While much attention has focused on reopening schools, the COVID-19 crisis presents a leapfrog moment to transform key elements of education systems, putting schools at the heart of social and economic recovery. New approaches by educators, parents, and even entire school systems to use education technology and other innovations are spreading across communities and bringing learning opportunities to disadvantaged young people. Given that COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last large-scale school disruption, it is imperative to build a more resilient education ecosystem, so that learning can continue when in-person instruction might not be possible. At this critical moment, it is now more important than ever to invest in innovations such as education technology and leapfrog progress—both during COVID-19 and beyond.

On September 14, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) hosted a webinar to discuss strategies, including around the effective use of education technology, for ensuring resilient schools in the long term and to launch a new education technology playbook “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?”

George Papandreou, former prime minister of Greece, provided opening remarks highlighting the important role of education in the recovery. Rebecca Winthrop, co-director of CUE, moderated a panel discussion on strategies for building resilient education systems with the current Minister of Education of Sierra Leone David Sengeh, Save the Children CEO Kevin Watkins, and NGO leader from Rajasthan, India and CUE Nonresident Scholar Urvashi Sahni.

Emiliana Vegas shared CUE’s newest ed-tech playbook, an evidence-based tool to help ministries of education realize the potential of education technology, leading into a discussion with the playbook co-authors, Alejandro Ganimian and Frederick Hess, moderated by CBS journalist Jearlyn Steele.

Viewers can submit questions via email to events@brookings.edu or via Twitter at #TransformingEdu.

       

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in at least one positive thing: a much greater appreciation for the importance of public schools. As parents struggle to work with their children at home due to school closures, public recognition of the essential caretaking role schools play in society has skyrocketed. As young people struggle 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, decisionmakers are having to devise new mechanisms for delivering essential services from food to education to health care.

We believe it is also valuable to look beyond these immediate concerns to what may be possible for education on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to imagine there will be another moment in history when the central role of education in the economic, social, and political prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population. Now is the time to chart a vision for how education can emerge stronger from this global crisis than ever before and propose a path for capitalizing on education’s newfound support in virtually every community across the globe.

It is in this spirit that we have developed this report. We intend to start a dialogue about 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. Ultimately, we argue that strong and inclusive public education systems are essential to the short- and long-term recovery of society and that there is an opportunity to leapfrog toward powered-up schools.

A powered-up school could be one that puts a strong public school at the center of a community and leverages the most effective partnerships, including those that have emerged during COVID-19, to help learners grow and develop a broad range of competencies and skills in and out of school. For example, such a school would crowd in supports, including technology, that would allow for allies in the community from parents to employers to reinforce, complement, and bring to life learning experiences in and outside the classroom. It would recognize and adapt to the learning that takes place beyond its walls, regularly assessing students’ skills and tailoring learning opportunities to meet students at their skill level. These new allies in children’s learning would complement and support teachers and could support children’s healthy mental and physical development. It quite literally is the school at the center of the community that powers student learning and development using every path possible (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Powered-up schools

Adapted from Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

While this vision is aspirational, it is by no means impractical. Schools at the center of a community ecosystem of learning and support is an idea whose time has come, and some of the emerging practices amid COVID-19, such as empowering parents to support their children’s education, should be sustained when the pandemic subsides. In this report we draw upon: 1) the latest evidence emerging on both the dire effects of the pandemic on children’s schooling and on the new strategies that hold promise for strengthening children’s education post-pandemic; 2) a series of dialogues between March to August 2020 with former heads of state and education leaders from around the globe on the big questions facing education in the pandemic response and recovery; and 3) our ongoing research on harnessing innovation to leapfrog education toward a more equitable and relevant learning ecosystem for all young people.

This central question has guided our inquiry: “Is it possible to realistically envision education emerging from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than it was before?” To spark the discussion around this question, we describe four key emerging trends resulting from the impact of COVID-19 on education globally and propose five actions to guide the transformation of education systems after the pandemic.

Four emerging global trends in education from COVID-19

1. Accelerating education inequality: Education inequality is accelerating in an unprecedented fashion, especially where before the pandemic it was already high

Even before COVID-19 left as many as 1.5 billion students out of school in early 2019, there was a global consensus that education systems in too many countries were not delivering the quality education needed to ensure that all have the skills necessary to thrive. It is the poorest children across the globe that carry the heaviest burden, with pre-pandemic analysis estimating 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. As economist Lant Pritchett explained in his 2013 book “The rebirth of education,” although countries in the developing world had largely succeeded in getting almost all primary-aged children into schools, too many students were not learning even the basic literacy and numeracy skills necessary to continue learning. 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. The Education Commission’s 2016 report, “The learning generation: Investing in education for a changing world,” emphasized that technology was changing the nature of work, and that growing skills gaps would stunt economic growth in low- and middle-income countries; it called for increasing investment in education in these countries.

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 that instruct only a few students at a time with agreed-upon teaching schedules and activities. These parents argue that the pods encourage social interaction, improve learning, and reduce the burden of child care during the pandemic. However, they often exclude lower income families, as they can cost up to $100 per hour.

There is nothing new about families doing all they can for their children’s education; one only has to look at the explosion of the $100 billion global tutoring market over the last decade. 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. On top of cross-country differences in access to remote learning opportunities, within-country differences are also staggering. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, during the COVID-19 school closures, 1 in 10 of the poorest children in the world’s largest economy had little or no access to technology for learning. And UNICEF estimates that 463 million children—at least one-third of the world total, 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 leapfrogging in education, as we discuss next.

2. A leapfrog moment: Innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems, and there is an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, can help young people get an education that prepares them for our changing times.

This unprecedented acceleration of education inequality requires new responses. In our ongoing work on education innovation, we have argued that there are examples of new strategies or approaches that could, if scaled up, have the potential to rapidly accelerate, or leapfrog, progress. Two years ago, in “Leapfrogging inequality: Remaking education to help young people thrive,” we set forth a leapfrog pathway laying out a map to harness education innovations to much more quickly close the gap in education inequality. We argued that at two decades into the 21st century, the 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 citizens in society. We defined education innovation as an idea or technology that is new to a current context, if not new to the world. And we proposed that those innovations that could help provide a broader menu of options for delivering learning were those with the potential to help leapfrog education, namely: 1) innovative pedagogical approaches alongside direct instruction to help young people not only remember and understand but analyze and create; 2) new ways of recognizing learning alongside traditional measures and pathways; 3) crowding in a diversity of people and places alongside professional teachers to help support learning in school; and 4) smart use of technology and data that allowed for real-time adaptation and did not simply replace analog approaches.

When we surveyed almost 3,000 education innovations across over 160 countries, we found that some innovations had the potential to help leapfrog progress, as defined along our four dimensions, and many did not. We also found that many of the promising innovations were on the margins of education systems and not at the center of how learning takes place. We argued that to rapidly accelerate progress and close the equity gaps in education, the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to young people would need to spend more time documenting, learning from, evaluating, and scaling those innovative approaches that held the most leapfrog 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. Based on a recent 59-country survey of educators and education administrators, Fernando Reimers and Andreas Schleicher note that: “The crisis has revealed the enormous potential for innovation that is dormant in many education systems.”¹ 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. Fortunately, across the world, communities are increasingly valuing the role that schools play, not only for student learning, but also for the livelihoods of educators, parents, and others, as we discuss below.

3. Rising public support: There is newfound 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. To underscore this sentiment of appreciation, Gabriel Zinny of the Buenos Aires government says: “Societies are recognizing that schools and teachers are heroes … 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. Just recently in Buenos Aires, families went out to their balconies to applaud not only doctors and nurses, but teachers.”

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. The global education community is also mobilizing from UNESCO’s broad consortium with the newly formed Save Our Future campaign that brings together a broad coalition of actors in the international development sphere to advocate for sustained education funding, especially among international aid donors, for low- and middle-income countries.

Ultimately, today for the first time since the advent of universal education, the majority of parents and families around the world share the long-standing concerns of the most vulnerable families: They are in urgent need of a safe and good enough school to send their children to. 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. And they are forging, at least for a moment, common cause between many of the parents of the 1.9 billion school-aged children around the world. As a result, new stakeholders are getting involved in supporting education, an emerging trend we describe next.

4. New education allies: The pandemic has galvanized 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, schools formed new relationships with community health and social welfare organizations, media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with nonprofits and governments, and local nonprofits and businesses contributed to supporting children’s learning in new ways.

The idea of children’s education being supported by an ecosystem of learning opportunities in and outside of school is not new among educationalists. The community schools movement envisions schools as the hub of children’s education and development, with strong partnerships among other sectors from health to social welfare. Schools remain open all day and are centers for community engagement, services, and problem-solving. Proponents of “life-wide” learning approaches point out that children from birth to 18 years of age spend only up to 20 percent of their waking hours at school and argue that the fabric of the community offers many enriching learning experiences alongside school. In our own work on leapfrogging in education, we argue that diversifying the educators and places where children learn can crowd in innovative pedagogical approaches and complement and enrich classroom-based learning. More recently, the concept of local learning ecoystems has emerged to describe learning opportunities provided through a web of collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, and government agencies that often pair direct instruction with innovative pedagogies allowing for experimentation.

There is evidence ranging from the U.K. to Nicaragua that young people engaging in diverse learning opportunities outside of school—from classic extracurricular activities such as music lessons to nonformal education programming—can be quite helpful in boosting the skills and academic competencies of marginalized children. But until recently there has been only limited empirical examples of local learning ecosystems. Emerging models are appearing in places such as Catalonia, Spain with its Educacio360 initiative and Western Pennsylvania, where several U.S. school districts have engaged in a multiyear Remake Learning initiative to offer life-wide learning opportunities to families and 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.

Five proposed actions to guide the transformation of education systems

Given these four emerging trends and building on previous research, we put forth five proposed actions for decisionmakers to seize this moment to transform education systems to better serve all children and youth, especially the most disadvantaged. We argue that because of their responsibility to all children, public schools must be at the center of any education system that seeks to close widening inequality gaps. We highlight the creative use of technology—especially through mobile phone communication with parents—as examples of strategies that have emerged amid the pandemic that, if sustained, could complement and strengthen children’s learning in public schools. We acknowledge that the highlighted examples are just emerging, and there is more to learn about how they work and other examples to consider as events unfold. For this reason, we propose guidance for identifying which new approaches should potentially be continued. We argue that innovations that support and strengthen the instructional core, namely the interactions in the teaching and learning process, will have a greater chance at sustainably supporting a powered-up school. We also argue that the urgency of the moment calls for an adaptive and iterative approach to learning what works in real time; hence, improvement science principles should accompany any leapfrogging effort to build evidence and correct course in real time.

1. Leverage public schools: Put public schools at the center of education systems given their essential role in equalizing opportunity across dimensions within society

Public schools play a critical role in reducing inequality and strengthening social cohesion. By having the mandate to serve all children and youth regardless of background, public schools in many countries can bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and needs, providing the social benefit of allowing individuals to grow up with a set of common values and knowledge that can make communities more cohesive and unified.

The private sector has an important role to play in education—from advocating that governments invest in high-quality public schools because they help power economies and social stability to helping test innovative pedagogical models in independent schools. In many low-income countries, low-cost private schools have expanded in recent years, helping to address the challenge that fiscally- and/or capacity-constrained governments have long faced in expanding access to education. Many families in developing countries, ranging from Chile to India to Nigeria to Kenya, opt to send their children to these low-cost, often for-profit, private schools. Indeed, the expansion of private schools in low-income countries has in some locations played a role in increasing universal access to primary education.

However, there are a range of concerns with private schools, both in terms of their effectiveness as well as their impact on inequality. For example, the extent to which private schools might provide a better education, the so-called “private school advantage,” has been a long-standing debate. While it is difficult to isolate the impact of private schools, a recent analysis of over 40 countries that participated in the OECD’s 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) concludes that public schools outperform both publicly subsidized private schools, as well as independent schools, in a majority of countries.

In addition, in many countries, the expansion of private schools has not been accompanied by regulations to guide student selection processes or the fees schools may charge (which also directly affect selection). A troubling unintended consequence of the unregulated expansion of private schooling is an increase in segregation of students by socioeconomic and other background characteristics. In many countries, private schools select students based on multiple factors, including academic ability, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic background. As a result, private schools tend to be less diverse than public schools. Further, entry into private school may not be entirely merit-based. In middle- and high-income countries, the private sector has stepped in to provide services to help students gain admission into selective education institutions. Since these services are costly, they select for wealthier families that can afford the help to get their students into the “right” schools, further excluding low-income families. In the U.S., for example, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that public schools are much more diverse than private schools: In 2017, 67 percent of private school students were white, compared with just 48 percent of their public school counterparts.

A growing body of research shows that segregation can have a negative impact on children’s academic and social outcomes. For example, in Chile, where a school choice program was introduced in 1981, there has been a steady exodus from public schools over time, and today more than half of its students are enrolled in private schools. Not only did national average test scores stagnate, but unfettered school choice also led to student segregation into private and public schools based on parental education and income. Achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students began to decline after a reform to the per-student subsidy (or voucher)—called the Preferential School Subsidy Law—was introduced in 2008. The reform introduced higher value per-student subsidies to schools serving low-income students and required schools who accepted the higher value vouchers to take part in a new accountability system. Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged households soon improved their performance, leading to an increase in national average test scores and a reduction in the income-based achievement gaps.

In many countries, a central debate is whether education should be seen as a public good or a private consumable. Advocates of expanding private school choice see education as a private consumable. Advocates who argue that education is a public good put forth that schools are about more than preparing individuals for the labor market, and that they have an irreplaceable role in generating multiple public benefits, including public health and in developing citizens to participate in democratic societies.

We follow Levin (1987) in arguing that schools play a crucial role in fostering the skills individuals need to succeed in a rapidly changing labor market, and they play a major role in equalizing opportunities for individuals of diverse backgrounds. Moreover, schools address a variety of social needs that serve communities, regions, and entire nations. And while a few private schools can and do play these multiple roles, public education is the main conduit for doing so at scale. Hence, we argue that public schools must be at the center of any effort to build back better or, in the words of UNICEF’s chief of education Robert Jenkins, “build back equal,” after the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A laser focus on the instructional core: Emphasize the instructional core, the heart of the teaching and learning process.

To develop powered-up schools, it will be essential to figure out how to identify what strategies, among the many that communities are deploying amid the pandemic, should be sustained to power up a school as the crisis subsides. We argue that decisionmakers should ground their actions on rigorous evidence of what works to improve student learning, as well as how school change happens and ultimately should include a heavy emphasis on the heart of the teaching and learning process, what is often called the instructional or pedagogical core. Indeed, how educators engage with students and instructional materials, including education technology, is crucial for learning given the strong evidence that educators are the most important school-side factor in student learning.²

In our forthcoming CUE publication co-authored by Alejandro Ganimian, Emiliana Vegas, and Frederick Hess, “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?,” the authors note that significant research has shown that one of the main reasons many education innovations and reforms have failed, despite serious effort, is that they have paid insufficient attention to the instructional core. While there have been several variations and terms associated with the instructional core, at its heart is the understanding that it is the interactions among educators, learners, and educational materials that matter most in improving student learning.³ For example, higher quality learning materials—whether they are new online resources or revamped curriculum—will not on their own improve student learning. Only when educators use them to improve their instruction can students have an improved experience. The authors build on this model of the instructional core to integrate parents, given not only their predominant role in children’s lives but also the new ways in which they have supported children’s learning amid the pandemic (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The instructional core

Using the instructional core as a guide can help us identify what types of new strategies or innovations could become community-based supports in children’s learning journey. Indeed, even after only several months of experimentation around the globe on keeping learning going amid a pandemic, there are some clear strategies that have the potential, if continued, to contribute to a powered-up school, and many of them involve engaging learners, educators, and parents in new ways using some form of technology.

Grounding decisions on existing evidence is necessary, but not sufficient. It will also be essential to ask people—students, families, teachers, school leaders—what their experience has been and what new educational practices they hope will continue post pandemic. The Just Ask Us Movement in the U.S., for example, aims to discover and share at least a million student and family perspectives on how school systems should respond to the pandemic and its effects. Communities will certainly identify important strategies that fall outside the instructional core, such as essential collaboration between health and social protection services, that could be vital to developing a powered-up school. For example, Sierra Leone’s new “radical inclusion” policy aims to bring together health and banking services to help marginalized girls stay in school. Or in the U.S., where David Miyashiro, the superintendent of Cajon Valley, a school district with one of the highest populations of refugee students in California, has heard from parents that they need more help with child care and hence has established a new Extended Day Program.

While we focus in this report primarily on those innovations that support the interactions in the instructional core, we recognize that there will be a myriad of strategies needed to support marginalized children and bring a powered-up school to life. Ultimately, communities should have a view on what these strategies should be. Grounding decisions in the lived experience of the people at the center of education, especially students and teachers, is one of the central principles of designing for scale and will be an essential component of developing a powered-up school. When asked what her one piece of advice would be to heads of state today, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, said “Listen to your people, they may not be educated but they are knowledgeable.”

3. Harness education technology: Deploy education technology to power up schools long term in a way that meets the teaching and learning needs of students and educators; otherwise, technology risks becoming a costly distraction.

Leveraging technology to help with educational continuity is a topic front and center in schools around the world. Countries are using whatever they have at their disposal—from radios to televisions to computers to mobile phones. For many families, accessing educational content through technology is not easy. For example, a nationally representative survey in Senegal conducted approximately three weeks after schools closed found that children were far more likely to continue their education through work assigned by their parents than accessed through any technology. Less than 11 percent of survey respondents said students accessed educational material using either radio, television, or web-based resources.⁴

This is not necessarily surprising given education’s past record of using technology to support learning. Indeed, while there has been the expectation that ed tech would radically transform teaching and learning, the impact of ed-tech interventions on student learning has been mostly disappointing.⁵ But, as put forth in “Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all?,” this is most likely because most ed-tech interventions have paid limited attention to the instructional core. However, when we consider rigorous evidence on the comparative advantages of technology vis-a-vis traditional instruction, we find that ed tech can help improve learning by supporting the crucial interactions in the instructional core through: (1) scaling up quality instruction (by, for example, prerecorded lessons of high-quality teaching); (2) facilitating differentiated instruction (through, for example, computer-adaptive learning or live one-on-one tutoring); (3) expanding opportunities for student practice; and (4) increasing student engagement (through, for example, videos and games).

While we envision powered-up schools after COVID-19 using technology in these four ways to improve learning, we 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. For example, from Chile to the United Kingdom, we have seen teachers coming together to rapidly lend their expertise to develop relevant remote-learning content for students. In Chile, a network of teachers came together to develop a series of 30-minute radio lessons for secondary students who had no access to online learning. The initiative, which the teachers dubbed La Radio Enseña, is supported by the civil society organization Enseña Chile, and the radio lessons went from being distributed by a handful of radio stations to over 240 only one month after schools closed. Similarly in the U.K., a group of teachers worried about learning continuity for their students when schools were about to close, developed within two weeks an online classroom and resource hub to help educators and parents help their children learn. As of the end of July, users accessed lessons 17 million times and this initiative, called Oak National Academy, has been a significant feature of the government’s remote learning strategy.

Listening to educators as technology is deployed for learning and responding to their concerns with real-time iteration is also essential in helping make ed-tech rollouts successful. In response to the school closures, Peru’s ministry of education embarked on an ambitious national-scale remote-learning strategy called Aprendo en Casa using multiple channels—television, radio, and online resources. Curriculum-aligned lessons were recorded, and, to make the content engaging, the ministry hired actors to serve as content facilitators. After the initial rollout, the government requested feedback from school leaders, teachers, and parents, which led to the inclusion of a teacher and a student in each lesson. Additionally, reporting requirements of teachers were initially quite onerous leading to overburdening already stretched teachers and were adapted to a more manageable streamlined approach. Feedback from users was solicited regularly, not only on usage (which was reported to be as high as 74 percent among students), but also on quality (59 percent of parents reported being satisfied with the program). In addition, over 90 percent of teachers reported having been in regular communication with principals and students.⁶ Interestingly, a very recent study confirms that teachers’ sense of success was higher in school systems that had strong remote working conditions, including communication, training, collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts.

These examples are just a few of the education technology experiments underway during the pandemic. Some rely on good internet and connectivity, and the OECD and HundrED have curated a list of online learning resources for schools. Others utilize offline technology or basic cellphones to facilitate learning for those less-resourced communities. Ultimately, the evidence is clear that there is no single “ed-tech” initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere because school systems vary in multiple ways. However, after COVID-19, one thing is certain: School systems that are best prepared to use education technology effectively will be better positioned to continue offering quality education in the face of school closures. Learning about those strategies that have emerged due to the closures and that have forced school leaders, educators, parents, and students to engage with technology in new and productive way will be important for developing powered-up schools in the long term. One such strategy is how technology, often through low-tech texts and phone calls, has helped engage parents in a whole new way, which is where we turn to next.

4. Parent engagement: Forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers.

Rarely is the topic of parent engagement at the top of the “to do” list for education administrators and educators whose days are filled with numerous decisions—from bell schedules to safety to lesson plans—around how to deliver education to children. In the recent OECD-Harvard survey of educators and education administrators across 59 countries on school reopening strategies, three-quarters of the respondents stated that the reopening plans were developed collaboratively with teachers, but only 25 percent said that collaboration included parents as well.

This 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. Practitioners working with schools and families to build strong parent-teacher relationships frequently point out that strategies for community outreach and collaboration are frequently missing in teacher preparation programs and are given short shrift in professional development courses for administrators. Additionally, researchers are much more likely to focus their study on school-based factors such as curriculum development or assessment policies. In a recent search of the Education Resources Information Center database, which has close to 20 years of articles, the citation “teachers” was used almost four times the amount that the citation “parents” was used.

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. From Asia to Africa to North America, examples are emerging of new ways of partnering with parents and families that provide real promise for supporting children’s learning in and out of school over the long term.

For example, creative mechanisms for real-time guidance to parents on their children’s education are popping up around the globe using the low-tech but, in many places, ubiquitous ability to make a phone call. In Argentina, the government of the State of Buenos Aires developed a call-in center staffed by the Ministry of Education to provide real-time information and guidance to any parent with concerns or information requests about their children’s education during the pandemic. In the first five months, over 100,000 calls were received.⁷ In some places, civil society organizations are collaborating to provide this type of live, real-time support to parents. In the U.S. for example, the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative, a coalition of over 50 local organizations serving families and children, has created a family hotline to help provide parents and families with guidance and resources to assist with their children’s learning. In its first month, the hotline received 1,000 calls.

Mobile phones have also helped parents directly facilitate their children’s learning in India. In Himachal Pradesh, a state of almost 7 million people, the government is using a multilayered approach to remote learning that engages parents in a new way. In response to pandemic-related school closures, in April the government launched the Har Ghar Pathshala initiative. The initiative developed thousands of videos and digital worksheets and then deployed 48,000 teachers to connect to all parents in the state through WhatsApp. The goal was to develop a clear understanding among parents of the materials children should be accessing, including taking a weekly WhatsApp assessment that would come to their phones. Students themselves are unlikely to have electronic devices and a family phone—the main avenue for accessing online learning—so the materials are shared between parents and the children in the household. Over 92 percent of parents engaged with teachers through “ePTMs,” electronic Parent Teacher Meetings, and ultimately 70-80 percent of students in the state have engaged with the digital materials and 50 percent of students are taking the WhatsApp assessments.⁸

Perhaps the most significant part of the government’s strategy, and the component that holds the most promise for powering up schools long term, has been building a relationship between students’ caregivers and their teachers and schools.⁹ “Until now, in India we have not been able to establish the parent-to-teacher connection for first-generation learners at scale,” said Prachi Windlass, director of India Programs at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. “The pandemic has brought to light how parents of first-generation learners can—and now clearly do—help with their children’s learning.”¹⁰ Parents themselves are eager to continue being allies in their children’s learning, with 88 percent of parents saying they would like to attend future ePTMs.

It is not only the government that is realizing what is possible when they invite parents and families into the teaching and learning process. Civil society organizations such as Pratham pivoted during school closures to engage directly with parents and families on children’s learning by using a combination of daily WhatsApp or text messages and weekly phone calls. “While we are further away physically, we have gotten closer,” says Samyukta Subramanian, a Pratham team lead and former CUE Echidna Global Scholar. The text messages provide activities to keep children engaged in learning and can include fun and interactive activities such as asking children to count how many teeth their parents have or how many buckets of water their family uses and text the answers back. The Pratham staff members call each family once a week to see how the activities are going, and by June they were sending over 100,000 text messages and reaching parents in over 12,000 rural communities. Noting that this approach to engaging parents is something they hope to continue after schools reopen, the Pratham Education Foundation CEO Rukmini Banerji says she hopes “there is a celebration for parents when children return to school to recognize all that they have done to continue their children’s learning and to give parents the confidence to stay engaged.”

The Ministry of Basic Education of Botswana has also learned the power of harnessing mobile phone technology to partner with parents and boost children’s learning. Prior to the school closures, the Ministry had been working closely with a coalition of partners to scale up an approach to teaching literacy and numeracy that involved interactive teaching methods geared to students’ learning levels rather than their grade. This Teaching at the Right Level initiative brings together a range of partners, including a Botswanan nonprofit called Young 1ove working with the government and university partners to implement and evaluate the approach, and the Real-Time Scaling Lab team at Brookings to help guide and document the scaling process.

During the closures, Young 1ove worked with the government to rapidly pivot from working with teachers to deliver literacy and numeracy lessons to working with parents. They reached out to over 7,000 parents and invited them to take part in remote learning during school closures—60 percent of whom accepted the invitation. While they tested several approaches, the most successful included a weekly math problem sent to parents by text message and followed up with a weekly 15-20 minute phone call. On the phone call, Young 1ove facilitators would ask parents to get their child and put the phone on speaker so they could ask if they had seen the math problem and then discuss it. A rapid and rigorous evaluation of the intervention, which included a control group, showed startling results. For the children whose parents received text messages and phone calls from Young 1ove, the drop in innumeracy levels was 52 percent. Clearly, when invited in as partners to their children’s learning, parents in Botswana also showed how powerful their partnership can be for children’s schooling.

While likely surprising to many, these examples of the capability of low-income or marginalized parents and families to be powerful allies in support of their children’s learning aligns with existing evidence on effective parent engagement and will come as no surprise to the select group of practitioners, researchers, and advocates working on this issue around the globe. In the U.S., for example, several decades of research have shown that parents, especially for low-income students, have a positive influence on student academic achievement largely through equipping parents to support their children’s learning at home. Rigorous evaluations in Ghana and the U.K. also demonstrate this.¹¹

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. A thread running across the above examples is schools inviting families to be allies in their children’s learning by using easy-to-understand information communicated through mechanisms that adapt to parents’ schedules and that provide parents with an active but feasible role. The nature of the invitation and the relationship is what is so essential to bringing parents on board.

Getting this relationship right is no easy task, and there are many dimensions to parental involvement in their children’s schooling, which can also reflect tension and power dynamics active in society writ large.¹² Schools and teachers can find it difficult to navigate the range of expectations, many of them conflicting. At times, engaging parents does not always lead to desirable outcomes for children’s learning. For example, a randomized control trial using longitudinal data in Ghana’s preschools found marked improvement in student outcomes that were sustained over several years in schools that received a yearlong teacher training and coaching program aimed at making classrooms more student-centered. The program incorporated play-based learning approaches and influenced the instructional core by improving teacher-child interactions.¹³ But this improvement was only seen when the busy working-class parents of the students were not informed about the shift in the teaching approach. In the schools where the teacher training was paired with discussion sessions with parents about the purpose of the training and what the new teaching methods entailed, the opposite happened. The parent awareness sessions counteracted any of the benefits of the teacher training, and the children’s outcomes were worse than those in the control group. Ultimately, the parents who took part in the information sessions had a cooling effect on the teachers, leading them to stop using many of the techniques learned in the training. The researchers posited that rather than building support for the new pedagogical approach, the information sessions, which were infrequent and passive, raised concern among parents that the teaching was becoming less rigorous. This phenomena is not unique to Ghana. Through our own Brookings research initiative on parents and education, we have found stories of this parental cooling effect in interviews with educators and education leaders across 50 countries.

Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers. It is an opportunity for parents and families to gain insight into the skill that is involved in teaching and for teachers and schools to realize what powerful allies parents can be. Parents around the world are not interested in becoming their child’s teacher, but they are, based on several large-scale surveys, asking to be engaged in a different more active way in the future. Perhaps the most important insight for supporting a powered-up school is challenging the mindset of those in the education sector that parents and families with the least opportunities are not capable or willing to help their children learn.

5. An iterative approach: Embrace the principles of improvement science required to evaluate, course correct, document, and scale new approaches that can help power up schools over time.

As we have seen above, there are some promising new approaches that have the potential to enable a broader learning ecosystem to support children’s schooling. However, in most countries around the world, there is a long road to travel before we fully understand how to leverage technology or transform parent engagement to realize a powered-up school for each community. The speed and depth of change mean that it will be essential to take an iterative approach to learning what works, for whom, and under what enabling conditions. In other words, this is a moment to employ the principles of improvement science. Traditional research methods will need to be complemented by real-time documentation, reflection, quick feedback loops, and course correction. Rapid sharing of early insights and testing of potential change ideas will need to come alongside the longer-term rigorous reviews. CUE’s own work on system transformation and scaling change in education provides one possible model for doing just this. Through our Real-Time Scaling Labs, teams of practice-oriented researchers are working to scale and sustain transformative change in education systems. These teams learn, document, and share emerging insights in rapid, iterative cycles making sure peers across the different components of an education system are included in the process and that failures, one of the most valuable insights, are documented alongside successes.

A key principle underlying the Real-time Scaling Labs is that scaling is an iterative process that requires ongoing adaptation based on new data and changes in the broader environment. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed brought this reality front and center. In the Real-time Scaling Labs, two categories of adaptation have emerged: (1) adaptations and simplifications to the model being scaled itself and (2) adaptations and adjustments to the scaling approach and strategy. While both are critical to scaling, adapting the scaling strategy is especially challenging, requiring not only timely data, a thorough understanding of the context, and space for reflection, but also willingness and capacity to act on this learning and make changes accordingly.

Conclusion: Having a vision of the change we want to see matters and can help guide discussion, debate, and—ultimately—action.

We acknowledge that emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources. But we argue that 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 leapfrog education forward.

Note: The authors are grateful to Brian Fowler for his valuable research assistance in preparing this paper.

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Africa is a young continent and getting younger by the year. By 2050, half of all the people in Africa will be under the age of 25 and it will be home to a full 25 percent of all the world’s working-age population.

But this tremendous asset—a continent full of energetic, bright, and creative young people—will only be the “demographic dividend” that the African Union aspires to if countries invest in the education and skills of all their children and youth. This task is much more difficult today given the economic downturn on the continent in the wake of COVID-19.

Luckily, there are experiments taking place in African education systems that started before the pandemic hit that can provide inspiration for today’s challenges. For example, Ghana’s initiative to radically expand access to senior secondary schooling, especially to the highest quality schools in the country, can shed light on how to increase inclusion without investing in the costly endeavor of building new schools. As countries in the region struggle to address the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic—from public health needs to rising poverty to increasing social instability—finding more cost-efficient ways to help the regions’ aspiring youth enter or finish secondary school is important in the short and long term.

But what has been Ghana’s approach and how was it done?

A Leapfrog experiment: Rapidly expanding access to top quality schools

In 2017, Ghana started nationwide implementation of its Free Senior High School policy. The initiative was spearheaded by President Nana Addo Akuffo who was deeply concerned about the one-third of students that the government estimated passed the exam to attend senior secondary school but could not afford to attend. In a recent conversation, Dr. Matthew Prempeh, Ghana’s minister of education, describes the process of finding a pathway to deliver on the president’s promise of free senior secondary school for all youth.

You don’t develop a country based off only elitism. You develop a country where the masses of the populations are trained and educated to a level that they can all lead productive lives in the country.

“When I came into my position, I had seven months to figure out how to deliver free senior secondary education before the start of the next school year,” says Dr. Prempeh. To access senior secondary school in Ghana, students need to pass the Basic Certificate of Education Examination (BECE) and choose a school they wish to attend, which could be anywhere in the country. With 85 percent of children enrolled in the nine years of required basic education that runs through junior secondary school, the prospect of free senior secondary was hugely popular with the country’s youth.

The largest problem Minister Prempeh faced in realizing this vision was that there simply were not enough seats in the schools that students wanted to attend, and it would take too long to build the infrastructure needed. While Ghana currently has 700 public senior secondary schools, 55 are widely recognized as the top schools in the country. These are the schools from which top universities fill their ranks and businesses and government agencies fill their leadership positions.

In the first year of free secondary education, 362,000 qualified students were enrolled, which included 80,000 more children who otherwise could not have afforded it. In the second year, over 490,000 students passed their BECE exams, but there were only 290,000 classroom seats. What was to be done with the extra 182,000 students? One option was simply to change the rules mid-stream and only accept those students with the highest exam grades to match the number of seats available. Advocates of this approach argued that it would give the government time to build classrooms, and over time all of Ghana’s young people who passed the BECE exam could enroll.

This approach would likely have been acceptable to the families of the top-scoring students, but these students would most likely have come from the wealthy families and private schools. But what about the poor student from a rural area whose family sacrificed everything to help her pass the BECE? “You don’t develop a country based off only elitism. You develop a country where the masses of the populations are trained and educated to a level that they can all lead productive lives in the country,” says Minister Prempeh. With this commitment to equity, the Ministry took up the challenge of finding a way for all eligible students to attend senior secondary. “I wanted to embrace the leapfrog mentality and see how we could tackle access and quality at the same time. It is not so complex. We just had to know how to count and measure, and if we did that correctly, we could get it right,” says the Minister.

The solution? Year-round schooling for schools with fewer seats than students interested in attending. Inspired by the experience of his deputy minister, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, who earlier in his career had led year-round schooling initiatives in the U.S., Minister Prempeh and his team got to work measuring and counting. For the most popular—and highest quality—schools in the country, students were assigned to either the “green” or “gold” track and alternated attending school 11 weeks at a time with vacation breaks in between. This way, by adjusting the length of the school day and the school calendar and even increasing teaching hours from 1,080 to 1,140 per year, Ghana plunged into free universal secondary education. Today, the ministry is beginning to build more schools to ease congestion and ultimately sees year-round school as a temporary measure.

The rollout of year-round schooling was less than smooth. Parents and students alike expressed a range of concerns: caring for children during the many school breaks, frustration with siblings in different tracks—making family calendars difficult—and concern about how the frequent breaks would affect learning. Admitting that there could have been better communication to families and students, Minister Prempeh defends the decision nonetheless: “Whose child was supposed to wait to enroll in top senior secondary schools?” He argues that most of the concerns came from families whose children traditionally attended the top schools.

The need to continue investing in young people

While the verdict is still out on how this has impacted student learning, the ministry has partnered with ID Insights and others to document and evaluate the program, and this innovative approach is likely to be a good one with lessons for today when all education systems are struggling to do more with less. In addition, any strategy that provides for more inclusive and equitable access to education across elite and marginalized groups, especially at the secondary level, helps fend off social unrest. In fact, researchers argue that equitably expanding access to educational opportunities can “breed peace” and in some cases reduce the risk of conflict by two-thirds. This is something many leaders across the continent who are worried today about mounting instability, especially among frustrated youth, would do well to take note.

According to Minister Prempeh, Ghana’s top senior secondary schools, many of which are long-standing boarding schools, have long played a special role in helping build social cohesion in the country. Over the decades, these schools became the place where the best and brightest of Ghana—from all over the country and from different tribes and traditions—would come and spend their formative years. Citing his own experience as a student, Minister Prempeh describes the strong bonds developed in these schools, “We feel a strong affiliation to our school that rises above tribal differences and we learned to work together and contribute to Ghana the country.” Perhaps this has played a crucial role in Ghana’s long record of peace and stability across over 100 tribes while each of its neighboring countries has struggled with civil war.

Indeed, now is not the time to back off from investing in Africa’s young people. “The current president believes that it is not resources that make a nation but human beings,” says Minister Prempeh. Ghana’s youth would agree with him.

       

Hill opened the conversation by noting the particular relevance of civic education and service given the current national spotlight on racial discrimination. Haines agreed that civic engagement can play a key role in “helping us to unite and to address some of the unacceptable racial and economic inequities that exist in the United States.”

Discussing the drastic federal funding disparities between STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and civic education, panelists remarked that civic education should be as highly prioritized as other academic competencies. According to Perry, “the advancement of academic skills void of democratic principles will have the country move further into a land of anomie and descent.” Regarding models of civic education internationally, Winthrop emphasized that there are already great models within the U.S. that should be better funded and nationally scaled.

Brigety argued that we do not lack knowledge of the benefits of civic education and public service, but there is insufficient leadership and political will to implement the necessary policy changes. Additionally, he scrutinized the use of education to strengthen the civic fabric of the nation, explaining that “civics for some people actually sounds like indoctrination to others because it presumes that there is a right way for us to approach the organization of our society.” Winthrop added that there is a larger consensus about the value of civic education in the K-12 space than at the university level, while Reeves commented that references to a shared civic fabric “can be used as a cloak, as a way to cover up and to disguise the kinds of structural, hard inequalities that so many Americans face.”

The importance of combatting structural inequalities to reinvigorate civic engagement was a central theme. When it comes to democratic values, “it is better to show than to tell,” Perry urged. “Society is better off when students see equity in funding and diversity amongst the ranks of educational systems,” rather than when they hear abstract lessons about civic values. Winthrop agreed, adding that there is both an “explicit” curriculum — what is officially taught in classrooms — and a “hidden” one. It is through this hidden curriculum, she said, that systemic racism can often “keep kids from having an equal opportunity experience,” in policing and school disciplinary policy, for instance.

Likewise, Reeves pointed out that a recurring issue with public service programs, such as AmeriCorps, is their inaccessibility due to the low compensation they offer. Making public service more attractive and financially feasible for people of all backgrounds would have cascading positive impacts. As Koppell argued, if we adopt the idea that public service can be a mechanism by which “we bring people together, provide skills, get people on an educational pathway, I think we have the nuggets of a broad solution that we can get behind.”

       

The protests raging across the United States in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death all call for an end to systemic racism and inequality, which have been alive and well since the very founding of the United States. There is much that needs to be done to address systemic racism from police reform to opening ladders of economic opportunity. Education too has a role to play.

The strategy of “divide and conquer” has been used for literally thousands of years to expand empires and extend control of authoritarian leaders. The military strategy of Nazi Germany was, as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis recently so eloquently reminded us, to divide and conquer, and the American response was “in unity there is strength.” This applies not only to military strategy and morale but also to the fabric of society and our ability as Americans to bridge our differences and connect with each other. It is why after World War II, a U.N. organization dedicated to education was founded, stating “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

This remains true to this day and it is why education in its broadest sense must be a part of the solution to build unity across our country. Education does play a crucial role in social mobility and ensuring economic opportunity and it is why so many school districts across the U.S. are concerned with helping all young people develop academic mastery and 21st century job skills such as digital literacy, creativity, and teamwork. This is why there are such deep concerns about equity of access to quality schools and the disturbing legacy of tracking African American students into less prestigious avenues of study.

But education also plays a powerful role in shaping worldviews, connecting members of a community who might have never met before, and imagining the world we want. It is this power to shape values and beliefs that has made education susceptible to manipulation by those who want to divide and conquer (e.g., why extremists such as the Taliban in Afghanistan prioritized interfering in education as a top priority for achieving their agenda). Hence it is this power that we must turn to in an effort to fight inequality and racism. In 1996, a UNESCO global commission chaired by Jacques De Lors released a report—now affectionately known in education circles as the “De Lors Report”—and spelled out the four purposes of education:

1. Learning to know. A broad general knowledge with the opportunity to work in depth on a small number of subjects.
2. Learning to do. To acquire not only occupational skills but also the competence to deal with many situations and to work in teams.
3. Learning to be. To develop one’s personality and to be able to act with growing autonomy, judgment, and personal responsibility.
4. Learning to live together. By developing an understanding of other people and an appreciation of interdependence.

These four purposes all remain urgent and relevant today but it is the fourth, learning to live together, that we must as a country pay more attention to. Luckily there are many in the education community that have for years been working on helping young people develop the mindsets and skills to live together. A number of organizations have long included fighting systemic racism in this effort, working tirelessly and more often than not with little visibility and recognition. Some of the best places to begin exploring this work include the nonprofit education organization Facing History, Facing Ourselves, which has been working for the past 45 years with teachers and schools across the United States to combat bigotry and hate and help build understanding across difference. Education International, a federation of the world’s teacher organizations and unions, has put forward the top 25 lessons from the teaching profession for delivering education that supports democracy for all and hence must foster inclusion and fight racism. More well-known to most Americans is Sesame Street, the children’s media organization that has for generations modeled tolerance to America’s youngest children.

On Saturday, June 6, Sesame Street and CNN will host a town-hall meeting titled “Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism.” Finally, the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture has a host of resources for parents and families, schools and educators, and young people and adults for talking about race.  

As Brookings President John R. Allen so eloquently stated in his recent piece on the need to condemn racism and come together, the leadership for this is not going to come from national political leaders, but every teacher, principal, school superintendent, and parent of students can do their part to make sure education is playing its part and contributing to all of us learning to live together.

       

As governments and philanthropic bodies move their spend to urgent social protection and economic revival programs, how do we protect education budgets, which in many countries and states were already stretched?

A panel of global education experts believes a new global narrative for education—one that clearly demonstrates the key role education will play in our recovery—is needed at the individual, family, community, national, and global levels.

The Center for Universal Education co-hosted this event with LearnIt.

       

African political leaders have their hands full: rising COVID-19 infections, fragile health systems, increasing food insecurity, and, in some areas, growing social unrest. And as government revenues dry up amid the continent’s sharpest economic contraction in decades, the resources available to address these challenges are dwindling.

For now, cash-strapped governments and their international development partners are rightly putting public health, social protection, and economic stimulus first. But they appear to be forgetting one of their most important tools: education.

Recent analyses indicate that some African governments are cutting education budgets in response to the pandemic—and if the 2008 global financial crisis is any guide, donors will do so, too. And whereas governments were able to maintain education budgets during the 2008 crisis by issuing debt, the continent’s current public-debt burdens are already heavy, and borrowing conditions are unfavorable.

But education is one of the largest and most consequential government activities in Africa, and policymakers and aid agencies ignore it at the continent’s peril. Indeed, by continuing to support education during the pandemic, governments can strengthen their countries’ immediate COVID-19 response and long-term recovery in four key ways.

First, COVID-19 is hitting Africa’s most vulnerable people the hardest: Food insecurity has increased alarmingly, and the economic recession is likely to push an additional 23 million people into extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. But once schools reopen, they will be powerful vehicles for delivering social protection to families that need it most, which will encourage attendance. For example, school programs that provide take-home food rations and cash transfer support incentivize families with minimal resources to send their children to school while providing them with much-needed nutritional and economic support.

Similarly, the education sector plays an important role in supporting the health sector’s pandemic response. For example, life-saving COVID-19 health messages—from proper handwashing techniques to wearing face masks—can form part of national distance-learning programs. This strategy of empowering children with knowledge in order to change their families’ behavior has proven effective in past public-health campaigns, and countries such as Tanzania, Ghana, and Uganda have already adopted it for COVID-19. In addition, schools have also regularly served as important front-line sites for public-health interventions such as vaccination campaigns.

Second, whereas inadequate relief to the most vulnerable segments of the population risks igniting protest and fueling civil unrest, education continuity can contribute to social stability. Already during the pandemic, young people and women in South Africa, Malawi, and Nigeria have taken to the streets to protest shortages of food and other basic necessities. But by doubling down on schools’ ability to disseminate social protection assistance, governments can deliver much-needed relief and thus ameliorate the grievances of low-income and food-insecure families.

Moreover, extensive research shows that unequal provision of education services increases the risk of social unrest and conflict. Without continued investment in education, the gap between the haves and have-nots will widen further as wealthy families purchase educational opportunities for their children that leave other students behind.

Third, paying teachers helps the economy. Our review of 33 African countries, which used data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the World Bank, found that salaries of teachers and education staff amounted to 3 percent of GDP on average, more than three times the average financial package announced by African governments to fight the pandemic. Teachers are one of the largest groups of civil servants in many African countries, and their daily work is not only intrinsically valuable, but also contributes greatly to the local and national economy. Furthermore, enabling teachers to continue teaching will make it easier for parents to return to work.

Finally, education continuity is essential for productivity and competitiveness. Prolonged breaks in education provision, or a deep deterioration in its quality, will hurt Africa’s long-term economic competitiveness. Many of the current estimates of learning loss from COVID-19 already present a worrying picture for young Africans. Our colleagues at the Brookings Institution and the World Bank estimate that, with just four months of lost schooling and little change in the quality of education, the lifetime earnings of today’s students in the United States will be greatly reduced, representing a loss of nearly 13 percent of U.S. GDP over subsequent generations.

Africa already significantly lags behind other regions in human capital development, owing to shortfalls in health and education. According to the World Bank, Africa’s Human Capital Index is currently only 0.4 (on a scale of 0 to 1), meaning that GDP per worker will increase by 250 percent if the region achieves the highest health and education scores. Conversely, deteriorations in these areas will widen productivity gaps between workers in Africa and in other countries.

The extent to which Africa’s long-term productivity and competitiveness suffer as a result of learning loss will depend on how well governments can continue educational activities during the pandemic. Recent estimates show that only 25 percent of low-income countries are currently providing remote online and broadcast learning opportunities. But well-designed interactive radio instruction can be effective, and Malawi’s education ministry is working with civil-society organizations to deliver effective literacy and numeracy instruction via solar-powered offline tablets. This is just one of many “leapfrog” approaches that can result in new and more effective ways of giving young people a quality education during the pandemic and beyond.

COVID-19 has presented African policymakers with a barrage of difficult choices. But if governments continue to invest in education alongside health, social protection, and economic-recovery initiatives, they will bolster young people’s well-being and enhance the welfare of families, communities, and countries.

       

Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. Of increasing concern to many is the declining levels of civic engagement across the country, a trend that started several decades ago. Today, we see evidence of this in the limited civic knowledge of the American public, 1 in 4 of whom, according to a 2016 survey led by Annenberg Public Policy Center, are unable to name the three branches of government. It is not only knowledge about how the government works that is lacking—confidence in our leadership is also extremely low. According to the Pew Research Center, which tracks public trust in government, as of March 2019, only an unnerving 17 percent trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. We also see this lack of engagement in civic behaviors, with Americans’ reduced participation in community organizations and lackluster participation in elections, especially among young voters.¹

Many reasons undoubtedly contribute to this decline in civic engagement: from political dysfunction to an actively polarized media to the growing mobility of Americans and even the technological transformation of leisure, as posited by Robert D. Putnam. Of particular concern is the rise of what Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine call “civic deserts,” namely places where there are few to no opportunities for people to “meet, discuss issues, or address problems.” They estimate that 60 percent of all rural youth live in civic deserts along with 30 percent of urban and suburban Americans. Given the decline of participation in religious organizations and unions, which a large proportion of Americans consistently engaged in over the course of the 20th century, it is clear that new forms of civic networks are needed in communities.

As one of the few social institutions present in virtually every community across America, schools can and should play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement. They can do this by helping young people develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors needed to participate in civic life. Schools can also directly provide opportunities for civic engagement as a local institution that can connect young and old people alike across the community. To do this, civic learning needs to be part and parcel of the current movement across many schools in America to equip young people with 21st-century skills.

To date however, civic education experts argue that civic learning is on the margins of young people’s school experience. The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education examined the status of civic education and found that while reading and math scores have improved in recent years, there has not been the commensurate increase in eighth grade civics knowledge. While 42 states and the District of Columbia require at least one course related to civics, few states prioritize the range of strategies, such as service learning which is only included in the standards for 11 states, that is required for an effective civic education experience. The study also found that high school social studies teachers are some of the least supported teachers in schools and report teaching larger numbers of students and taking on more non-teaching responsibilities like coaching school sports than other teachers. Student experience reinforces this view that civic learning is not a central concern of schools. Seventy percent of 12th graders say they have never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30 percent say they have never taken part in a debate—all important parts of a quality civic learning.

The origins of civic education

The fact that children today across the country wake up in the morning and go to school five days a week for most of the year has everything to do with civic education. The idea of a shared school experience where all young people in America receive a standard quality education is inextricably linked to the development of the United States as a national entity and the development of citizens who had the skills and knowledge to engage in a democracy.

In the early 1800s, as the country struggled to navigate what it meant to be a democratic republic, school as we know it did not exist as a distinguishing feature of childhood. Even almost midway into the century—in 1840—only 40 percent of the population ages 5 to 19 attended school.² For those who did attend, what they learned while at school was widely variable depending on the institution they attended and the instructor they had. Several education leaders began advocating for a more cohesive school system, one in which all young people could attend and receive similar instruction regardless of economic status, institution, or location. Chief among these leaders was Horace Mann, often referred to as the “father of American education,” who argued that free, standardized, and universal schooling was essential to the grand American experiment of self-governance. In an 1848 report he wrote: “It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion.”

The rise of reading, math, and science

The Common Schools Movement that Mann helped establish and design was the foundation of our current American education system. Despite the fact that the core of our education system was built upon the belief that schooling institutions have a central role to play in preparing American youth to be civically engaged, this goal has been pushed to the margins over time as other educational objectives have moved to the forefront. Reading, math, and science have always been essential elements of a child’s educational experience, but many educationalists argue that these subjects were elevated above all others after the country’s “Sputnik moment.” In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first space satellite, made waves across the U.S. as Americans perceived they were falling behind academically and scientifically. A wave of reforms including in math, science, and engineering education followed. Improving students poor reading and math skills received particular attention over the last several decades including in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. A focus on ensuring American students get strong STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills continues to be an ongoing concern, as highlighted by President Obama’s 2013 Educate to Innovate plan focused on improving American students performance in STEM subjects.

The case for incorporating 21st-century skills

Civic learning experts, however, are not the only ones concerned about the perceived narrow focus on reading, math, and science in American schools. In recent years, there has been a growing movement for schools to help students develop “21st-century skills” alongside academic competencies, driven in large part by frequent reports of employers unsatisfied with the skills of recent school graduates. Business leaders point out that they not only need employees who are smart and competent in math and reading and writing, they also need people who can lead teams, communicate effectively to partners, come up with new ways to solve problems, and effectively navigate an increasingly digital world. With the rise of automation, there is an increasing premium on non-routine and higher order thinking skills across both blue collar and white collar jobs. A recent study of trends in the U.S. labor market shows that social skills that are increasingly in demand³and many employers are struggling to find people with the sets of skills they need.

Advances in the science of learning have bolstered the 21st-century skills movement. Learning scientists argue that young people master math, reading, and science much better if they have an educational experience that develops their social and emotional learning competencies—like self-awareness and relationship skills which are the foundation of later workplace skills—and puts academic learning in a larger, more meaningful context. One framework, among many, that articulates the breadth of skills and competencies young people need to succeed in a fast-changing world comes from learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff. Their “6 Cs” framework, a variation on the prior “4 Cs” framework, is widely used and argues that schools should focus on helping young people develop not just academically, but as people. As all learning is fundamentally social, students must learn to collaborate, laying an important foundation for communication—an essential prerequisite for mastering the academic content in school that provides the specific topics around which students can practice critical thinking and creative innovation, and which ultimately will help develop the confidence to take risks and iterate on failures.

This movement for 21st-century skills has powerful allies and growing momentum even while the movement itself is comprised of an eclectic collection of organizations spread across the country with a wide range of interests and multiple missions for their work. However, a central thread is that the standardized approach to education, the legacy of Horace Mann’s Common Schools movement, is holding back student learning. Teacher-led instruction, for example, will never be sufficient for helping students learn to collaborate with each other or create new things. Active and experiential learning is required, which is harder to standardize as the specifics must be adapted to the particular communities and learners.

Civic learning as an essential 21st-century skill

This focus on mastering academic subjects through a teaching and learning approach that develops 21st-century skills is important but brings with it a worldview that focuses on the development of the individual child to the exclusion of the political. After all, one could argue that the leaders of the terrorist organization ISIS display excellence in key 21st-century skills such as collaboration, creativity, confidence, and navigating the digital world. Their ability to work together to bring in new recruits, largely through on-line strategies, and pull off terrorist attacks with relatively limited resources takes a great deal of ingenuity, teamwork, perseverance, and problem solving. Of course, the goals of Islamic extremists and their methods of inflicting violence on civilians are morally unacceptable in almost any corner of the globe, but creative innovation they have in abundance.

What the 21st-century skills movement is missing is an explicit focus on social values. Schools always impart values, whether intentionally or not. From the content in the curriculum to the language of instruction to the way in which teachers interact with students, ideas around what is good and what is bad are constantly being modeled and taught. While a number of competencies that are regularly included in 21st-century skills frameworks, like the ability to work with others, have implicit values such as respect for others’ perspectives, they do not explicitly impart strong norms and values about society. Of course, as long as there has been public education there has been heated debate about whose values should be privileged, especially in relation to deeply held religious and cultural beliefs. From the teaching of evolution and creationism to transgender bathrooms, debates on values in public schools can be contentious.

In a democracy, however, the values that are at the core of civic learning are different. They are foundational to helping young people develop the dispositions needed to actively engage in civic life and maintain the norms by which Americans debate and decide their differences. The very nature of developing and sustaining a social norm means that a shared or common experience across all schools is needed. While civic learning has been essential throughout American history, in this age of growing polarization and rising civic deserts, it should be considered an essential component of a 21st-century education.

Civic learning defined

The term civic learning evokes for most Americans their high school civics class in which they learned about the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government, and how a bill becomes a law. This knowledge and information is essential—after all how can young people be expected to actively participate in democracy if they are unaware of the basic rules of the game?—but it is by no means sufficient. There is an emerging consensus across the many scholars and organizations that work on civic learning that imparting knowledge must be paired with developing civic attitudes and behaviors. For example, CivXNow, a bipartisan coalition of over one hundred actors including academic and research institutions, learning providers, and philanthropic organizations, argues that civic education must include a focus on:

1. Civic knowledge and skills: where youth gain an understanding of the processes of government, prevalent political ideologies, civic and constitutional rights, and the history and heritage of the above.
2. Civic values and dispositions: where youth gain an appreciation for civil discourse, free speech, and engaging with those whose perspectives differ from their own.
3. Civic behaviors: where students develop the civic agency and confidence to vote, volunteer, attend public meetings, and engage with their communities.

There is also emerging evidence suggesting a correlation between high quality civic learning programs and increased civic engagement from students. As the 2011 Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools report highlights, students who receive high quality civic education are more likely to “understand public issues, view political engagement as a means of addressing communal challenges, and participate in civic activities.” The outcomes are equally as influential on civic equality, as there is evidence to suggest that poor, minority, rural, and urban students who receive high-quality civics education perform better than their counterparts.

Civic learning delivered

The crucial question is how to deliver high-quality civic learning across American schools. Researchers in civic learning have reviewed a wide range of approaches and the evidence surrounding their effectiveness. Experts identified a menu of six specific approaches, which was later updated to ten, that if implemented well has been demonstrated to advance civic learning. These range from teaching young people about civics to creating learning opportunities for practicing civic behaviors.

Classroom instruction, including discussing current events and developing media literacy skills, is needed for developing civic knowledge and skills, whether it is delivered as a stand-alone course or lessons integrated into other subjects. Many in the civics education community are advocating for more time devoted to civics from the elementary grades through high school and the corresponding teacher professional development and support required to make this a reality.

However, for developing civic dispositions, values, and behaviors, the promising practices identified by the civic learning experts are very similar to those required to develop 21st-century skills in part because many of the competencies in question are essentially the same. For example, strong communication skills contribute to the ability of students to speak up at meetings and strong collaboration skills enable them to effectively work with others in their community. Indeed, the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College notes that “civic and political values are a subset of the values that young people should learn, and there are no sharp lines separating the civic/political domain from others.”

Hence, the range of teaching and learning experiences needed to develop civic behaviors and needed for 21st-century skills are similar. They include experiential learning approaches, such as service learning where students work on a community project alongside organizations or extracurricular activities where students learn to work together in teams. Experiential learning can also include simulations of democratic procedures or, better yet, direct engagement in school governance and school climate initiatives. In communities where there is limited opportunities for civic engagement, schools can themselves model civic values by becoming the place where community members gather and connect with each other.

Uniting the 21st-century skills and civic learning movements

A movement for 21st-century skills that does not include in a meaningful way the cultivation of democratic values is incomplete and will not prepare young people to thrive in today’s world. Given what is at stake in terms of civic engagement in America, uniting the powerful push for 21st-century skills with the less well-resourced but equally important movement for civic learning could prove to be an important strategy for helping schools fill the civic desert vacuum and renew the social norms that underpin our democratic form of government. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation. Each generation has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.”

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The past two decades have been marked by outstanding gains in girls’ education worldwide, with the number of girls out of school dropping by 79 million. We cannot risk rolling back this progress. For some children, the impact of COVID-19 will be temporary. But for others, this pandemic will be devastating and will alter the course of their lives.

As we saw during the Ebola crisis, girls are particularly vulnerable when schools close for long periods of time. A recent report estimates that 10 million more secondary school-age girls could be out of school after this initial wave of the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Evidence shows that prolonged school closure can also result in increased sexual abuse and teenage pregnancies. Further, girls from the poorest communities are likely to miss out on remote learning strategies, either because access is limited or because the burden of care often falls on women.

Now, in the face of this pandemic, more than 70 percent of students around the world are still affected by nationwide school closures—or more than 1.26 billion children and youth. While we are just beginning to understand the socioeconomic impact, experiences from Ebola show us that girls will be among the hardest hit.

For many adolescent girls, especially those from low-income countries and the poorest communities, access to education was already a challenge even before COVID-19. A recent UNICEF report shows that nearly one in three adolescent girls from the poorest households around the world have never been to school, and estimates show that only 25 percent of the poorest girls in low-income countries complete primary school. Emergencies exacerbate preexisting inequalities and intensify the existing learning crisis.

Together, this data and lessons learned from our past experience tell us that we’ll need to do more than simply reopen classrooms to make it possible for the poorest and most marginalized girls to return to school. We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to transform education and reimagine the way students learn, so that when schools reopen, they are more gender-responsive and inclusive, help all students to learn, look after all students’ health and well-being, and are digitally connected.

Drawing on existing evidence, including the “What Works in Girls’ Education” Brookings book, and on-the-ground know-how, we recommend governments and their partners take the following five steps to ensure marginalized girls, alongside boys, can continue their education.

1. Lift financial barriers that prevent girls from going to school and that are likely to increase as a result of COVID-19 economic impacts.

The pandemic is hitting poorer families the hardest. A recent study in Kenya revealed that 68 percent of respondents had skipped a meal or eaten less as a direct result of COVID-19. The economic impact on families and communities leaves adolescent girls at higher risk of child marriage, sexual exploitation, and child labor. Waiving school and examination fees could facilitate girls’ return to school. Other strategies, such as cash transfers for the most marginalized girls, have also proven effective. Following Ebola, the Sierra Leone government waived tuition and examination fees for all learners for two academic years to motivate parents and caregivers to send children back to school. Additionally, in Ghana, keeping girls safe and learning is a priority during school closures. The Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection will increase cash transfers under the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) Program for extremely poor households across Ghana, facilitating girls’ return to school in communities hard hit by the economic impact of COVID-19.

2. Scale gender-responsive distance education to reach the most marginalized girls.

Distance learning strategies are essential during and after COVID-19, especially for the most marginalized girls and boys. While a recent Brookings report shows that currently 90 percent of high-income countries are using remote learning strategies to continue education, only 25 percent of low-income countries are doing so—and then largely through television and radio. There is an opportunity for countries to transform how they reach out-of-school girls and boys, even after the pandemic is over, by designing and scaling remote learning programs using appropriate technology. But it will be essential for these programs to take a gender-focused lens. Marginalized girls have less access to technology, so the design and deployment will need to be especially sensitive to working with and for girls to address these gaps. Additionally, any safety and violence risks that could be posed by girls’ participation in remote learning must be identified and protection approaches incorporated, including digital safeguarding flows in tech platforms

For example, in Vietnam alone, nearly 44,000 schools from preprimary to upper secondary were closed to prevent COVID-19 spread, affecting more than 21 million children. In trying to reach every child with learning opportunities the government has seen evidence that income and geography continue to be barriers for distance education and that there is very limited data to show the differential effects of school closures on girls versus boys. UNICEF is working with the government to better understand gender differences in access and learning through distance education so that this pandemic becomes an opportunity for improving the gender-responsiveness of distance education at scale.

3. Intensify community mobilization and support for girls’ education, including for pregnant girls and those who were out of school before the COVID-19 crisis.

Back-to-school campaigns must include targeted messages for communities and caregivers to actively engage them in supporting girls going back to school. Messages must be contextualized, culturally relevant, and effective at changing pervasive and harmful gender norms that hold girls back. Communities must monitor girls’ attendance once schools reopen, through school management committees and parent and teacher associations, and support their distance learning in the interim.

Ensuring that girls can access learning materials online and offline during school closures, and that families remain committed to girls’ education, is key. For example, in Guatemala, UNICEF is working with the government to support communities in remote areas with poor connectivity and no electricity by providing printed material, TV, and radio messaging, and GIFs via mobile phones that depict both boys and girls helping with domestic chores, and survivor-centered guidance for adults to provide psychosocial support to victims of gender-based violence. This large-scale campaign is accompanied by distribution of baskets that include basic groceries and gender-responsive learning activities.

In Sierra Leone, the COVID-19 crisis forced a reassessment of policies that excluded pregnant girls from attending school. Learning from this experience, Sierra Leone’s minister of basic and senior secondary education recently issued a new policy on “radical inclusion” and “comprehensive safety,” allowing pregnant girls and adolescent mothers to attend school, take exams, and learn safely once schools reopened.

4. Prioritize girls’ safety and protection.

During the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic, girls were disproportionately affected by gender-based violence, resulting in a spike in adolescent pregnancies and thousands of adolescent girls unable to complete their education. We have already seen that violence against women and girls has increased during COVID-19 lockdowns. Governments must prioritize measures to protect girls from gender-based violence, early marriage and pregnancy to facilitate their return to school. A couple of examples of rapid responses to keeping girls safe and learning come from Jordan and Cote d’Ivoire.

The government of Jordan, in partnership with UNICEF and the U.K. government, has responded with a set of comprehensive policies including psychosocial support for girls through the nonformal education system, and teachers’ professional development in life skills education and effective ways to support victims of violence. More than 180,000 children have benefited from these programs so far. In Cote d’Ivoire, with support from UNICEF, the government launched a nationwide distance learning program, “Mon école à la maison,” or “My school at home.” Under this system, teachers, mothers’ groups, community health workers, and community leaders track how the pandemic is affecting students and families, and offer insights on who may need protection from gender-based violence, child marriage, early pregnancy, or other threats.

5. Ensure meaningful participation for adolescent girls.

While we continue to highlight the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on adolescent girls and young women, we must also recognize their creativity, innovative solutions, and effective partnership in shaping the response and recovery. Adolescent girls and boys can be agents of change in their communities, but for this to happen, the education system needs to intentionally ensure equity of voice and opportunity of participation for all adolescent girls. An education system that recognizes that girls’ voices are valuable and allows for their meaningful participation contributes towards girls’ and women’s empowerment.

Innovative approaches can help to highlight girls’ voices. For example, Plan International utilizes a “photovoice” approach to capture what adolescent girls in the Solomon Islands identify as the barriers preventing them from completing secondary education. These photos and their accompanying captions are featured in two youth-led reports: “Our Education, Our Future” and “Stronger Together.” Giving voice to the unheard and raising their voices in chorus on local and global platforms is inspiring.

Without urgent action to remove barriers to girls’ education, this health crisis could become a children’s rights crisis by denying students their right to learn. Now is the time for governments to reimagine education systems so that girls and boys have equal opportunity to attend school, or access quality learning remotely.

Cover photo credit: UNICEF/Frank Dejongh

       

For perhaps the first time in recent memory, parents and teachers may be actively encouraging their children to spend more time on their electronic devices. Online learning has moved to the front stage as 90 percent of high-income countries are using it as the primary means of educational continuity amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

If March will forever be remembered as the month that virtually all the world’s countries closed their school doors, will April be remembered as the month that students around the world embraced the world of online learning?

There is no shortage of optimistic speculation from education experts and innovators that this experience will have a transformative effect on education after the pandemic is over. The hope is that teachers will be more well-versed in the range and use of quality online learning resources, schools will welcome innovation that drives better and more enriched learning experiences, and students will demand more interesting multimedia and multimodal learning experiences.

I certainly hope this will be true. But what if it is not?

There is some evidence that such hope will not materialize, at least if we continue with what we are doing now. Christopher Pommering, founder of Learnlife, a global network dedicated to fostering lifelong learning practices, says many of the 1,000 school leaders across the 60 countries in its network report that both teachers and students are burning out from trying to conduct the traditional school day in an online environment.

“We are being flooded with requests for assistance on how to develop effective and engaging remote learning experiences, especially after the first or second week in which schools try to transfer their normal curriculum to an online format and parents and teachers realize it doesn’t work,” he says.

To understand the major pitfalls of online learning and what we need to do to avoid them, I recently spoke with Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). As someone who earned his stripes as a classroom teacher and designer of multiple online courses, and who previously held positions as the chief innovation officer for the state of Rhode Island and director of the Office of Education Technology for the U.S. Department of Education, Richard is a go-to person for exploring the shift we are experiencing in learning today.

As Richard posits, if we aren’t careful to avoid the pitfalls, “it will guarantee that nobody will ever want to do online learning again after coronavirus is over.”

Here are Culatta’s top five pitfalls that could kill online learning—and how to avoid them.

1. The content trap

When you look at moving a school online, the first question is often, “What content do we need to make available?” Immediately everybody’s mind goes to uploading chapters of the textbook and worksheets to Google Classroom. People often forget that the learning content is one small fraction of an effective learning experience.

When people fall into the content trap, online learning has all of the materials but none of the heart. Students are just sitting there, clicking “next” through presentations that have been uploaded to an LMS (learning management system). It’s painful to watch. You can see the kids slipping into a coma while they sit there. It teaches kids to hate learning. It teaches them that learning is boring.

To avoid the content trap, it is important to consider all of the critical elements of learning and think about how to design them for a virtual space. For example, what do virtual conversations look like, or virtual art projects?

Or what about digital recess? There are lots of fun ways to do recess in a virtual space. You could certainly do group exercises in front of the computer but, depending on the age of the kids, you could use free apps, some with geotagging, to run around the block and see how far you have gone or do a scavenger hunt in your neighborhood.

The point is: Don’t just upload scanned textbooks and worksheets and think it’s going to be a good learning experience. It’s actually going to be a horrendously boring and painful learning experience. If that’s what we’re going to do, we might question whether it’s better to just not do learning at all.

2. The one-size-fits-all trap

When we move to an online environment, we shouldn’t assume that one approach or type of activity will work for all students (and frankly, we shouldn’t assume this in the classroom either). It is easy to create online assignments without remembering that every student has unique needs, interests, and challenges.

Fortunately, it turns out that providing personalized learning experiences is one of the areas where online learning can improve on the classroom experience. Since every kid isn’t sitting in the same classroom at the same time, there is no excuse to not have them working on a variety of different activities that align to their own unique interests and strengths. If a kid is learning math, for example, programs like Dreambox Learning or Zearn can adapt to the needs of each individual learner and share progress with teachers and parents.

This is particularly important for special populations, such as young children, English language learners, or students with physical, emotional, or cognitive challenges. We have Individualized Education Plans (IEP) for a reason, and we can’t forget that when we move online we also need a digital IEP where we create an individual program using the virtual environments.

Fortunately, there are lots of digital tools to facilitate this. For some kids, it could be as simple as installing screen readers or using voice commands. For others, it might mean breaking the content into smaller pieces and having more check-ins. There are a variety of apps, like Newsela, that adapt and adjust the content to a wide variety of English language proficiency. At ISTE, we are launching a new course for teachers around designing online learning with special populations in mind.

3. The isolation trap

Teaching and learning online does not mean learning alone. But many people forget that. School provides critical human interactions—a chance to engage with friends, not only on a social level, but also for learning. It also provides the chance for mentorship from an adult. There are a lot of different ways to do that online. In fact, I would argue it may be even easier to do peer collaboration in virtual spaces.

There are a whole bunch of tools that can facilitate collaboration without some of the challenges, like noise, that you run into in the classroom. In the classroom, we limit our social learning experience to other kids in the class. But when you are in a virtual space, that sort of collaboration could be with kids all around the world.

It is also a great way to think about incorporating experts that, frankly, would never come to the school in person. In a virtual space, you can invite a book author, engineer, or a legislator to engage with your students directly. That access to expertise and global peers can make online learning a much more connected environment than the traditional classroom.

4. The teaching transfer trap

Another big pitfall is thinking that if you know how to teach in the physical world, all you need to do is just log onto an online tool, and you will be effective at teaching in the virtual world. That is just absolutely not true.

Of course, the basic foundations of learning are the same. But the way you manifest those in a virtual space is very different. For example, if you are trying to assess student learning online, a teacher who does not have experience teaching online might revert to using multiple choice tests or uploading worksheets. In the virtual classroom, there are far more options for assessing learning than there are in the traditional classroom, but no teacher is born knowing how to do this.

While the basic principles of assessing learning remain the same, teachers must learn new approaches for authentic assessment in a virtual space. For example, you might ask them to make their own Khan Academy-style videos explaining how to solve a problem. You could even have other members of the class review the script for accuracy, as a test of their knowledge. Using document histories the teacher can see all of the contributions that different students have made along the way.

But teachers need support to learn skills like authentic online assessment. It is inappropriate to just expect that because a teacher is really good in a physical classroom, that he or she will suddenly just know how to be a good teacher in a virtual classroom. Teachers also should be recognized for the skills they develop in this domain.

5. The learning-is-serious trap

For some reason when learning moves to a virtual space, it generally also becomes much more serious. I’ve watched this happen over and over again. A teacher who is funny and engaging in the physical classroom often doesn’t know how to convey that “fun-ness” through virtual tools. When that happens, learning becomes very serious and, honestly, boring.

Fortunately there are many simple ways to make a virtual classroom fun. In virtual classrooms, something as simple as playing music when people sign in to the session can completely change the tone, and signal “this is a fun place, we’re going to learn and it’s going to be fun.” Using video interstitial transitions can both break up the experience and add humor. Creating polls is another way to keep learning fun and can still be related to the topic. If you’re having a math class, posting a silly question like “what is a vampire number?” (yes, that’s a real thing) and seeing what answer students choose can help lighten the experience of being online.

Ultimately, learning online can have many benefits and allow for new ways to engage and challenge students. But only if schools do not fall into these five traps. It’s upon school leaders to ensure that educators are supported and trained to do just that.