward to 2018, the same residency spot in Vancouver remained unfilled till the third iteration after implementation of the CAP assessment in 2018. To do the CAP assessment, you have to be a current permanent resident of British Columbia for a prolonged duration of time (https://imgbc.med.ubc.ca/resource/clinical-assessment/). It is still uncertain if that position was even filled. In contrast, my nephew who lives in Guelph Ontario had to wait over 10 months to see a child psychiatrist, he was 13 when he was referred and had his consult at age 14.I still remember my second interview in Saskatchewan in 2013, when I was still in my mid 20’s, and only 10 months prior I was doing my psychiatry externship in Boston. When I interviewed in Saskatchewan in 2013, we were 20 candidates for 1 available position. When I re-interviewed in 2016, we were nearly 40 candidates, for the same, single position. I still remember my interview in 2018 at another Canadian institute, where I was no longer the young candidate per sae, and my clinical and research experience in Canada did not “reflect” the way I had hoped it should, or would during the related social event. Perhaps I was too pushy. I still remember contacting MUN during the second iteration of 2018, only to be informed that they do not consider any of my work in research/publications as practice, hence, to them I have been out of practice since 2012 (6 years) and their medical education office could not process my papers in accordance with provincial guidelines. If it’s not relevant to practice, then why was I offered resident-fellow membership status from the APA because of the same work in Canada? Another question would be, what alternative did you offer me? I was a returning Canadian student who did everything he could to gain this experience on his own without anyone’s help, when the alternative would have been to abandon what I had worked so hard for nearly my entire life.Matching international graduates are often Canadian student who studied in the UK/Ireland/Australia and graduated within the last two years. However, even some of those students have a lot of difficulty returning home. I remember once being asked if I had citizenship status from Qatar by a colleague since I was born there and being informed that this might perhaps help me get into residency. Much like Saudi Arabian residents who are highly competent and occupy a prominent part of Canadian residencies, because their country pays Canadian institutes 100,000$ per year, per candidate (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-teaching-hospitals-scrambling-to-resolve-how-saudi-student/). I replied no, I am just a Canadian student trying to return home.At the moment, I am staying in Canada till April 2019, then I will travel abroad, possibly for good. Maybe I will come back when I retire. Yet, I will try to apply one more time in Carms 2019, one last time before I pack up my bags and close this 20 year old chapter of my life (from age 13 to 31). I have the comfort of knowing that I have achieved the impossible on my own during 6 years. My conscience is guilt free, there is genuinely nothing else I could have done to be able to practice this profession here. My health and mental state are truly suffering to the point of beyond return. I had a seizure, or possibly a vasovagal syncope on the 30th of April. I really don’t know what it was exactly because 3 days later I had to attend the 2018-APA in New York to receive my award and APA resident-fellow status. It’s amazing the amount of things that can actually run through your mind during only a few minutes/seconds of paralysis. But I arrived at an ultimatum, I will always choose my profession. Without my profession, I am miserable and incomplete. Without a home, well, I can always start again; and hopefully find one that will not try this hard to force me into giving up my dreams.