Beyond reopening schools

Could education systems emerge stronger than before Covid-19?As it has been said for ages,every cloud has a silver lining,the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in at least one positive thing: a much greater appreciation for the importance of schools,especially the public ones.As parents struggled to work with their children at home due to schools closure, public recognition of the essential caretaking role schools play in society has seen an all time high ranking. As learners struggled to learn from home, parents’ gratitude for teachers, their skills, and their invaluable role in student well-being, has risen. As communities struggle to take care of their vulnerable children and youth, parents and guardians can not wait to hand over the learnrs back to the teachers.

It is therefore valuable to look beyond these immediate concerns of reopening and focus to what may be possible for education on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to fathom or imagine that there will be another moment in history when the central role of education in the economic, social, political,prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population than what has been. Now is the time to focus and visualize how education could emerge stronger from this global crisis than ever before.

A conversation needs to start on what could be achieved in the medium to long term if leaders around the world took seriously the public’s demand for safe, quality schools for their children. It is now very clear that strong public education systems are essential to the overall recovery of society after this pandemic.Strong public schools at the center of a community help learners grow and develop a broad range of competencies and skills in and out of school. For example,  such a public school would embrace aspects of technology, that would allow for partnerships in the community from parents to employers to reinforce, complement, and bring to life learning experiences in and outside the classroom. Such schools would recognize and adapt to the learning that takes place beyond walls, regularly assessing students’ skills and tailoring learning opportunities to meet students at their skill level. 
Ideas such as empowering parents to support their children’s education, should be sustained when the pandemic subsides. This as we even ask this question: “Is it possible to realistically envision education emerging from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than it was before?” To start the discussion around this question, let us consider the following four key emerging trends resulting from the impact of COVID-19 on education globally. They include:

1) Hightened education inequality.

Inequality in education is accelerating in an unprecedented manner, especially where before the pandemic it was already high.Even before COVID-19 forced as many as 1.5 billion students out of school in early 2020, there was a global consensus that education systems in many countries were not delivering the quality education needed to ensure that all have the skills necessary to survive and thrive. It is the poorest children across the globe that carry the heaviest burden.According to a report by UNICEF in 2018,it indicates :pre-pandemic analysis estimated that "90 percent of children in low-income countries, 50 percent of children in middle-income countries, and 30 percent of children in high-income countries fail to master the basic secondary-level skills needed to thrive in work and life." It is children in the poorest countries who have been left the furthest behind. The World Bank’s “2018 World Development Report” called it a “learning crisis,” and the global community mobilized to seek more funding to support education systems across the world. Yet, for a few young people in wealthy communities around the globe, schooling has never been better than during the pandemic. They are taught in their homes with a handful of their favorite friends by a teacher hired by their parents. Some parents have connected via social media platforms to form learning pods/groups that instruct only a few students at a time with agreed-upon teaching schedules and activities. Such parents argue that the pods encourage social interaction, improve learning, and reduce the burden of child care during the pandemic.While the learning experiences for these particular children may be good in and of themselves, they represent a worrisome trend for the world: the massive acceleration of education inequality.While by mid-April of 2020, less than 25 percent of low-income countries were providing any type of remote learning and a majority that did used TV and radio, close to 90 percent of high-income countries were providing remote learning opportunities.UNICEF estimates that 463 million children- the majority of whom are in the developing world—had no chance at remote learning via radio, television, or online content. (However, this does not take into account the creative use of text messages, phone calls, and offline e-learning that many teachers and education leaders are putting to use in rural and under-resourced communities. )Indeed, these innovative practices suggest that the school closures from COVID-19 are setting the stage for a leapjump in education innovations.


2).The leapjump moment.

During the schools cIosure, innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems.This presents an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, could help the learners get an education that prepares them for our changing times. In the ongoing work on education innovation,there are examples of new strategies or approaches that could, if scaled up, have the potential to rapidly accelerate or leapjump progress. Our goal should be for all children to become lifelong learners and develop the full breadth of skills and competencies—from literacy to problem-solving to collaboration—that they will need to access a changing world of work and be constructive and global citizens in society. As such,there is need for new and innovative pedagogical approaches as well as new ways of recognizing learning alongside traditional approaches.Others may include building on a diversity of people and places alongside professional teachers to help support learning in school and smart use of technology that allow for real-time adaptation ,not just replacement of the old approaches.Is is important to note however,that many of the promising innovations were on the margins of education systems and not at the center of how learning takes place. It is therefore necessary that ,the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to learners need to spend more time documenting, learning from, evaluating, and scaling those innovative approaches that hold the most leapjump potential. Today we are facing a very different context. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education innovation into the heart of almost every education system around the globe.The crisis has revealed the enormous potential for innovation that is dormant in many education systems.The question is no longer how to scale innovations from the margin to the center of education systems but how to transform education systems so that they will source, support, and sustain those innovations that address inequality and provide all young people with the skills to build a better future for themselves and their communities. By doing this, we ultimately hope not only that those who are left behind can catch up, but that a new, more equal education system can emerge out of the crisis.




3). Inreasing public support for teachers and schools

There is new found public recognition of how essential schools are in society and a window of opportunity to leverage this support for making them stronger.March 2020 will forever be known as the time all the world’s schools closed their doors. As teachers and school leaders around the world struggled with hardly any forewarning to pivot to some form of remote learning, parents and families around the globe who had relied on schools as an anchor around which they organized their daily schedule faced the shock of life without school. An outpouring of appreciation on social media for teachers from parents deciding between caring for their children and earning money quickly followed.Suddenly,communities started recognizing that schools and teachers are heroes;and that schools are the place not only where we get to learn and progress, fulfill our hopes and dreams, but also where we learn to live in community. This broad recognition and support for the essential role of education in daily life can be found on the pages of newspapers across the globe. It can be found in emerging coalitions of advocates urging that education be prioritized across communities and countries. This reality, which is so well known to the families of the 258 million out-of-school children, has brought the issue of education into the living rooms of middle class and elite parents around the globe who were otherwise too busy in other'profitable'discourses of life.


4). New education friends.

The pandemic has brought together new actors in the community—from parents to social welfare organizations—to support children’s learning like never before.Alongside increasing recognition of the essential role of public schools, the pandemic has galvanized parts of communities that traditionally are not actively involved in children’s education. As school buildings closed, teachers began to partner with parents in ways never done before,media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with NGOs and governments and businesses and contributed to supporting children’s learning in new ways.Prior to the pandemic,schools remained open all day and were centers for community engagement, services, and problem-solving. However,this shifted in recent times and the concept of local learning ecoystems has emerged to describe learning opportunities provided through a network of collaborations among schools, community organizations, businesses, and government agencies all with a similar goal of bridging the gap. Engaging learners in diverse learning opportunities outside of school can be quite helpful in boosting the skills and academic competencies of marginalized children. One of the opportunities emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic may just be the chance to harness the new energies and mindsets between schools and communities to work together to support children’s learning.
While we envision powered-up schools after COVID-19 using technology in these four ways to improve learning,it is necessary to emphasize the need to support educators to embrace the comparative advantages of technology. Without involving and supporting educators in innovation, efforts will not be sustainable over time. Indeed, throughout the global school closures, we have seen the heroic efforts of educators, many of whom are in poor communities with limited ed-tech resources, and yet have innovated to continue engaging students in learning even with little support from parents at home.
However the limited engagement with parents and families should come as no surprise given that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of parent engagement occupied a relatively marginal place in the education discussions. But the coronavirus pandemic has put the topic of engagement with parents and families at the center of today’s education debates, and education leaders across the globe are finding out just what powerful allies parents can be in their children’s learning—including parents from the most marginalized communities. New ways are emerging of partnering with parents and families that provide real promise for supporting children’s learning in and out of school over the long term.When a respectful relationship among parents, teachers, families, and schools is at the center of engagement activities, powerful support to children’s learning can occur. The nature of the invitation and the relationship is what is so essential to bringing parents on board.

In conclussion,it is important to acknowledge that emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger  education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources. But articulating such a vision is essential, and that amid the myriad of decisions education leaders are making every day, it can guide the future. With the dire consequences of the pandemic hitting the most vulnerable young people the hardest, it is tempting to revert to a global education narrative that privileges access to school above all else. This, however, would be a mistake. There are enough examples of education innovations that provide access to relevant learning for those in and out of a school building to set our sights higher. A powered-up public school in every community is what the world’s children deserve, and indeed is possible if all stakeholders can collectively work together to harness the opportunities presented by this crisis to truly leapjump education forward.