Pandemic Threatens to Push 72 Million More Children into Learning Poverty (News and Research 224)
Pandemic Threatens to Push 72 Million More Children into Learning Poverty | COVID-related school closures risk pushing an additional 72 million primary school aged children into learning poverty—meaning that they are unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10—according to two new World Bank reports released today. The reports outline a new vision for learning and the investments and policies, including on education technology, that countries can implement today to realize this vision… The new report, Realizing the Future of Learning: From Learning Poverty to Learning for Everyone, Everywhere, lays out a vision for the future of learning that can guide countries today in their investments and policy reforms, so that they can build more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems and ensure that all children learn with joy, rigor, and purpose in school and beyond the school walls. The accompanying report, Reimagining Human Connections: Technology & Innovation at the World Bank, presents the World Bank’s new approach to guide investments in education technology, so that technology can truly serve as a tool to make education systems more resilient to catastrophic shocks like COVID-19 and help in reimagining the way education is delivered…
Bars or schools? How nations rank education in pandemic priorities | If education is the foundation of a functioning society, how should it be prioritized in a pandemic? The U.S. and Germany offer a tale of two approaches, pointing to the influence of culture on decision-making | …students in grades 1 through 12 affected by closures in 2020 could expect an average 3% lower income over their lifetimes… The most affected will be students who are most disadvantaged in the first place, says Harry Patrinos, practice manager at the World Bank’s education global practice. From the Spanish flu of 1918-1920 to World War II, losses have been traced decades later. “I worry that the longterm impact is going to be huge,” he says. “Past crises like influenza of 1918 and other catastrophes had lifetime impacts”… “During a crisis you have to ask yourself what is really important. On the question around reopening, do you open cinemas first or schools?” says Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. “These are values questions. Societies need to make tradeoffs between the present and the future, and they do that very differently…
School Tracking and Mental Health To understand how the type of education affects long-term mental health, we examine the effects of a comprehensive school reform on mental health-related hospitalizations and deaths. The reform postponed the tracking of students into vocational and academic schools from age 11 to 16, thus affecting the set of peers and curriculum to which these students were exposed. The reform was implemented gradually across Finnish municipalities between 1972 and 1977. We use difference-in-differences variation and administrative data. Our overall results show no discernible effects on mental health-related hospitalizations or deaths, but heterogeneity analysis shows an adverse effect on hospitalizations due to depression for females from highly-educated families…
Learning loss in USA: St. Paul, Minnesota high schoolers are failing 2 in 5 classes during distance learning; midway through the first quarter this fall, students were failing 39 percent of their high school classes, up from 19 percent last fall…
COVID Schools: Parents, Education Advocates Sue California Over Remote Learning
The importance of connecting Central Asia
The Pandemic Is Changing Our Children’s Lives for the Worse
Parent engagement has long been touted as a component of student success. In a new working paper, researchers … looked at results from two trials using different types of interventions in schools in Mexico. The first intervention provided parents with information and resources about how to support their students’ academically. The second intervention doubled the amount of grant money given to parent associations. The researchers found that the two approaches produced different results. The information and resources intervention increased parent engagement in school events significantly. It also resulted in more support for schoolwork at home and an improvement in student behavior. The grant money intervention resulted in a temporary increase in parent engagement but no significant change in parent support at home or student behavior. Interestingly, neither intervention positively affected student academic achievement. Lastly, the resource intervention increased parent trust in teachers while the grant money intervention decreased parent trust in teachers. The positive impact from the resource intervention was most pronounced in indigenous populations, who have historically been excluded from school conversations…
Education, economics and public policy 