Access, Quality, and the Global Learning Crisis


Book Description

Around the world, 250 million children cannot read, write, or perform basic mathematics. They represent almost 40% of all primary school-aged children. This situation has come to be called the global learning crisis and it is one of the most critical challenges facing the world today. Work to address this situation depends on how it is understood. Typically, the global learning crisis and efforts to improve primary education are defined in relation to two terms: access and quality. This book is focused on the connection between them. Through a mixed-methods case study, it provides detailed, contextualized analysis of Ugandan primary education. As one of the first countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to enact dramatic and far-reaching primary education policy, Uganda serves as a compelling case study. With both quantitative and qualitative data from over 400 Ugandan schools and communities, the book analyzes grade repetition, private primary schools, and school fees, viewing each issue as an illustration of the connection between access to education and education quality. This analysis finds evidence of a positive association, challenging a key assumption that there is a trade-off or disconnect between efforts to improve access to education and efforts to improve education quality. Embracing the complexity of education systems, and focusing on dynamics where improvements in access and quality can be mutually reinforcing, can be a new approach for improving basic education in different contexts around the world.




World Development Report 2018


Book Description

Every year, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) features a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 WDR—LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise—is the first ever devoted entirely to education. And the time is right: education has long been critical to human welfare, but it is even more so in a time of rapid economic and social change. The best way to equip children and youth for the future is to make their learning the center of all efforts to promote education. The 2018 WDR explores four main themes: First, education’s promise: education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies—both within and outside the education system. Second, the need to shine a light on learning: despite gains in access to education, recent learning assessments reveal that many young people around the world, especially those who are poor or marginalized, are leaving school unequipped with even the foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. And too often these shortcomings are hidden—so as a first step to tackling this learning crisis, it is essential to shine a light on it by assessing student learning better. Third, how to make schools work for all learners: research on areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, and school management has identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, teachers are both skilled and motivated, and other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, how to make systems work for learning: achieving learning throughout an education system requires more than just scaling up effective interventions. Countries must also overcome technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and taking an adaptive approach to reform.




The State of the Global Education Crisis


Book Description

"The global disruption to education caused by the COVD-19 pandemic is without parallel and the effects on learning are severe. The crisis brought education systems across the world to a halt, with school closures affecting more than 1.6 billion learners. While nearly every country in the world offered remote learning opportunities for students, the quality and reach of such initiatives varied greatly and were at best partial substitutes for in-person learning. Now, 21 months later, schools remain closed for millions of children and youth, and millions more are at risk of never returning to education. Evidence of the detrimental impacts of school closures on children's learning offer a harrowing reality: learning losses are substantial, with the most marginalized children and youth often disproportionately affected. Countries have an opportunity to accelerate learning recovery and make schools more efficient, equitable, and resilient by building on investments made and lessons learned during the crisis. Now is the time to shift from crisis to recovery - and beyond recovery, to resilient and transformative education systems that truly deliver learning and well-being for all children and youth."--The World Bank website.




Powering a Learning Society During an Age of Disruption


Book Description

This open access book presents contemporary perspectives on the role of a learning society from the lens of leading practitioners, experts from universities, governments, and industry leaders. The think pieces argue for a learning society as a major driver of change with far-reaching influence on learning to serve the needs of economies and societies. The book is a testimonial to the importance of ‘learning communities.’ It highlights the pivotal role that can be played by non-traditional actors such as city and urban planners, citizens, transport professionals, and technology companies. This collection seeks to contribute to the discourse on strengthening the fabric of a learning society crucial for future economic and social development, particularly in the aftermath of the coronavirus disease.




COVID-19 Learning Losses


Book Description

Since the beginning of the pandemic, efforts have been made to monitor both school closures (and re-opening) and the measures put in place to ensure continuity of learning. These include the Survey of Ministries of Education on National Responses to COVID-19, jointly supported by UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank. However, to date, no systematic evidence has been available on how students' learning is being affected by the disruptions caused by the pandemic or on the impact of education response measures initiated by governments. This report contributes to filling this evidence gap and includes a series of simulations of potential learning losses due to COVID-19 and exploration of their longer-term implications. The analysis is based on the Enabling learning for all framework, which outlines access, engagement and enabling environment as the three crucial enablers for learning, while the simulation assumptions are informed by the evidence on school closures and governments' education-related responses, collected through the joint survey.




Radical Solutions for Education in a Crisis Context


Book Description

This book presents how to keep working on education in contexts of crisis, such as emergencies, zones of conflict, wars and health pandemics such as COVID-19. Specifically, this work shows a number of strategies to support global learning and teaching in online settings. Particularly, it first presents how to facilitate knowledge sharing and raising awareness about a specific crisis, to increase people’s safety, including educators and learners. The book then discusses various techniques, mechanisms and services that could be implemented to provide effective learning support for learners, especially in learning environments that they do not daily use, such as physical classrooms. Further, the work presents how to teach and support online educators, no matter if they are school teachers, university lecturers, youth social workers, vocational training facilitators or of any other kind. Finally, it describes worldwide case studies that have applied practical steps to keep education running during a crisis. This book provides readers with insights and guidelines on how to maintain learning undisrupted during contexts of crisis. It also provides basic and practical recommendations to the various stakeholders in educational contexts (students, content providers, technology services, policy makers, school teachers, university lecturers, academic managers, and others) about flexible, personalised and effective education in the context of crisis.




Education


Book Description

In an age of catastrophes—unchecked climate change, extreme poverty, forced migrations, war, and terror, all compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic—how can schooling be reengineered and education reimagined? This book calls for a new global approach to education that responds to these overlapping crises in order to enrich and enhance the lives of children everywhere. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco convene scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines—including anthropology, neuroscience, demography, psychology, child development, sociology, and economics—who offer incisive essays on the global state of education. Contributors consider how educational policy and practice can foster social inclusion and improve outcomes for all children. They emphasize the centrality of education to social and environmental justice, as well as the philosophical foundations of education and its centrality to human flourishing, personal dignity, and sustainable development. Chapters examine topics such as the neuroscience of education; the uses of technology to engage children who are not reached by traditional schooling; education for climate change; the education of immigrants, refugees, and the forcibly displaced; and how to address and mitigate the effects of inequality and xenophobia in the classroom. Global and interdisciplinary, Education speaks directly to urgent contemporary challenges. Contributors include Stefania Giannini, the director of education for UNESCO; development economist Jeffrey Sachs; cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner; Carla Rinaldi, president of the Reggio Children Foundation; and academics from leading global universities. The book features a foreword by Pope Francis.




World Development Report 1978


Book Description

This first report deals with some of the major development issues confronting the developing countries and explores the relationship of the major trends in the international economy to them. It is designed to help clarify some of the linkages between the international economy and domestic strategies in the developing countries against the background of growing interdependence and increasing complexity in the world economy. It assesses the prospects for progress in accelerating growth and alleviating poverty, and identifies some of the major policy issues which will affect these prospects.




Primary and Secondary Education During Covid-19


Book Description

This open access edited volume is a comparative effort to discern the short-term educational impact of the covid-19 pandemic on students, teachers and systems in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the first academic comparative studies of the educational impact of the pandemic, the book explains how the interruption of in person instruction and the variable efficacy of alternative forms of education caused learning loss and disengagement with learning, especially for disadvantaged students. Other direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic diminished the ability of families to support children and youth in their education. For students, as well as for teachers and school staff, these included the economic shocks experienced by families, in some cases leading to food insecurity and in many more causing stress and anxiety and impacting mental health. Opportunity to learn was also diminished by the shocks and trauma experienced by those with a close relative infected by the virus, and by the constrains on learning resulting from students having to learn at home, where the demands of schoolwork had to be negotiated with other family necessities, often sharing limited space. Furthermore, the prolonged stress caused by the uncertainty over the resolution of the pandemic and resulting from the knowledge that anyone could be infected and potentially lose their lives, created a traumatic context for many that undermined the necessary focus and dedication to schoolwork. These individual effects were reinforced by community effects, particularly for students and teachers living in communities where the multifaceted negative impacts resulting from the pandemic were pervasive. This is an open access book.




Why Does College Cost So Much?


Book Description

College tuition has risen more rapidly than the overall inflation rate for much of the past century. To explain rising college cost, the authors place the higher education industry firmly within the larger economic history of the United States.