We believe that it is also valuable to look beyond these immediate concerns and see what could be possible for education on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is difficult to imagine that there will be another moment in history when the central role of education in the prosperity and economic, social and political stability of nations will be so obvious and well understood by the general population. Now is the time to draw a vision of how education can emerge stronger than ever from this global crisis and propose a path to capitalize on the new support of education in practically every community in the world. 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 and long term if leaders around the world took seriously the public demand for safe and quality schools for their children. Ultimately, we argue that strong and inclusive public education systems are essential for the recovery of society in the short and long term and that there is an opportunity to make a leap towards schools with better capacities. A reinforced school could be one that places a strong public school at the center of a community and takes advantage of the most effective partnerships, including those that emerged during COVID-19, to help students grow and develop a wide range of competencies and abilities inside and outside of school. For example, such a school would receive supports, including technology, that would allow community partners, from parents to employers, to reinforce, complement and bring to life learning experiences inside and outside the classroom.
It would recognize and adapt to learning that takes place beyond its walls, periodically evaluating students' abilities and adapting learning opportunities to satisfy 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. Literally, it is the school at the center of the community that drives student learning and development using every possible path (Figure. Adapted from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
When we surveyed nearly 3,000 educational innovations in more than 160 countries, we found that some innovations had the potential to help drive progress, as defined in our four dimensions, and many didn't. We also found that many of the promising innovations were on the fringes of education systems and not at the center of how learning is carried out. We argue that, to rapidly accelerate progress and close equity gaps in education, the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to young people would need to spend more time documenting, learning, evaluating and expanding innovative approaches that had the greatest potential for advancement. This widespread recognition and support for the essential role of education in daily life can be found on the pages of newspapers around the world.
It can be found in emerging coalitions of advocates who urge that education be prioritized in all communities and countries. The global education community is also mobilizing thanks to UNESCO's extensive consortium with the newly created Save Our Future campaign, which brings together a broad coalition of actors in the field of international development to advocate for sustained funding of education, especially among international aid donors, for low and middle income countries. In addition to a growing recognition of the essential role of public schools, the pandemic has boosted sectors of communities that traditionally do not participate actively in the education of children. When school buildings closed, teachers began collaborating with parents in ways never seen before, schools established new relationships with community health and social welfare organizations, media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with nonprofit organizations and governments, and local organizations and businesses helped support children's learning in new ways.
The idea that children's education is supported by an ecosystem of learning opportunities inside and outside of school is not new among educators. The community school movement sees schools as the center of children's education and development, with strong partnerships between other sectors, from health to social welfare. Schools are open around the clock and are centers for community participation, services, and problem solving. Proponents of “lifelong learning” approaches point out that children, from birth to age 18, only spend up to 20 percent of their awake hours in school and argue that the fabric of the community offers many enriching learning experiences along with school.
In our own work on advances in education, we argue that diversifying educators and the places where children learn can include innovative pedagogical approaches and complement and enrich learning in the classroom. More recently, the concept of local learning ecosystems emerged to describe learning opportunities that are provided through a collaborative network between schools, community organizations, companies and government agencies that often combine direct instruction with innovative pedagogies that allow experimentation. There is evidence that ranges from the United Kingdom,. For Nicaragua, the fact that young people participate in various learning opportunities outside of school, from classic extracurricular activities, such as music classes, to non-formal education programming, can be very useful in boosting the academic skills and competencies of marginalized children.
Until recently, however, there were only limited empirical examples of local learning ecosystems. Emerging models are emerging in places such as Catalonia, Spain with its Educacio360 initiative and western Pennsylvania, where several United States,. School districts have participated in a multi-year Remake Learning initiative to provide lifelong learning opportunities to families and children. One of the opportunities that arise from the COVID-19 pandemic may be the opportunity to harness the new energies and mentalities between schools and communities to work together to support children's learning.
Given these four emerging trends and based on previous research, we present five proposed actions for decision makers to take advantage of this moment to transform education systems in order to better serve all children and young people, especially the most disadvantaged. We maintain that, because of their responsibility to all children, public schools must be at the center of any education system that seeks to close growing inequality gaps. We highlight the creative use of technology, especially through mobile phone communication with parents, as examples of strategies that have emerged in the midst of the pandemic and that, if maintained, could complement and strengthen children's learning in public schools. We recognize that the outstanding examples are just emerging and there is more to learn about how they work and other examples that must be taken into account as events unfold.
For this reason, we propose a guide to identify what new approaches could continue. We maintain that innovations that support and strengthen the core of teaching, that is, interactions in the teaching and learning process, will be more likely to sustainably support an empowered school. We also argue that the urgency of the moment requires an adaptive and iterative approach to learning what works in real time; therefore, the principles of the science of improvement should accompany any accelerated effort to collect evidence and correct the course in real time. Public schools play a fundamental role in reducing inequality and strengthening social cohesion.
By having a mandate to serve all children and young people, regardless of their origin, public schools in many countries can bring together people from diverse backgrounds and needs, providing the social benefit of allowing people to grow up with a set of common values and knowledge that can make communities more cohesive and unified. In many countries, a central debate is whether education should be considered a public good or a private consumable. Advocates of expanding private school options view education as a private consumable. Advocates who argue that education is a public good assert that schools are more than just preparing people for the labor market, and that they play an irreplaceable role in generating multiple public benefits, including public health, and in developing citizens to participate in democratic societies.
We follow Levin (198) by arguing that schools play a crucial role in fostering the skills that people need to succeed in a rapidly changing labor market, and play an important role in equalizing opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds. In addition, schools address a variety of social needs that serve communities, regions, and entire nations. And while some private schools can perform these multiple functions, and in fact do, public education is the main channel for doing so on a large scale. Therefore, we argue that public schools should be at the center of any effort to rebuild better or, in the words of UNICEF's head of education, Robert Jenkins, “rebuild equitably”, after the COVID-19 pandemic.
To develop schools with electricity, it will be essential to find out how to identify what strategies, among the many that communities are implementing in the midst of the pandemic, should be maintained to feed a school as the crisis diminishes. We maintain that decision makers must base their actions on rigorous testing of what works to improve student learning, as well as on the way in which school change occurs and, ultimately, must include a strong emphasis on the essence of the teaching and learning process, which is often referred to as the educational or pedagogical core. In fact, the way educators interact with students and teaching materials, including educational technology, is crucial for learning, given the strong evidence that educators are the most important factor in student learning. 2 Using the educational core as a guide can help us identify what types of new strategies or innovations could be converted into community support in children's learning journey.
In fact, even after just several months of experimentation around the world to maintain learning in the midst of a pandemic, there are some clear strategies that, if continued, have the potential to contribute to strengthening schools, and many of them involve involving students, educators and parents in new ways through the use of some type of technology. Founding decisions on existing evidence is necessary, but not sufficient. It will also be essential to ask individuals, students, families, teachers and school leaders what their experience has been and what new educational practices they expect to continue after the pandemic. The Just Ask Us movement in the U.S.
UU. There is no doubt that communities will identify important strategies that do not fall within the educational core, such as essential collaboration between health and social protection services, which could be vital to developing a reinforced school. For example, Sierra Leone's new “radical inclusion” policy aims to unite health and banking services to help marginalized girls stay in school. Or in the U.S.
While in this report we mainly focus on innovations that support interactions in the educational core, we recognize that a myriad of strategies will be needed to support marginalized children and create an empowered school. Ultimately, communities must have an opinion on what these strategies should be. Basing decisions on the lived experience of the people who are at the center of education, especially students and teachers, is one of the core principles of scale-oriented design and will be an essential component in developing a powerful school. When asked what her only advice would be for today's heads of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, said: “Listen to your people, they may not be polite, but they are well informed.
While we think that schools equipped with energy after COVID-19 will use technology in these four ways to improve learning, we emphasize the need to help educators take advantage of the comparative advantages of technology. Without involving and supporting educators in innovation, efforts will not be sustainable over time. In fact, throughout school closures around the world, we've seen the heroic efforts of educators, many of whom are in poor communities with limited educational technology resources, and yet have innovated to continue engaging students in learning. For example, from Chile to the United Kingdom, we've seen teachers come together to quickly contribute their expertise to develop remote learning content relevant to students.
In Chile, a network of teachers came together to develop a series of 30-minute radio lessons for high school students who didn't have access to online learning. The initiative, which the teachers called La Radio Enseña, has the support of the civil society organization Enseña Chile, and the radio lessons went from being distributed by a handful of radio stations to more than 240 just one month after the schools closed. Similarly, in the United Kingdom,. By the end of July, users accessed classes 17 million times and this initiative, called Oak National Academy, has been an important feature of the government's remote learning strategy.
Listening to educators while implementing technology for learning and responding to their concerns with real-time iterations is also essential to helping educational technology implementations succeed. In response to the closure of schools, Peru's Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious nationwide remote learning strategy called Learning at Home, using multiple television channels, radio and online resources. The lessons were recorded in line with the curriculum and, to make the content attractive, the ministry hired actors to act as facilitators of the content. After the initial implementation, the government sought input from school leaders, teachers, and parents, leading to the inclusion of a teacher and a student in each lesson.
In addition, teacher reporting requirements were initially quite onerous, putting an burden on teachers, who were already exhausted, and adapted to a more manageable simplified approach. User feedback was regularly requested, not only on usage (which reportedly reached 74 percent among students), but also on quality (59 percent of parents said they were satisfied with the program). In addition, more than 90 percent of teachers reported having regular communication with principals and students.6.Interestingly, a very recent study confirms that teachers' sense of success was greater in school systems that had strong remote working conditions, including communication, training, collaboration, fair expectations and recognition of their efforts. Rarely does the topic of parent participation rank high on the to-do list of educational administrators and educators, whose days are filled with numerous decisions, from pressing schedules to safety and lesson plans for how to educate children.
In the recent OECD and Harvard survey of educators and education administrators from 59 countries on school reopening strategies, three-quarters of respondents stated that reopening plans had been developed in collaboration with teachers, but only 25 percent said that the collaboration also included parents. This limited commitment to parents and families should not be surprising, given that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of parent participation occupied a relatively marginal place in debates about education. Professionals who work with schools and families to build strong parent-teacher relationships often point out that community outreach and collaboration strategies are often lacking in teacher preparation programs and receive little attention in professional development courses for administrators. In addition, researchers are much more likely to focus their study on school-based factors, such as curriculum development or evaluation policies.
In a recent search in the database of the Educational Resources Information Center, which has nearly 20 years of articles, the quote “teachers” was used almost four times more than the citation “parents”. However, the coronavirus pandemic has placed the issue of engagement with parents and families at the center of current educational debates, and education leaders around the world are discovering 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 forms of partnerships with parents and families that are truly promising in supporting children's learning in and out of school in the long term. For example, creative mechanisms are emerging around the world to guide parents in real time about their children's education thanks to the ability to make a phone call, albeit not very advanced, in many places.
In Argentina, the government of the State of Buenos Aires created a call center with staff from the Ministry of Education to provide information and guidance in real time to any parent who has concerns or requests for information about their children's education during the pandemic. In the first five months, more than 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. For example, the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative, a coalition of more than 50 local organizations that provide services to families and children, has created a hotline for families to help parents and families receive guidance and resources to help their children learn. Perhaps the most important part of the government's strategy, and the most promising component in boosting schools in the long term, has been to build a relationship between students' caregivers and their teachers and schools.
9 “Until now, in India we haven't been able to establish a parent-teacher connection for first-generation students on a large scale,” said Prachi Windlass, program director for India at the Michael %26 Susan Dell Foundation. Botswana's Ministry of Basic Education has also learned the power of harnessing mobile phone technology to collaborate with parents and boost children's learning. Before the schools were closed, the Ministry had been working closely with a coalition of partners to expand an approach to teaching arithmetic that included interactive teaching methods aimed at students' learning levels and not on their qualification. This Teaching at the Right Level initiative brings together a number of partners, including a Botswana non-profit organization called Young 1ove, which works with government and university partners to implement and evaluate the approach, and the team from the Brookings real-time scaling laboratory, to help guide and document the scaling process.
During the closures, Young 1ove worked with the government to quickly move from working with teachers to teach arithmetic classes to working with parents. They contacted more than 7,000 parents and invited them to participate in distance learning during school closures, 60 percent of whom accepted the invitation. While they tried several approaches, the most successful ones included a weekly math problem sent to parents via text message and followed by a weekly 15 to 20 minute phone call. In the phone call, the Young 1ove facilitators asked parents to pick up their children and put the phone on the speaker so that they could ask them 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 surprising results. For children whose parents received text messages and phone calls from Young 1ove, the drop at countless levels was 52 percent. Clearly, when invited to participate as partners in their children's learning as partners, parents in Botswana also showed how powerful their partnership can be for children's schooling. While likely to surprise many, these examples of the ability of marginalized or low-income parents and families to be powerful allies in support of their children's learning align with existing evidence on effective parent participation and will not surprise the select group of professionals, researchers and advocates working on this topic around the world.
In the U.S. Rigorous evaluations in Ghana and the United Kingdom. Demonstrate this as well. 11 When a respectful relationship between parents, teachers, families and schools is at the heart of participatory activities, powerful support can be provided to children's learning.
A common thread among the above examples is that schools invite families to be partners in their children's learning through the use of easy-to-understand information that is 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 attracting parents. Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to build stronger and more trusting relationships between parents and teachers. It's an opportunity for parents and families to understand the skills involved in teaching and for teachers and schools to realize how powerful parents can be.
Parents around the world are not interested in becoming teachers for their children, but, according to several large scale surveys, they are asking to participate in a different and more active way in the future. Perhaps the most important idea to support a powerful school is to challenge the mentality of those who work in the education sector that parents and families with fewer opportunities are neither able nor willing to help their children learn. We recognize that emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision that will require financial and human resources. However, we argue that articulating that vision is essential and that, amidst the myriad of decisions that education leaders make every day, it can guide the future.
Since the dire consequences of the pandemic are those that most affect the most vulnerable young people, it is tempting to return to a global educational narrative that privileges access to school above everything else. However, this would be a mistake. There are enough examples of educational innovations that provide access to relevant learning for those who enter and leave a school building to set our sights higher. What the world's children deserve is a powerful public school in every community and, in fact, it is possible if all stakeholders can work collectively to take advantage of the opportunities presented by this crisis and thus truly promote education.
Cohen, David K. Pena-Lopez, Ismael. As the demands made in relation to the theory of appropriateness establish that learning experiences depend on resources and influence outcomes, they establish a principle of “opportunity to learn” that could allow states to define a curriculum right that becomes the basis for both funding and for the review of school practices. Special programs, such as compensatory or bilingual education, will never be effective in remedying underperformance as long as these services are part of a system that, to begin with, educates minority and low-income children so poorly to begin with.
Ostrosky, PhD, is the Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor of Education in the Department of Special Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Students whose education is mainly guided by workbooks compatible with basic skills tests are at an increasing disadvantage when faced with the more challenging expectations of the new standards and the assessments that accompany them. For example, the extent to which private schools could offer a better education, the so-called “private school advantage”, has been a long-standing debate. A high school counselor, special education teacher, or virtual reality counselor can meet periodically with high school students with disabilities to provide services or monitor their progress within the framework of their educational plans.
If students with disabilities cannot find other sources of funding to pay for the evaluation or tests needed for post-secondary education, they are responsible for paying for them themselves. The increase in incarceration and its disproportionate effects on the African-American community are due to new criminal justice policies and continuing police discrimination (Miller, 199), as well as the lack of access to education. Butler, PhD, is an adjunct professor of instruction in the Department of Counseling and Special Education at DePaul University in Chicago. This strategy would take advantage of both school improvement and school equity reform, providing a basis for state legislation or litigation in cases where learning opportunities were not properly funded.
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