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Why go back to school now

2021-05-17T22:59:55.666Z


The interruption of educational services will impact in terms of learning losses, stagnation in the search for quality education and knowledge generation


Students attend preschool classes in León, Guanajuato, on May 11 Luis Ramírez / EFE

The impact of covid-19 on education has produced very serious damage and costs and on several fronts. Until before this crisis, globally it was calculated that around 95% of the world's population had gone through school at some point, which means that, at least from a quantitative point of view, there were observable progress in rates coverage in all countries. The school had certainly become a space for teaching, learning and knowledge, but also for the construction of citizenship, civility and collective culture. Furthermore, there were millions of children who relied on school to have access to food services, in addition to being a protected space to create key affective and socio-emotional ties. Today all that has been broken. Some estimates predict that, worldwide,maybe 10 million students may not return to the classroom and 24 million if we also count higher education. That is why the key question - and the most urgent challenge - is how to create the conditions to avoid this tragedy.

Despite the large number of studies, reports and preliminary reports, there are still no robust or definitive conclusions based on high-quality and hard evidence about the real consequences of the pandemic.

However, it is more than clear that the interruption of educational services will impact economies and societies, especially the poorest, in the medium and term, in terms of lower growth, lower social and political cohesion, learning losses and stagnation in the search for quality education and generation of knowledge.

For example, specialists from the World Bank and Brookings, a

think tank

In the United States, they estimated that if each additional year of schooling equates to an additional 10% in future earnings, when a country closes its schools for about four months the loss in marginal future earnings could be 2.5% per year over working life of student; Applying this premise to an economy like that of that country - assuming a working life of 45 years, a discount rate of 3% and average annual income of about $ 53,490 - the loss of present value in learning would be equivalent to 63% of the annual salary at current average rates, that is, in that model the cost to the United States of lost education, in terms of future earnings, could be equivalent to more than 12% of annual GDP. Obviously, the effect is much more pronounced among the poor population.In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C) there are still no similar exercises, but it can be deduced that if, as reports from the OEI and ECLAC suggest, for example, income inequality measured through the Gini index could increase by 3 and 5 percentage points for the pandemic, a certain proportion of this would be the result of school closings and learning losses. As Rafael de Hoyos says: if so, 20 years of progress could be erased at a stroke.As Rafael de Hoyos says: if so, 20 years of progress could be erased at a stroke.As Rafael de Hoyos says: if so, 20 years of progress could be erased at a stroke.

However, many focused the problem basically on the previous deficiencies of the educational systems and wondered in the first months of the pandemic if its impact could have been avoided. The answer is somewhat correct, but it is more complex. It is one thing to accurately identify the size of the deficits, thanks, among other inputs, to the teacher evaluations and learning achievements and all the census and statistical information, and another is to see them live, in the reality of a crisis that nobody , no country, it was expected, and for which no one was prepared. For example, already before, globally, 53% of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries could not read or understand simple texts and 56%, between 6 and 11 years old, do not handle mathematics competently. The same thing happened with the digital divide:79% of LA&C students who participated in the 2018 PISA test had internet access at home, but only 61% had a computer and only 30% had

software

educational. And if we look at the scores of the LA&C countries on that same test, all without exception were below the international average in the three graded areas, which are math, reading, and science. Chile, the best positioned in reading, was in 43rd place (out of 79), and Uruguay, the best in mathematics, was in 58th place. These are some of the reasons why several countries have undertaken systemic educational reforms in recent decades. and structural, among them Mexico in the past Administration, to have better teachers and better learning achievements, which were already beginning to give some results: the latest tests applied to 3rd year high school students showed progress in 11 of the 32 Mexican states in language and communication, and at 18 for mathematics,measured through the increase in the scores achieved between 2015 and 2017, the years evaluated.

It is too early to know how these indicators will move when the critical phase of this nightmare passes, but a report from the World Bank last March estimates that if we take as a baseline the percentage of students who were already below the “minimum level of performance "Before the covid, that is, the poverty of learning - the percentage of 10-year-old children unable to read and understand a simple story - which was 55%, after the pandemic it could reach 71%, calculating schools closed for 10 months ; if the closing is 13 months it would increase to 77%. And if these children took the PISA test in reading now, their score would drop, in the case of children belonging to the two poorest income deciles and with schools closed for 10 months, from 362 points to 321, and in the case of the children of the two richest deciles,it would also drop from 456 to 426 points. In other words, the impact in both cases is downward, but naturally it is less for children from households with higher incomes. In the case of ALyC there is no similar simulation exercise, but there is no reason to think that it could be different, considering that, according to Unicef, between March 2020 and February 2021 schools have been closed between 180 and 211 days. In fact, 11 of the 20 most affected countries are from this region.In fact, 11 of the 20 most affected countries are from this region.In fact, 11 of the 20 most affected countries are from this region.

On the other hand, preliminary evidence indicates that the pandemic has had a huge psychological, affective and emotional impact on students and also on relevant segments of teachers, manifested for example in levels of stress, sadness, depression, anxiety; in the increase in the levels of domestic violence; in adolescent pregnancy, abuse, sexual violence and other dysfunctions, especially among the poorest and most marginalized population. For example, Harvard researchers (

The Wall Street Journal

, April 9, 2021) who have been following 224 children ages 7 to 15 found that around 67% of them had clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as behavioral problems such as hyperactivity and attention deficit, between November of 2020 and January 2021. This proportion represents a very significant increase from the 20% or 30%, respectively, that showed the same disorders before the pandemic, which, naturally, were more accentuated among children with a hospitalized family member or died from covid, or whose father or mother lost their job.

These are all compelling reasons to go back to school and it is urgent to have a clear, realistic, efficient and determined roadmap. Various institutions have made efforts to clarify actions and recommendations to work, first, on the return to presence in safe conditions; then in the evaluation, measurement and diagnosis of the psychological and socio-emotional and learning costs with which students and teachers will return to school; later in the remediation of what was lost in terms of the necessary curricular adaptations, the flexibility and / or expansion of calendars and the school day, tutorial interventions, the establishment of timely monitoring systems,support and prevention against risky behaviors or the gradual incorporation of socio-emotional education into the curriculum in a systematic way, among other things, and finally resuming the agenda in favor of quality education and the development of knowledge oriented towards the next two decades at least .

Of course, there will be tensions, doubts and contradictions among policy makers about this navigation map, which among other things requires more money, but none should prevent facing the great challenge of reopening schools now.

Otherwise, millions of children and young people will pay the costs of indecision.

Otto Granados

is President of the Advisory Council of the OEI, he was Secretary of Education of Mexico in the past Administration and

Chen Yidan

Visiting Global Fellow (2019-20) of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Source: elparis

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