COVID-19 & Education: A World Bank Group Perspective, part II

Collection of the World Bank’s blogs on Education on its response to the COVID-19 outbreak – 2nd Edition (July – December 2020)

with foreword by: Jaime Saavedra, Global Director, World Bank Group Education

COVID-19 & Education: A World Bank Group Perspective, part II

Table of Contents I. Foreword 1. There is no magic: The formula for Brazil’s Ceará and Sobral success to reduce learning poverty 2. Moving high-stakes exams online: Five points to consider 3. COVID-19 and education systems in Tanzania: Brainstorming for a true ed-tech disruption?

4. Examinations and high stakes decision making in the era of COVID-19 5. How to invest in remote learning while building the education system of the future?

6. Reintegrating Out-of-School Children into Ghana’s Formal Education System 7. The importance of monitoring the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young children and their families 8. Launching a new academic year under the cloud of COVID-19 9. Multi-modal TVET delivery during COVID-19: Expanding access to continued learning in Afghanistan 10. Universalizing basic literacy: how to get every child reading?

11. Learning losses due to COVID19 could add up to $10 trillion 12. Getting children back to school: “We are in a hurry” 13. On World Teacher's Day: A recognition of hard work during challenging times 14. The costs of COVID-19 in education in Latin America. Acting now to protect the future of our children 15. To rebuild our education systems, we must focus first on leadership 16. Accelerating Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Through Focus, Measurement, Support and Accountability 17. Learning for All: Beyond an Average Score 18. How to improve human capital? The need for cost-effective education investments 19. The remote learning paradox: How governments can truly minimize COVID-related learning losses 20. Learning for All: Within-country learning inequality 21. The Gujarat Model: Managing Learning Continuity During COVID-19 22. Learning in the time of COVID-19: the role of learning assessment in reopening schools 23. Shifting mindsets to support disability-inclusive education 24. Is the COVID-19 slide in education real?

25. What PISA for Development results tell us about education access and learning levels in developing countries 26. How could COVID-19 hinder progress with Learning Poverty? Some initial simulations 27. Read@Home: Effective partnerships to reach vulnerable children in North Macedonia 28. A silent and unequal education crisis. And the seeds for its solution.

29. Considering an adaptive learning system? A roadmap for policymakers

A silent and unequal education crisis. And the seeds for its solution.

A girl in 6th grade is sitting in a comfortable chair in front of her laptop engaging in a class through Zoom. Her 15 classmates are all connected. Since the pandemic-induced lockdown, their parents, like hers, are mostly teleworking, and are able to supervise how they are engaging. She just got new headphones and a tablet where she can have her digital workbook open.

She is shy and feels comfortable asking questions via chat. This way of interacting fits with her personality, so she is enjoying the class. Too many hours on Zoom is a drag, though, and sometimes she just mentally disconnects.

A boy, just a few miles away is taking turns with his siblings to watch one hour of TV programing for 6th grade in the recently launched public TV educational channels. His teacher sends him homework through WhatsApp, but he can only see it at night on his mother’s smartphone. She is out most of the day working and must take the phone with her. His teacher came to his house some weeks ago to give him a brand-new textbook and a workbook. That was great, as there is no other reading material at home. He has not seen most of his classmates for many months. Actually, his teacher has not been able to contact several of his classmates for a long time either.

These dramatically different experiences – and many shades of gray in between – are happening in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Kenya, and Colombia. Some were able to easily cope with the changes after schools closed, but not the majority.

2020 marks a different childhood experience that these young people will remember for the rest of their lives. And a different education service, during many months, that might impact their skills and economic prospects for the rest of their lives.

This pandemic has generated suffering of an unthinkable scale across the globe. It is the worst economic, health, and social crisis of the last 100 years. A once in a century event. But this suffering has been tremendously unequal, something that should not be a surprise given the increasing level of inequality we were already witnessing. An unequal suffering that invades many aspects of human life. The likelihood of not being properly treated if infected – and, hence, dying – is higher for the poor. Unemployment and less possibility of teleworking is higher for unskilled workers. Hours worked have fallen disproportionately more on women.

Education opportunities have been lower and, also, dramatically unequal. Most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote learning strategies in place. But the quality and effectiveness are varied, and low. A recent survey of government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that in only half of the cases there is close monitoring of the usage of remote learning. And in those cases, remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population.

This generation, who is – or should have been – in school during 2020 is bound to lose at least US$ 10 trillion in foregone future earnings. Unless we do something, this generation might do worse than the previous and the future one. This potential economic loss is linked to the loss in learning (and hence future productivity): at the World Bank we had assessed that before the pandemic, Learning Poverty (the share of 10-year-olds that cannot read and understand a simple text) was already at an extremely high 53% in low- and middle-income countries. With the pandemic forcing massive school closures, we now project that Learning Poverty could increase to 63%. That is, 72 million more primary age kids will be learning poor.

Reading is not all but it is a precondition to advance many of the aspects of education we care about. And the ability of a system to assure that their kids read with and understand a simple text is a good proxy of its overall quality.

In addition to lower learning in basic education, other mechanisms are at play. We expect large increases in dropout rates both in secondary and higher education, and most likely the total number of schooling years of this generation will be lower.

Younger children, those who were 5 to 7 years old in 2020 and were supposed to receive early childhood education services, lost that option completely, as no form of remote learning has been possible for them. Remember all the arguments in favor of the early years’ investments proving they had the highest private and social returns? Well, all those returns disappeared.

Those children will never get those valuable years back and will be at a disadvantage compared to previous and later generations.

We were already witnessing an education crisis. A silent, slow moving crisis that was denying a future to many students. The pandemic is making this crisis even more serious.

In addition, data that suggest how unequal these learning losses are is slowly appearing. We have some evidence from rich countries. Despite their extensive technological reach, for a few European countries for which there is learning data post closures, there is evidence of learning losses and higher inequality as a result of the pandemic. In the Netherlands, researchers found a decrease in student performance on a national exam equivalent to a fifth of a school year (roughly the actual time out of school due to the pandemic) and a growing inequality, likely due to children from better-off families receiving more parental support and having better remote learning environments. In the US, regardless of the type of college,

Fall of 2020 college enrollment rates for low-income high school students plunged by 29%, nearly double that of students from higher-income high schools.

Among middle-income and poor countries, we only have some data of usage of different forms of remote learning, and they reveal different experiences for different children. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 45% of children had no exposure at all to any type of remote learning. Of those who did, it was mostly radio, TV, or paper material. In a typical African country, at most 10% of kids received some material through the internet. In Latin America, the situation is better, 90% of children received some remote learning; but less than half of that was through the internet – the rest was radio and TV. In many middle-income countries a small minority, mostly in elite schools had several hours a day of synchronous instruction.

On the other side of the income spectrum, many students had to settle for a few hours for their grade by TV or radio. In Chile, a country better prepared than most Latin American countries, it is estimated that the poorest quintile might lose 88% of expected learning for this year, while the richest quintile “only” 64%. Note that in the southern hemisphere, the school closures that started a few weeks after the pandemic, coincided with the start of the school year (April or May). There was no northern summer vacation from May to August to try to figure out what to do. The school closures smacked down at the precise moment to affect the school year almost in its entirety. The average Latin American country has lost 160 days. And for many children, in-classroom instruction vanished completely.

This horrendous year, however, carries the seeds for a promising change. It has shown that innovation and technology adoption is possible. Mental blocks can be lifted, and quickly. Starting in April, millions of children started communicating with their teachers and having their homework reviewed through WhatsApp or other social media. Not the panacea – and not everyone had access to a smartphone – but it allowed many children to maintain contact with the education system. In many systems, millions of teachers have started learning the use of social media and ed-tech tools at an unheard of pace, forced by the circumstances.

And many other mindsets are changing. Education, as if there was any doubt, is mainly a social endeavor. Parents now have a whole new understanding about how much they can do to support their children’s learning, and at the same time, the immense influence that a teacher can have in the lives of children and about the complexity of a teacher’s job. In the short run, this raises the stakes of smart and creative school management policies that could help increase face time between teachers and students in the coming months, trying, at least, hybrid experiences. Authorities, teachers, and parents have to cooperate and reach a balance to minimize both the negative health impacts and the negative education impacts.

In the medium-term, this better understanding of the role of teachers raises the stakes of making teaching a socially valued career. A good teacher is the most important factor to guarantee quality education and makes a huge difference in a student’s life. This pandemic has shown that many great teachers have found creative ways of engaging with their students, with technology or without it. Yet, in many countries, we still see teachers selected from low-quality applicant pools, and political considerations defining selection, promotion, and deployment of teachers. Countries that do not change that will simply fail. But that is changing. In the state of Edo in Nigeria, in the states of Ceara and Sao Paulo in Brazil, in Peru, in Turkey, shifts towards a meritocratic career are being consolidated, and countries are investing in coaching, schools-based practical training, providing feedback to teachers to excel in their classroom engagement, and giving them tools to perform better in class Going forward, as schools reopen even with modified schedules and curriculums, educational systems will need to be more flexible and adapt to the student’s needs. That flexibility requires giving teachers the tools and support to provide a more personalized and flexible learning experience that ensures that all children within the classroom learn. That is a critical element to making systems more equitable. Technology can have an incredibly powerful role to provide these tools and complement the work of the teacher. That is another critical lesson that some countries are starting to build on: the pandemic has shown that the digital divide has to be closed at a much faster rate. Technology will be critical also to make systems more resilient, allowing for a continued educational experience at home and at school.

All this will require resources. Closing the digital divide will not be cheap, having the right number of teachers and investing more in a professionalized well-respected career, will also require resources. The complex management of the school system – which is being pushed to its limits – requires resources. It is a challenge for both Ministries of Education and Ministries of Finance defining the investment path that is needed in the coming years to provide a minimally decent service for all its children and youth. This investment path requires a financing path that maps into higher domestic resources mobilization, mainly taxes. There is no magic wand. A renewed social contract, and a political commitment to invest what is needed to provide the right opportunities to all is unavoidable.

In this compilation of 30 blogs, written by both World Bank staff and guest bloggers between July and December 2020, we dig into all these issues in detail. I welcome you to explore.

There is no magic: The formula for Brazil’s Ceará and Sobral success to reduce learning poverty ANDRE LOUREIRO | EMANUELA DI GROPELLO | OMAR ARIAS |JULY 09, 2020

Classroom in Sobral, Brazil, receiving a visit of the World Bank delegation, February 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted life as we knew it. In education, massive school closures have left over a billion children out of school. The situation will exacerbate the already existing global learning crisis - before COVID-19 global learning poverty – the percentage of 10-yearold children who cannot read and interpret a simple text –stood at 53% and reached up to 90% in Africa. Without effective remedial policy action, the negative impacts on learning of the pandemic will impinge huge economic losses for the current generation of learners and economies.

The policy response to the COVID-19 shocks to education needs to be comprehensive and wellplanned to ensure that education systems are “built back better than before”. Learning from successful experiences in education is key to help develop this response. Many lessons on how to successfully fight learning poverty and improve foundational learning can be learned from Ceará - a relatively poor state in Northeastern Brazil with 9 million inhabitants - and Sobral - a 200-thousandinhabitants municipality where 20 years ago 8 out of 10 kids were illiterate. These lessons are even more important now that Brazil and the world will have to recover from the effects of the pandemic on learning outcomes and, in this process, have an opportunity to deeply reform their education systems to accelerate learning.

As part of an effort to learn more about globally successful cases, a team of education specialists from the World Bank visited Ceará and Sobral in early February. We were a group formed by people of eight nationalities with the expectation of discovering a great secret to spread to the world.

From professor Izolda Cela, vice-governor of Ceará who led the main educational reforms in the state as secretary of education and from Ivo Gomes, mayor of the municipality of Sobral, who also led several of the main education reforms in that municipality, we heard the same answer: There is no secret, really! It boils down to a strong focus on the basics, e.g, teaching children how to read by the right age, and making everyone and the system to coherently work towards that goal.

The recipe seems simple, but for many other education systems that want to emulate the success of Sobral and Ceará in education, what happened there still looks like a big puzzle. In recent reports, a Bank team distilled the lessons from Ceará and Sobral in improving foundational learning. Let us here tease out the main ingredients of their formula.

First, the facts: Learning improved much faster in Sobral, first, and then in Ceará as a whole The municipalities of Ceará, and notably Sobral, had the biggest increase in education quality (as measured by Brazil’s Basic Education Development Index, IDEB) between 2005 and 2017. Almost all of the 184 Ceará municipalities initially had very low levels of quality in teaching and very limited resources, investing about a third of the per student education spending of wealthier Brazilian states, such as São Paulo.

In just over a decade, Ceará improved the quality of education so much faster than the rest of Brazil. Among them, Sobral went from a bottom-ranked municipality to become first for both primary and lower secondary education and to reach levels of education quality comparable with those of world-class education systems as measured by PISA. Today Ceará has the lowest rates of learning poverty in Brazil and features 10 of the 20 top-ranked municipalities, and Sobral has some of the best primary schools in Brazil. Moreover, the outstanding educational results of Ceará and Sobral students are well above what would be expected given the socioeconomic context in which they live and learn.

So then, what are the key ingredients of the formula for the success in education of Ceará and Sobral?

At a fundamental level, what municipal schools in Ceará have accomplished is firmly grounded in insights from the Science of Learning, which emphasize three key principles: first, that learning needs to happen with joy, rigor and purpose; second, that improvement requires readiness, opportunities and incentives to get better; and third, that sustained performance improvement requires constant and focused feedback. Sobral, first, and then Ceará have embraced these principles in the day-to-day practices and interactions of students, teachers, principals and even district officials in classrooms and schools.

At the education system level, these principles manifest in having a clear diagnostic of learning and system performance, focusing the efforts on top priorities for improvement, and then choosing the right set of strategies and implementing them in a coordinated and persistent fashion with all key education stakeholders.

Concretely, the formula for education success of Ceará has five main ingredients, which are supported by international evidence on what works in education. The first three ingredients involve sound financing and pedagogical policies, namely: (i) incentives, both financial and non-financial, for municipalities to achieve better education outcomes; (ii) technical support to the municipal school networks struggling to improve learning goals, with a strong focus on enhancing teacher effectiveness and achieving universal literacy at the right age; and (iii) the use of a robust and reliable monitoring and assessment system, which continuously assesses key results of education, chiefly student learning. These three ingredients emphasize instructional coherence in terms of the alignment of the curriculum (what students are expected to learn), teachers’ pedagogical approaches (how students are taught), and learning assessment (how the system checks whether students are learning). They also show consistent implementation over time building on earlier preparatory reforms.

The fourth ingredient is a high degree of autonomy for municipalities to design and implement their education policies. Together with the first three, this leads to the creation of a culture where feedback is essential to improve performance throughout the system. What stroke us the most in

visiting Cearรก and Sobral is that when asked about the potential drawbacks of the use of assessments and incentives to drive performance, principals, teachers, and administrators generally reframed the conversation: they see feedback and incentives as critical to achieve learning for all rather than as instruments of accountability. The last, but not least, ingredient that makes it all stick together and enables action is a sustained political leadership and commitment to education quality.

Recipe for success in education in the state of Cearรก

No other municipality exemplifies this non-miraculous recipe better than Sobral.

What has led Sobral to become the best education system in Brazil is the coherent mix of: (i) Effective and continuous use of student assessment, through written and oral evaluations of all children focused on reading fluency, and using learning outcomes extensively to guide education policy and in-classroom pedagogical practices; (ii) Focused and well-aligned curriculum, with a clear learning sequence and prioritization of foundational skills, particularly literacy at the right age, as well as its full alignment with national, state and municipal assessments, textbooks and teacher training; (iii) Prepared and motivated teachers, with focused and practical professional development, classroom observations and support through structured lesson plans aimed at improving teaching practices and the use of teacher incentives and learning assessments to drive better performance; and (iv) Autonomous and accountable school management with school principals being identified by a meritocratic selection process and then being allowed a high level of school autonomy and financial and non-financial incentives for principals linked to reaching student learning targets of her/his school and substantial support from the secretariat of education to school management.

Recipe for success in learning in the city of Sobral

All of the successful education policy reforms in Ceará and Sobral involved a crucial first step: political leadership and a commitment to put learning first or as a high-level official put it “to take politics outside of schools”. Strong political leadership is needed to confront the resistance from stakeholders whose interests are not always well-aligned with student learning. Again in Sobral sustained and strong political leadership has placed education as a top priority, as made explicit by a sharp overarching goal: ensure that all students are fully literate by grade 2.

Countries that are firmly committed to achieving learning for all can well start with establishing similar time-bound, ambitious targets to eliminate learning poverty, and adapt the key ingredients of the success formula of Ceará and Sobral to their own country contexts. That is the real magic!

To learn more about what worked in Ceará and in Sobral, check out our webpage with a variety of resources on both experiences

Moving high-stakes exams online: Five points to consider DIEGO LUNA-BAZALDUA | JULIA LIBERMAN | VICTORIA LEVIN | JULY 16, 2020

Teen boy taking exam at home.

As social distancing measures have been put in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus (COVID19), governments, universities, and testing organizations around the world have had to decide whether or not to administer high-stakes examinations. These exams are commonly used to make high-stakes decisions, such as selecting students for the next education level or certifying students’ knowledge and skills as they enter the workforce; thus, the results of exams directly affect students’ lives and futures. When properly designed and administered, examinations can enhance equity by opening up access to educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. Likewise, high-stakes examinations can also increase transparency in the student certification or selection processes.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, high-stakes exams tended to be administered in person, usually in paper format, with students and proctors physically present together in a school or a testing center.

In the current context, governments and testing organizations have had to evaluate the extent to which such in-person exam administration is feasible, taking into account health and safety considerations. As investments in the digital delivery of learning content increased significantly over the last several months, so too has the focus on administering high-stakes examinations online to allow students to take such exams from their homes without risking exposure to COVID-19.

Some testing organizations in the United States have introduced home-based online versions of exams for university admission, course credit or certification purposes, such as the Graduate Records Examination (GRE), the Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exam. Before COVID-19, these exams were administered in person at school or at testing centers following high test security protocols to prevent malpractice. Similarly, some states in the United States, like California, have decided to move professional certification exams to an online format. Likewise, as a precautionary measure against COVID-19, Saudi Arabia implemented its Standard Achievement Admission Test (SAAT) online for the first time using

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Some universities in Europe have also implemented final examinations in an online format. For instance, the Imperial College London administered a timed, open-book exam online to its graduating undergraduate medical school students. The University of Amsterdam implemented final examinations online as it continues online teaching for the foreseeable future.

To administer an online at-home exam, a number of factors need to be in place to ensure that the exam produces valid, reliable, and fair results. Test-takers must have access to an electronic device (e.g., desktop, laptop, or tablet) that is compatible with the exam delivery software. Likewise, testtakers must have a stable and secure internet connection. The format and content of the test should be amenable to online delivery, which is particularly critical for online screen visualizations of reading passages, images, charts, figures, and geometric shapes. In order to produce valid scores of student performance, the online examination should be designed so that test-takers are tested on the content of what is being assessed, rather than on their familiarity with the testing software or on the use of a specific electronic device.

Remote proctoring is also key to monitor test takers’ behavior to prevent malpractice; for example, some online exam proctoring software can access test-takers’ webcam, microphone, browser activity, and keyboard and mouse to monitor their behavior during the exam, and any suspicious behavior is reported to test administrators for review.

While all of these factors are necessary to ensure proper administration of online at-home highstakes exams, many developing countries would require significant targeted investments to meet these conditions. The following five considerations for moving high-stakes exams to an online athome format, while not providing an exhaustive list, point to the need for significant reflection in making this transition, particularly for developing countries.

First, in many developing (and even developed) countries, not all students have access to an adequate device or internet connection at home to take an online exam. Moreover, students living in overcrowded households may not have the appropriate or sufficient space or conditions to take an exam that will likely be very consequential for their futures. To address this reality, some local governments and organizations in the United States have implemented laptop loaner or donation initiatives and facilitated the availability of public internet hotspots (while maintaining social distancing) to support test-takers who are not able to take online exams at home.

Second, even with the right infrastructure and space at home, software malfunctions may occur.

Adequate time and effort are needed for software testing, providing troubleshooting guidelines, and ensuring the availability of real-time technical assistance prior to and during the online test administration. With regard to remote proctoring in particular, if an online automated proctoring software malfunctions, trained proctors must be on standby and ready to monitor students’ behavior during the online examination remotely.

Third, remote proctoring has faced legal issues regarding data sharing, confidentiality of personal information, and the use of technologies for surveillance of students’ behavior. In the Netherlands, for example, legal complaints have been made, arguing that online proctoring goes against students’ privacy rights. The Amsterdam District Court has ruled that the use of proctoring software does not constitute a violation of students’ privacy; however, the Court’s decision reaffirmed the importance of proctoring software providers’ compliance with European privacy laws to protect the collection and sharing of students’ personal information.

Fourth, for examinations previously administered in paper format, it is not enough to simply put the existing examination items in an online format without consideration for other critical aspects of the testing process. With the changes in the exam delivery format, items need to be piloted, evaluated, and adjusted accordingly to meet the content and psychometric standards. For example, the

change in the delivery format could turn some items easier or more difficult than in paper format, or simply change the resolution and quality of pictures, plots, or other stimuli; these subtle changes can only be evaluated through pilot studies to ensure the quality of the exam and its content.

For exams that require test takers to perform certain tasks to show their mastery of specific skills (for example, to play a musical instrument or to conduct a science experiment), assessment agencies and testing organizations must develop appropriate tasks to allow for the rigorous measurement of these skills through the online testing format.

Fifth, like other learning assessments, high-stakes examinations should adhere to the principles of universal design to allow all students to have equal opportunity to accurately demonstrate what they know and can do. In fact, testing organizations and government assessment agencies in many countries devote considerable resources to ensure that tests can be adapted for students with disabilities. The at-home online versions of high-stakes exams also need to ensure that all students can be provided with necessary accommodations; therefore, online proctoring needs to consider adaptations to the individual needs of students with disabilities, such as extended time to take the exam, the use of assistive technologies, and the live presence of professionals that can support students to read the questions and record their answers if needed, among others.

Certainly, the challenges of online exam administration are not trivial, and more issues will continue to be identified now that more and more countries and organizations explore online solutions for assessing what students know and can do. As governments and testing organizations work to enhance the assessment solutions they offer for high-stakes decision-making, it will be imperative to ensure that any solution meets the validity, reliability, and fairness properties of a high-quality assessment, especially if it is expected to have a significant impact on students’ lives.

Disclaimer: Resources in this article are provided for informational purposes only. The World Bank does not endorse any of the tools, companies, or applications mentioned in the article.

COVID-19 and education systems in Tanzania: Brainstorming for a true ed-tech disruption?

GEMMA TODD | JULY 23, 2020

An empty classroom in Tanzania

“Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.” – Steve Jobs The opportunity: tackling the learning crisis with technology. We now realize the world is facing a ‘learning crisis’ worldwide; and recognize there needs to be a shift from focus on schooling to focus on learning (World Development Report, 2018). In Tanzania, more children are now enrolled in school. With the introduction of the fee-free basic education policy, enrolment increases have been found across all levels. By 2020, 15.4 million students were enrolled in Mainland Tanzania from pre-primary up to advanced level secondary education, but schools remain with a shortage of teachers and basic infrastructure. With such an environment, the addition of school closures from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic (March to June 2020) brought on new challenges. We witnessed a big ‘technology rush’ with the government and education stakeholders exploring what solutions to school closures technology can offer. In this blog I want to reflect on some successful examples of use of ed-tech in Tanzania during the time of school closures. In my next blog, I will share some ‘disruptive’ ideas for a post COVID-19 Ed-Tech world.

Tanzania is home to award-winning innovations in Ed-Tech!

The country’s ed-tech space has expanded over the years, and now it is home to award-winning innovations: • •

• •

Edutainment using a user-centred approach i.e. Ubongo Kids E-learning platforms providing digital content online and a virtual teacher i.e. TIE e-learning platform, Shule Direct, KitKit, TESEA, Mtabe, My Elimu, and Kisarawe Shule Zetu.

E-learning for out-of-school children i.e. XPrize winners, KitKit and One Billion Equipping schools with technology to become tech-hubs i.e. Avanti’s Iknowledge project

Each of these ‘innovations’ has pushed hard to reach as many children as possible by: Ensuring the use of multiple platforms to expand outreach. Ubongo Kids and the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE) have made content for TV, radio (community and national), online, and YouTube, to maximize outreach to children even in the most remote areas. A paper written on the impact of watching Ubongo Kids TV program over four-weeks, concluded that children improved their drawing, shape knowledge, number recognition, counting, and English skills at a faster rate compared to the control group. However, the treatment group started with higher scores on the skills and showed a lower score for emotion recognition or letter identification (compared to control group). For now, there is limited published research on the impact of radio (more equitably accessed) on children’s learning. In addition, there is a need to better understand how and in what cases technology works for children’s learning.

Roll-out with strong communications. Both TIE and Ubongo Kids have rolled out the platforms by targeting parents. Awareness raising efforts focused on making parents aware of the tools they can use to help their child learn at home. Adverts for the platforms (and schedule) are found on social media, WhatsApp, TV, and radio, encouraging parents to log on and tune-in for their child. Ubongo Kids additionally has created a ‘Toolkit’ to allow parents to filter and access the content they need.

Making e-content zero rated to ensure equitable access. Many of the e-content platforms mentioned above (i.e. Shule Direct) have partnered with mobile providers to ensure the platform is available without any internet bundle required.

Introducing fictional teachers for Q&A. Both Shule Direct and the Mtabe App have built using Artificial Intelligence to allow for interaction with a ‘virtual teacher’. The platforms are both for secondary school-age students and in the case of Shule Direct, ‘Teacher Kidevu’ provides a real-time teacher to answer questions for subjects or social issues.

Making sure content is multi-lingual and has monitoring by stakeholders integrated. Great examples of this are the recent XPrize Winners, Kitkit and One Billion, that used simple Tablet-Apps to improve early learning skills for out-of-school children (aged 7, 9 and 11). The Kitkit Tablet provided content in Kiswahili and English at community centers, students would attend and be monitored for their progress. What is interesting about Kitkit is that it focused on children out of the system with limited knowledge of technology. The program was simple and encouraged selfdirected learning (no teacher needed), but also integrated monitoring at the community center to closely follow the children.

Reaching rural schools and providing internet to the community. One last area that the innovations have made headways is by equipping schools in rural (and urban) areas with techenabled classrooms, with teachers trained to be ICT masters and the community having a point for internet connection. The IKnowledge project has turned schools into hubs for the community. In a school in Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam, I was told that it was now a space where the community would congregate on weekends to connect to good internet and learn!

COVID-19 has really highlighted the inequity in the Ed-Tech space, and the need for a ‘disruption’ at its core. The innovative examples shared in this blog highlight how far we have come in Tanzania in using technology for improving the learning environment and reaching more

children, but there are challenges both in terms of conceptualisation and application to reach all children.

As children across the country return to schools after the long period of closures during which we were relying on parents to carry out ‘learning at home’, I have been wondering why so many children were outside playing during the closures? Why did the government have to use forceful reminders to keep children at home and hopefully continuing to learn there? And why despite dissemination of the government strategy, not all parents were teaching their children at home? In my second blog I will try to answer some of these ‘why’s.

Examinations and high stakes decision making in the era of COVID-19 MARGUERITE CLARKE | JULY 28, 2020

Students taking exam in a classroom.

For many of us, our progress through school was punctuated by a series of high-stakes examinations that determined whether we would move to the next grade level, graduate from secondary school, or enter university. In my case, it was the Leaving Certificate examinations in Ireland which determined whether I would graduate from secondary school and which university course I could take. It never occurred to me at the time that there might be other, equally valid or better, ways of making these high-stakes decisions about my future.

Over the last few months, however, as coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forced the closure of over 90 percent of the world’s schools and required the imposition of strict social distancing measures, ministries of education everywhere had to rethink how to make these kinds of high stakes decisions about their students’ futures, including the extent to which examinations could be retained as part of the decision-making process.

Where did countries come out? A recent survey of 118 countries, carried out by UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank to understand how countries’ education systems were responding to the crisis, found that the most common responses by countries included: (i) shifting to online administration of their high-stakes examinations; (ii) postponing the examinations to a later date; (iii) continuing the examinations as planned, albeit with various social distancing/safety measures; or (iv) canceling the examinations entirely and using alternative sources of information to make decisions about students.

In this blog, I want to focus on the last approach – i.e., canceling – since this is, in many ways, the most extreme response, and raises interesting questions about the extent to which other sources of information can be used to make these kinds of high-stakes decisions. The United Kingdom (UK) is a good example. On March 18, 2020, the UK Secretary of State for Education announced that the summer 2020 A-Level exams (used to certify school leaving and for university entrance) would be cancelled in order to help fight the spread of COVID-19. Instead, each student was to receive a

“calculated grade” for each of their subjects, to be determined and standardized using five sources of information.

1. Centre Assessment Grades (CAGs) – predicted grades for students for each of their subjects provided by their school; 2. Subject-wise ranking of students within each of the CAG levels provided by their school; 3. Expected grade distribution for that subject at the national level; 4. The school’s historical grade distribution for that subject over the past one to three years; and 5. The school’s predicted grade distribution for that subject based on results on other examinations (e.g., the General Certificate of Secondary Education results) CAGs (the most important piece of information out of the five) are supposed to be decided by the subject team in a student’s school and signed off by the Headteacher before being submitted for standardization. The information used to calculate a student’s CAG may include (among other things): classwork, homework, any non-formal assessment carried out by the school; AS Levels (similar to the first year of an A Level course) performance if the student sat those exams, and mock (practice) exams.

Not surprisingly, this “calculated grades” approach has both supporters and opponents. Students who support the plan feel that it will be a better reflection of the work they’ve put in over the years.

Those against it point out that the ‘rules of the game’ are being changed at the last minute and they did not expect that assignments and other work they previously viewed as low-stakes or formative in nature would be used for high-stakes decision making.

There are also those who point to technical issues with an approach that relies so much on distributions and predictions. For example, students attending smaller schools may be at a disadvantage because their school’s predicted grade distribution may be less stable due to less data. There also are concerns that the calculated grades for students from disadvantaged backgrounds may suffer given that teachers tend to underestimate the abilities of students from such backgrounds.

My home country of Ireland has also decided to cancel the Leaving Certificate examination and instead issue calculated grades to students. The formula seems less complicated than the UK’s, but the issues are similar. A key issue in both countries is the role of teachers in the calculated grades process. While in some countries (e.g., Australia), teachers are used to (and welcome) playing a key role in the determination of their students’ grades as an input to high school graduation or university entrance, in others, teachers want as little as possible to do with the process. In Ireland, for example, there are concerns that teachers will face pressure from parents and students to provide certain grades and may face recriminations if they do not. There also is a belief in the inherent value of an external ‘objective’ measure of students’ performance as they transition from compulsory schooling. Finally, there is a sense that teachers have not been trained or given enough time to feel confident in their ability to make these kinds of high stakes decisions about their students’ futures. COVID-19 has made the whole process feel a little rushed.

At this stage, many of the above concerns and scenarios have yet to play out since students have yet to be issued their final calculated grades. In the meantime, it will be important for the UK, Ireland, and other countries using such alternatives to their traditional examinations to collect as much evidence as possible on the process, both to support better high-stakes decision-making using these alternate approaches as well as to facilitate evaluation of these approaches as options for the future. After all, we owe it to students to use the best evidence possible – examination or non-examination related – to make these kinds of high-stakes decisions about their futures. The

circumstances produced by COVID-19 may well yield some useful insights that will help countries to build back infinitely better in this area.

How to invest in remote learning while building the education system of the future?

HARRY A. PATRINOS | JULY 30, 2020

School hallway in Turkey.

Social distancing measures in response to the risk of coronavirus (COVID-19) have closed schools, which at the peak has affected more than 1.5 billion children and young people around the world.

This is having a negative impact on learning outcomes, and estimates suggest that significant losses will become evident when schools re-open. These lags in learning will last a lifetime by decreasing the earnings potential of the affected students. Moreover, it is likely that these learning and earnings losses will not be evenly distributed but will affect the disadvantaged learners much more than others. Some modeling suggests that the loss of learning during the extraordinary systemic crisis of World War II was still having a negative impact on the lives of former students some 40 years later.

With this in mind, it is crucial to find ways to protect learning outcomes during the current crisis and going forward, build a system that is resilient to future shocks. Over the past few months, governments around the world have put emergency remote learning efforts in place, but they have been plagued by limited capacity, weak student connectivity, constrained interactions between students and teachers, and poor attendance.

To fix these shortcomings going forward, governments need to: (i) protect education spending; (ii) provide a one-off increase in spending to the schools that have been hardest hit by learning losses; (iii) invest in summer learning programs and high-dosage tutoring to help those students falling furthest behind; (iv) implement just-in-time learning assessments so that teachers can plan their lessons to accelerate the learning recovery once schools re-open; (v) provide scholarships to keep children enrolled; and (vi) develop employment programs and lifelong learning opportunities for atrisk youths. In addition, they need to continue to address the ongoing public health emergency.

COVID-19 is forcing us to rethink the education system, and it is clear that automation will play an increasingly significant role in the process of teaching and learning in the future. To a large extent, the employment effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are skill-biased. For those with lower levels of

education, COVID-19’s negative effect on employment has been much more severe than for those with higher levels of education . Under a worst-case scenario, those workers with automationsubstituting skills (in other words, skills that machines can replace) will see their productivity drop as they are replaced by technology. However, these outcomes can be mitigated by improving the quality of education. Recently, the World Bank approved a US$160 million Safe Schooling and Distance Education Project loan to the Repubic of Turkey to enhance the capacity of the education system to provide e-learning equitably to school-age children during and following the COVID-19 pandemic and in any future shocks. This was the World Bank’s first stand-alone education lending response to the COVID-19 crisis.

While the project supports Turkey’s immediate education response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it also builds the foundation for critical investments aimed at building human capital equitably over the mid-term and at developing the systems needed to withstand future shocks.

The Safe Schooling and Distance Education Project is entirely appropriate for Turkey’s needs and builds on the country’s education platform, but it is also relevant to many other countries, whether rich, poor, or middle-income. All countries are facing challenges in terms of their capacity. This project extends the reach of Turkey’s education system to enable it to serve more than 12 million students over the next two years. The online education platform is being designed and scaled not only to respond to the present crisis but also to build a future-oriented and resilient digital education system for the long term. It will integrate physical teaching and learning with remote teaching and learning. The project is also investing in a strong remedial system to help students when they return to school.

All countries are facing the fallout from the school closures induced by COVID-19 and will need to mitigate these effects and to build their education systems to come back stronger. This project provides a blueprint for other countries to follow. As in Turkey, an effective response requires at least three actions: 1. Investment in Emergency Connectivity and IT Infrastructure. This is needed to expand the country’s elearning platform as part of the response to COVID-19. It is an essential part of the development and implementation of a new digital education system for the emergency and beyond.

2. Production of Digital Content. As the remote learning platform is developed, there will be a need for goods, services, expertise and training to support the delivery of distance education content while schools are closed due to COVID-19. In Turkey, an innovation hub and professional learning labs are being set up to support a gradual return to classroom-based teaching. In addition, the Turkey project is strengthening the blended teaching and learning process that will be needed going forward.

3. Building Institutional Capacity. It is important to strengthen the system’s capacity for coordination, management, and monitoring and evaluation as well as for the continued delivery of safe and equitable digital education services. The capacity of Ministries of Education needs to be strengthened not only for the immediate implementation of emergency projects but also to build the system of the future.

Developing a high-capacity, relevant digital education system will be imperative to minimize the educational costs of school closures stemming from the COVID-19 outbreak as well as any future crises. While educational achievements need to be protected in the short term, we also need to make the right investments to ensure that education systems are resilient and are prepared and equipped for the years to come.

Reintegrating Out-of-School Children into Ghana’s Formal Education System JESSICA LOPEZ | YOKO NAGASHIMA | EUNICE YAA BRIMFAH ACKWERH | AUGUST 04, 2020

Girls enjoying class at Gbimsi Junior High in Ghana. (GPE/Stephan Bachenheimer) Learn more about the Education Outcomes Fund

Despite Ghana’s significant progress in reducing poverty over the years, regional and sub-regional disparities in income level and access to social services persist, particularly with regard to inequitable access to quality education. Though education enrollment rates are high compared to other countries in the region, the quality of education is still far from ideal. Per the Human Capital Index for Ghana, out of the average years of schooling in Ghana (11.6), the number of qualityadjusted learning years is just 5.7—meaning that children are in school but not learning for nearly six years.

Children from hard-to-reach and low-income households must make challenging daily commutes to get to school, and in some cases, children lack access to formal classroom settings (there are some schools under trees). Other issues include limited infrastructure for gender and disability needs, barriers preventing pregnant, parenting, and working students from continuing their education, limited access to media and technology, and the opportunity cost of schooling, especially if students help their parents in generating income.

To tackle challenges like those faced in Ghana, and achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, developing countries must not only use existing resources more effectively, but also look to additional resources. Results-based financing (RBF), an innovative funding approach focusing on the achievement of actual results can contribute to narrowing the funding gap, both by increasing the cost-effectiveness of existing funding and by unlocking additional financing from the private sector.

The World Bank’s Global Partnership for Results-Based Approaches (GPRBA) recently approved a $25.5 million grant to harness outcome-based financing—a form of RBF that ties payments to the achievement of measurable outcomes—to help out-of-school children (OOSC) reintegrate into Ghana’s formal education system and improve learning outcomes. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) is providing this grant through

GPRBA’s recently launched Education Outcomes Fund (EOF). The government of Ghana will contribute an additional $4.5 million to the program. The primary focus will be to support marginalized OOSC, including girls, children with disabilities, and children from lower-income households.

This GPRBA grant builds on the ongoing work of the IDA-funded Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) a results-based operation. The GALOP aims to improve the quality of education by supporting teaching and learning. With greater focus on equity and efficiency, GALOP supports improved learning, improved accountability for learning, technology-based, in-service teacher training, and provision of learning materials. GALOP’s additional financing is also supported by the Global Partnership for Education, which recently approved an additional $15 million for Ghana as part of its response to the education emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With GPRBA’s grant, the government will work with social investors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as service providers to implement the EOF program. Social investors will provide the upfront financing in cases where service providers are unable to do so. Payments will be made based on agreed-upon outcomes, transferring the financial risk away from the government and onto the implementers. Technical assistance will help build government capacity to contract and manage outcomes.

The operation will target approximately 75,000 OOSC in areas with the highest absentee and dropout rates, in districts historically deprived of a strong educational infrastructure, and in the Greater Accra and Kumasi Metropolitan districts. In addition, approximately 120,000 students already enrolled in selected GALOP-beneficiary schools will benefit from strengthened interventions supported by service providers.

Since its approval by the World Bank in 2019, GALOP has seen considerable progress, including the completion of a revised curriculum training for all basic education teachers in the country and the establishment of a point-based sustainable professional development framework for teachers.

Approximately 10,000 schools have been targeted to receive support, management, and resources.

In addition, the process for strengthening the accountability systems for learning is underway.

The GPRBA grant is supporting Ghana’s commitment to reduce the number of OOSC in the country, bring more children to school, and increase sector resources by engaging social investors and NGOs. The first of its kind in Africa, this financing will help strengthen the ecosystem for outcomesbased funding in Ghana, spurring a shift from activity-based funding to outcomes-based financing.

COVID-19 and the education systems in Tanzania: Brainstorming for a true ed-tech disruption? (Part II) GEMMA TODD | AUGUST 06, 2020

A classroom in Tanzania.

Technology + Covid-19 = time for an education revolution In Tanzania we have now opened all schools, colleges and universities, and we are hopefully going to stay in this post coronavirus (Covid-19) world. If we want technology to really revolutionize education the post Covid-19 world is a good time to make that happen. In a post Covid-19 Tanzania we need to: (i) Place equity at the heart of ed-tech; (ii) Better utilize mobile phones; (iii) Create space for teachers to lead; and (iv) Improve adult literacy.

Disruption 1: Access to technology has grown but remains limited for the poor, equity needs to be a priority and mobile phones are key. Data in Tanzania shows limitations in access to electricity and technology. Radio continues to remain a key source of daily information, but mobile phone access has expanded. 79 percent of the population has access to a mobile phone, but as noted in the Poverty Assessment low internet and connectivity devalues the devices (World Bank, 2019). Additionally, this mobile phone may be with the head of household who may not be home when the child is supposed to be learning. We are not at a point where children have free access to the technological device, or internet and devices that could enable remote learning. Access to technology is limited, with a negative correlation to the poorest groups. There is a serious challenge of equity in ed-tech and technological revolution offers opportunity to ensure mass use, and mass value.

If we want true (equitable) disruption the following should be considered to reach the ‘last mile’: (i) mobile phones are the future: how can Tanzania better use SMS and mobile networks to connect with teachers and parents, and share advice or tips on implementing the curriculum? (ii) Solar has become more affordable, lets us this: what about portable solar-charged printers that can be easily connected to mobile phones to allow for printing of content online and e-books? (iii) The internet grid needs to be expanded: 46 percent of population were internet users in December 2019, however, there needs to be mass digital expansion closer to rural communities, at affordable price.

Disruption 2: Ed-tech needs to become a demand-driven innovation, let teachers lead. We need to ask ourselves, what are we aiming for with using technology in schools? In many ways the digitization of content has become a go-to solution for innovators, but what do teachers want and need? What would they demand if they had the chance to express their views? If we see this time as a disruptive space for ed-tech we need to put teachers at the forefront. For example, with rising pupil teacher ratio, a lack of infrastructure, slow communication to teachers, a changing curriculum with limited training, can technology solve these challenges?

If we want demand-driven innovations the following should be considered: (i) use mobile phones to connect teachers and the Government: why don’t teachers have regular channels to connect with government officials and fellow teachers to share lesson ideas, schedules, ask questions, submit ideas on how to use technology in education, share information about local infrastructure gaps, and showing the reality on the ground (a tech-based Grievance Redress Mechanism)? (ii) Use mobile phones for continuous professional development (CPD)? (iii) Teachers are not simply ‘receivers’: Imagine having a bi-annual teachers ‘hack’ education competition, inviting teachers to submit ideas on ed-tech solutions for their work and realities?

Disruption 3: The use of ed-tech needs to go together with improved adult literacy and skills for ICT. For effective interventions the role of the parent and community is key, but we cannot talk about an ed-tech revolution for all if adult illiteracy remains high and skills for ICT low. In 2018, 74 percent of heads of households were literate, and although extreme poverty declined the number of poor households rose compared to 2011. If we want an ed-tech disruption let’s think about improving adult literacy by: (i) Using multi-lingual voice-messages and videos to provide free literacy classes, guide parents on how they can use technology more, and explain the role of technology in education of their children. (ii) Use mobile phones and incentivize with mobile money: the presence and use of mobile money has grown nationwide, in 2019 nearly half of mobile phone subscribers had a mobile money account (TCRA, 2019). If you enrol in an adult literacy course maybe you could receive a top-up on your mobile money account. (iii) Simplify the curriculum for parents and accountability: parents can assist when they know what their child is supposed to be learning. Bitesize texts sent to parents, summarizing the week’s classes for the child could be a way of ensuring the parent knows what has been taught at school.

Ultimately, we need to socialize technology again! There is a growing trend in technology, increasingly it has become more individualized – we went from the radio to headphones. How can we socialize technology again, for students to meet and discuss? How can technology truly recreate a classroom environment at home? When we look at radio, voice allows stories to be told to multiple audiences in various locations. In a school, the teacher’s voice (or presence) in the classroom defines the learning experience. Could we make a low-cost solar-powered 3D robot which once charged loads the daily school schedule and sits with your child? In a post-COVID world the possibilities are endless, the only limitation is our imagination, but we must remember to put equity at the heart of our efforts!

The importance of monitoring the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young children and their families DIEGO LUNA-BAZALDUA | ADELLE PUSHPARATNAM | AUGUST 11, 2020

Madeleine Sarr and her 17 month-old daughter in Senegal

Young children and their families around the world have been exposed to the direct impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and are at the highest risk of being left behind if governments do not take action to protect them. Measures to limit the spread of the virus have resulted in changes to the everyday life of children and their families. In most countries, childcare centers and schools have closed to prevent the spread of the virus, which has changed home dynamics and may have an impact on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. At the same time, many parents and caregivers are being pressured to either work from home, continue to go to work outside of home despite the health risks involved, or have lost their jobs because of the pandemic.

The increased demands on parents to provide care and support learning, coupled with economic uncertainty and isolation, have elevated stress levels and the risk of violence at home. These health and economic factors may also impact families’ capacity to fulfill young children’s basic needs, including their nutrition and health, and even their other psychosocial needs such as education and social development. With prolonged lack of access to education, health, and social services, young children, particularly those living in fragile and impoverished conditions, are at risk of not developing to their full potential.

In order to support families with young children, more information is needed about how they are coping and how their family situation has changed. A range of information could help governments better understand how to support young children and their families, including: families’ access to services during the pandemic, children’s early cognitive and socioemotional development, understanding of prevention measures, how parents/caregivers are supporting children’s learning at home, caregivers’ well-being, and how families are coping with the pandemic.

To help, UNICEF has made available data from their country survey on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 response. The information from this survey is useful to understand how the pandemic has disrupted services provided to children and families. As shown by the indicators

collected by UNICEF, many low- and middle-income countries have experienced disruptions in their capacity to provide health, hygiene, and other social services to families. As a result, families are experiencing financial insecurity, and children are not able to access free meals and healthcare services (e.g., immunizations).

Similarly, results from a survey to parents in the United States conducted by the international organization Save the Children has found that caregivers are worried about the emotional wellbeing of their children during the pandemic; nearly half of the children interviewed in this study reported feeling worried about the potential risk of a close relative getting infected, but they are also concerned about not learning enough at home to be ready for the next school year. Similarly, results from the online survey produced by the RAPID-EC project, conducted by specialists in Early Childhood at the University of Oregon, show that children are experiencing difficulties in their socioemotional development and present higher rates of disruptive behaviors than before the pandemic started. At the same time, families are experiencing household economic insecurity that limits their capacity to meet their basic needs.

In normal circumstances, this sort of information would be gathered using a combination of inperson direct assessments of children and in-person interviews with their caregivers, which allow information to be corroborated from different respondents. Due to social distancing measures, governments, civil society, and international organizations have relied on collecting information using phone interviews with caregivers (see, for example, this blog post from our colleagues at the World Bank and this blog post from J-PAL). Phone surveys provide an important and unique window into young children’s and their families’ experiences of the pandemic despite the limitations and unique challenges surrounding their use (e.g., samples are limited to segments of the population that own phones, higher incidence of non-response, limited scope for verifying the accuracy of reported data).

Responding to the demand for information from low- and middle-income countries, the Scaling Up Measurement in Early Childhood team at the World Bank has developed a phone survey to capture critical issues that young children and their families are facing during the current pandemic. The core survey contains 40 questions on parental support at home, household context and COVID-19, engagement with educational resources, internalized/externalized behaviors, and child discipline. At the end of the core questionnaire, additional modules are included for teams interested in expanding the caregiver interview, depending on the information needs of clients and other stakeholders. It is estimated that the core survey will take approximately 15 minutes to administer over the phone.

In addition, the team has developed accompanying resources to support the implementation of this survey: a short manual with general guidelines to engage with parents/caregivers over the phone, a data management codebook that specifies how questions should be coded as variables in a data file for subsequent analyses, a data-entry spreadsheet template to facilitate the data-entry process, and files to support the survey content to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) systems.

Additional documents to support World Bank teams, partners, and policymakers to analyze data and report results are under development.

At the country level, the data from this survey will highlight the urgency of and inform policy actions around supporting young children and their families during the pandemic, including the need to increase the availability of learning materials at home, support caregivers’ and children’s holistic well-being, and support positive caregiver-child engagements. At the global level, the data can be aggregated to provide a cross-country view of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young children and their families. It is hoped that these data, in combination with the data resulting from other efforts mentioned in this blog and elsewhere, will emphasize the need for a coordinated

response to ensure that young children do not get left behind in local and global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you are interested in accessing the survey and related resources described in this blog post, please contact Diego Luna Bazaldua and Adelle Pushparatnam.

Launching a new academic year under the cloud of COVID-19 TIGRAN SHMIS | MARIA BARRON | KALIOPE AZZI-HUCK | AUGUST 18, 2020

A teacher in Finland prepares his classroom for socially-distant learning.

The next few weeks mark the beginning of the school year across the northern hemisphere. Per the World Bank School Closure data, (School Closures and Affected Students by country; a World Bank tracking tool) sixty-seven countries, almost half of them located in Europe and Central Asia, have reopened or are expecting to reopen schools by September. This year, the safety of students and teachers vis-a-vis the coronavirus (COVID-19) spread is top priority. This is according to countries who responded to the World Bank-UNESCO-UNICEF Survey on National Education Responses completed in June. Results indicate that over 95% of respondents were planning for the reopening of schools and as such, are also stepping up policies and interventions to avoid infection increases.

Among these measures are the reopening at national, or localized levels, or phasing back groups/grades (ex: France, Uruguay); recruiting additional teachers to cover shortages resulting from smaller classrooms (ex: Scotland); staggering attendance (ex: Germany); introducing temperature checks and social distancing requirements (ex: Denmark, Finland, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Tunisia); and/or providing personal protective equipment to teachers and students when in school (ex: Djibouti). Few countries such as Brazil, Canada, and the United Kingdom, are leaving the decision to states, provinces, and districts. For example, in the US’s largest school district (New York, including New York City) schools will reopen only in districts that have shown consistent low transmission rates (lower than 5% over two weeks).

Finding a balance between learning and safety is challenging. Some countries are starting the school year relying solely on remote learning; or using it as a supplement to face-to-face learning. Students in Mexico will begin the 2020-2021 year getting their lessons via TV or radio. In the United States cities and school districts such as Atlanta, Houston, Miami, and Washington, DC suburbs have announced exclusive use of online learning for the first semester of 2020-2021. In Panama, classes started in July with students using an integrated platform that combines TV, radio, print and online resources. Authorities have adapted the curriculum to focus on essential skills and resilience.

Drivers affecting school reopening The decision to reopen schools is very complex, often rendering policymakers, school administrations, parents, and teachers in circuitous debates about lost opportunities and managed risks. Children’s health as well as that of the community have also become paramount to the discussion, along with the long-term consequences on children’s health/wellbeing and learning losses, and the exacerbation of inequalities that hurt the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Consultations with teachers, parents, students and communities are also important to ensure that the decision is context specific and is informed or tailored by the concerns and suggestions of key actors. Figure 1 below summarizes the pre-conditions and trends among measures taken by countries who have decided to reopen schools.

Figure 1: Common Trends and Policies in countries who have started to reopen schools

Ensure quality of learning, regardless of mode of delivery As a measure of mitigating the impact of school closures on learning, and to support their student populations, over 160 countries moved to some type of remote learning by end of March 2020. In the coming weeks, as systems resume or begin a new school year, many of them are planning to continue with this mode, either exclusively or as a as a complementary measure that supports smaller class sizes and less physical presence in classrooms. However, as the recent global human experience has already shown, remote learning poses many challenges in implementation, measurement of its effectiveness, and in reaching disadvantaged children. So not surprisingly, disparities abound in access and quality. The UN Institute for Statistics and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that 40% of students whose schools are closed today do not have access to the internet.

To address these gaps, most countries have opted for multi-modal approaches that include high tech, low-tech and/or traditional paper-based dissemination. To increase accessibility, some governments are distributing digital devices and improving connectivity options. This is the case in Croatia, where telecommunications providers have agreed to distribute SIM cards to low income students so that they can have free internet access. Similarly, Kazakhstan is introducing unlimited access to 380 domestic educational platforms and resources through a tariff plan "Bilim" (knowledge) provided by all mobile operators for students and teachers.

Keep students engaged, teachers healthy, and communities safe That said, COVID-19 infections among children in the US increased 40% across 49 states during the last two weeks of July according to a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association released on July 30th. Understandably, this has raised alarm among many parents whose states have announced a physical start of the 2020-21 school year.

In addition to children, measures to keep teachers and school staff safe need to be taken as well.

First, it is important to determine how many of them may have conditions that put them at higher risk of serious illness if they were to contract COVID-19. An analysis in the US estimates that 1 in 4 American teachers would be at higher risk if they were to get sick. Education systems also need to plan: i) how to respond to shortage of teachers, either if they become sick or if more are needed to comply with smaller class sizes, ii) medical coverage for teachers and coverage of their sick leave. In countries such as Denmark, France, and Italy, teachers’ unions were actively involved in the school reopening discussions and the provision of universal healthcare in those countries alleviated some concerns.

Address Infrastructure/learning environment safety As key physical factors contribute to better infrastructure and a safer learning environment for students and teachers, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed vulnerabilities, including in schools of advanced education systems The average 15 year-old student in OECD countries has spent 7,538 hours inside school buildings, where sometimes the lack of proper ventilation and stagnate air create opportunities for virus spreading. Some measures that countries can consider are to enhance proper ventilation, providing hand washing facilities and other sanitization measures inside school buildings and educating people to use them, as well as establishing clear guidance on whether the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) would be required and in what circumstances. There are some good practices of repurposing school environments, like large sports halls into the learning spaces, rearranging the food facilities etc. Many question if it’s possible for teachers to wear masks at all times, countries such as France require them to use masks when they are less than a meter away from students, while England is considering not to require the use of masks at all. The silver lining of COVID-19 for schools is that the learning environments started to be considered with IT infrastructure and remote learning as a whole, potentially expanding ways of learning and collaborating.

A path towards continuity of learning – Flexibility is key to mitigate learning loss As the global debate and efforts roll forward, it should be noted that the return of students to physical classrooms on a global scale remains an exception rather than the norm, as over one billion students (approximately two thirds of the world’s learners) in over 110 countries are still impacted by school closures and may not see their classrooms for some time. This will have detrimental impact on students’ schooling attainment and learning, and accumulation of human capital across countries. By World Bank estimates, school closures to date could result in a loss of 0.6 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that children achieve during their schooling life from 7.9 years to 7.3 years, resulting in billions of dollars of lost future wages. (Simulating the Potential Impact of COVID19 and School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates) For students across the world the COVID-19 pandemic has already changed the way they learn and where they learn. Flexibility seems to be the foundation of any strategy on reopening schools: a cautious reopening, and readiness to close again if outbreaks emerge. This is not easy in education systems that are historically steeped in tradition and rigidity. But to balance safety and learning, a most effective approach has been to couple physical and remote education, allowing a switch between the two with minimal disruptions.

Multi-modal TVET delivery during COVID-19: Expanding access to continued learning in Afghanistan MABRUK KABIR | KURT LARSEN | SHAHRAM PAKSIMA | ABDUL HAI SOFIZADA | SEPTEMBER 02, 2020

TVET Authority teachers working to adapt curriculum for distance learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented health, economic and social shock. In Afghanistan, this has affected all facets of modern life, including shutting down education institutions across the country in mid-March.

As part of lockdown measures, the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector saw the closure of 300 TVET schools and institutes. Workplace closures had also meant that ‘apprentices’ under in-formal training – known as the Ostad-Shagerdi system – had lost both training opportunities and livelihoods. While learning loss is a concern for the education community as a whole, TVET systems are disproportionately vulnerable given the higher share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the remoteness of many students. Prolonged disengagement could increase the risk of attrition and dropouts.

To mitigate the impact of school closures, distance learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution. Countries around the world have pivoted towards a mix of online, television and radio broadcasts to allow learning continuity for students. Despite high hopes, however, there is a growing recognition that the ‘digital divide’ is widening pre-existing gaps across wealth and geographical lines, often leaving the most vulnerable students behind.

In Afghanistan, many students – especially those in rural areas – have limited or infrequent access to communications infrastructure. A 2019 Asia Foundation survey found that household internet penetration remains low (31% in urban and 9.0% in rural), while the share of television (91% vs 57%) and radio (62% vs 42%) ownership is higher, but not universal. While most households have at least one member with a mobile phone, many students may not have access to these devices for educational purposes.

TVET delivery through a distance learning is further complicated due to its focus on hands-on training. While the theoretical elements of the curriculum are suited to media broadcasts, most TVET pedagogy relies on demonstration of practical work, specialized equipment and learning-bydoing.

Getting Ahead of the Problem Faced with a complex set of constraints, policy makers at Afghanistan’s TVET-Authority (TVETA) developed an “Alternative Learning Plan,” to ensure its 60,000 students can stay connected to the TVET system.

The plan, supported under the Second Afghanistan Skills Development Project, adapted many of the global good practices to the Afghan context – emphasizing simplicity for quick roll out, localized solutions to account for ground realities, and provision through multiple modalities to reach and meet the needs of heterogeneous, hard-to-reach student groups.

First, it was clear that tech solutions were not the main answer for the large majority of students.

Given that many students do not have access to digital devices or Internet connectivity, the immediate response prioritized paper-based approaches. The TVET-Authority quickly mobilized its curriculum experts to develop physical “chapter note” packages for priority trades with the highest student enrollment. These packages are designed to facilitate self-study, providing additional scaffolding through self-instructional plans, supplementary guidelines, and explanatory notes from teachers. The Authority has identified various ways of distributing them to the students, including establishing collection points such as schools in the provinces.

Second, to compensate for the lack of practical instruction, TVETA is preparing a collection of video tutorials to supplement the chapter notes. This involves filming high caliber “lead teachers” delivering both theoretical content and practical demonstrations. These are slated to be delivered through a range of television and radio broadcasts, and online channels, but also through the physical distribution of CDs and flash-drives directly to the students.

Third, as part of a broader shift to expand distance learning, TVETA also plans to roll out a learning management platform. The “e-learning platform” will serve as content repository, while a telephonebased helpdesk will provide support and information to students, families, and TVET teachers, and allow TVETA to track implementation progress.

While online platforms may mainly be accessible to urban students for now, these investments balance the need for an immediate response, while building capacity for future growth of the sector. Afghanistan’s TVET Strategy (2020 – 2024) envisions distance learning as key path to introduce flexibility to skills delivery and broaden access to underserved groups. This includes targeted interventions for women and girls, youth with low literacy, returning migrants, excombatants and those with disabilities.

The Human Capital Agenda The skills sector can play an outsized role in fragile contexts. Access to marketable skills can provide young people an opportunity to access better livelihoods, in addition to strengthening social cohesion and resilience.

In the short term, TVET can be an essential part of the emergency response, providing skills required to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic. As countries emerge from lockdowns, the TVET sector will be central to their economic recovery strategy. Ms. Nadima Sahar, the Director General of the TVET Authority in Afghanistan is convinced that skills development is critical to the human capital agenda and national economic recovery and growth in Afghanistan given its large youth population, informal economy and nascent education sector.

Universalizing basic literacy: how to get every child reading?

MICHAEL CRAWFORD | MARIA BARRON | MARCELA GUTIERREZ | ELAINE DING | SEPTEMBER 08, 2020

Collage of students learning to read in their native languages / World Bank Group

Global trends, including disruptive technology, climate change, and rapidly evolving demographics, continuously redefine the skills that learners need to develop today to become productive workers and engaged citizens tomorrow.

Yet some things do not change: to be ready for the future, all children need to acquire foundational skills, which are the gateway to other skills and subjects. The most fundamental of these skills is literacy.

Before one can read to learn, one must learn to read. Reading with comprehension is arguably the most important skill a child needs to learn in their early school years. Without basic reading proficiency, children will most likely fail to become numerate and are at higher risk of dropping out of school altogether – unlikely to simply “catch-up” over time. Higher levels of behavioral selfregulation are also associated with higher levels of language and literacy.

Despite more students attending primary school than ever before, a shockingly high number of them fail to read by the time they graduate. 53% of children in low- and middle-income countries are unable to read and understand a simple text at age ten — they are known as the “learning poor”. The rate is much higher across Sub-Saharan Africa, where Learning Poverty is a staggering 87%. Despite multiple interventions to improve quality of schooling across countries, at the current rate of improvement, 43% of children will still be Learning Poor by 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the learning crisis, especially for the poor. Despite governments investing heavily in distance education during the pandemic, students’ learning will

surely decline as a result of school closures. Estimations coming out of Chile paint a dark picture: if face-to-face classes do not restart in the remainder of the school year, students in the country could lose on average, 88% of their expected learning for the year. The impact is largest for students of families from the lowest income quintile, who will lose 95% of the learning they were expected to acquire this year. Worldwide, more than 7 million students are at risk of dropping out of school due to the decline in family income alone. Now, more than ever, all children need to acquire foundational skills like literacy.

How to universalize foundational literacy? While high-income countries like Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Russia, and Sweden have learning poverty rates below 2%, lower-middle-income countries like Vietnam have also gone from being far from achieving universal primary a generation ago, to virtually eliminating learning poverty today (Vietnam’s learning poverty rate is 1.1%). What are these countries doing right?

1. Assure political and technical commitment to making all children literate It starts with governments and education authorities building policies committed to the goal that all children must learn to read and adopting targets to make this a reality for all children by the end of primary school. Assessments – at all levels – must align to these reading targets and monitor progress toward them.

An interesting example is the municipality of Sobral in the state of Ceará, one of the poorest states in Brazil. Reform started by the late 90s in Sobral when political leaders committed to the goal of having every child reading and writing by the end of second grade. Sustained commitment and leadership, alongside the use of assessments, a focused curriculum, empowering school management, and motivating teachers were the most important ingredients of Sobral’s reform. By 2017, Sobral ranked first among all municipalities in the index that measures education quality in Brazil in both primary and lower secondary education.

2. Ensure effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers Teachers need to be supported to obtain the knowledge and skills necessary to teach reading. In many settings, this can begin with detailed and highly structured teaching guides for literacy instruction (to provide an extra support to teachers who want it). It also means providing specific and practical professional development, which focuses not only on what to teach, but how to teach it. Moreover, the provision of individualized feedback to teachers on an on-going basis has also shown to have positive impacts on student learning. In South Africa for example, specialized reading coaches who monitored teachers and provided ongoing support led to improvements in student reading proficiency double that of one-off mass trainings conducted outside of the classroom.

3. Provide at least one quality, age-appropriate book per child The more children read, the better they get at reading. Availability of quality, age-appropriate reading materials makes a difference in building the skills necessary for reading fluently. However, in many countries, students simply don’t have materials to read. For example, in 91% of classrooms observed in Madagascar in 2016, none of the pupils had a textbook in hand. Systems that eliminate learning poverty ensure that students have regular and frequent access to a range of engaging reading materials. It starts with the main classroom text, a notebook, and a pen or pencil.

Ideally, this means print- and book-rich classrooms, libraries, and homes where the world of books and reading invites the child to explore and grow.

4. Teach students to read first in the language they best speak and understand A major and underappreciated obstacle to literacy is the mismatch between the language that students speak best and the language of instruction in their schools. Students who receive home language instruction are more likely to attend school, stay in school, and acquire higher levels of learning. This is especially true for girls, and for minorities whose languages are not represented in formal structures.

Moreover, research from contexts as wide ranging as Malawi, Guatemala, the United States (including a meta-analysis comprising 17 studies), has shown that learning to read in one’s mother tongue can help the acquisition of a second language (typically the lingua franca) in later years. On the other hand, for students who lack the oral language abilities in the language being taught, learning to read becomes much more difficult. Removing these language mismatches at a systems level is critical for all students to learn to read, and eventually, read to learn.

5. Foster children’s language abilities and promote the love of books and reading Developing oral language skills lead to better reading proficiency and positive attitudes towards books and reading. According to psychology professor Dan Willingham, author of the book Raising Kids Who Read, there are many strategies that parents and teachers can follow to increase children’s enthusiasm and motivation towards reading. Children develop reading skills while they read for pleasure as much as when they read academic texts. Families can link reading to positive activities, such as visiting a library as a family or having “reading time” at home.

These five interventions have shown to accelerate progress towards reading and raise overall education quality in relatively short periods of time. They make up the World Bank’s forthcoming new “Literacy Policy Package” (LPP). Broader reforms are also needed to maintain progress and expand the improvements made in reading to other areas of learning. But we believe it can be done, and more importantly, that it must be done. In 2019, to galvanize action and align all actors around fighting learning poverty, the World Bank launched a Global Learning Target: to reduce by at least half the global Learning Poverty rate by 2030.

The science of reading lays out a clear path for all students to have their best chance to become capable, engaged, lifelong readers. The LPP encapsulates this evidence and allows countries to “move the needle” in the direction of universal basic literacy. Ending learning poverty and getting every child reading is not an easy task to achieve, especially in the face of a global pandemic that is further jeopardizing learning outcomes.

Now, more than ever, targeted efforts in eliminating illiteracy are critical for the millions of children and their families across the world who deserve and aspire to expanded education opportunities in life.

Learning losses due to COVID19 could add up to $10 trillion JOAO PEDRO AZEVEDO | AMER HASAN | KOEN GEVEN | DIANA GOLDEMBERG | SYEDAH AROOB IQBAL | SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

This blog originally appeared on Brookings.edu

COVID-related school closures are forcing countries even further off-track to achieving their learning goals. The students currently in school stand to lose $10 trillion in labor earnings over their work life. To get a sense of the magnitude, this sum is one tenth of global GDP, or half of the annual economic output of the United States, or twice the global annual public expenditure on primary and secondary education.

Temporary closures in more than 180 countries have kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school, further complicating global efforts to reduce Learning Poverty. While most countries have made heroic efforts at putting in place remote and remedial learning strategies, learning losses are accumulating rapidly. A recent survey from UNICEF-UNESCO-World Bank on national education responses to COVID-19 school closures shows that while the response across countries and regions varies, it has been difficult to reach even half of all students (see Figure 1). Despite vigorous initiatives in Bangladesh, for example, take-up of remote learning is only in the single digits.

There are studies to measure learning losses directly, such as methodological work on phone-based assessments in Botswana and Pakistan. But the global community will need to wait many months— if not years—for a complete picture of global learning losses. In the meantime, many important decisions about funding, school re-openings and teaching strategies have to be made. To inform these decisions, we have developed simulations of the effects of school closures lasting 3 (optimistic), 5 (intermediate), or 7 months (pessimistic) with varying degrees of effectiveness of mitigation measures. Our results add to information from previous simulation exercises such as Rise and RTI.

Figure 1: Remote learning strategies vary across country income groups and educational levels

How do we get to $10 trillion?

In our intermediate scenario, schools are closed for five months. These are the estimates that we find most likely, given that most school systems closed in March and, though with exceptions, we see many countries planning to reopen after the summer. In this scenario, we expect to see a global loss of 0.6 learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS), making the global average fall from 7.9 LAYS to 7.3 LAYS. Being out of school for that long means that children not only stop learning, they also tend to forget a lot of what they have learned.

We use the PISA global database to estimate how learning levels could be affected. The closures could result in an average of 16 points of lost learning in terms of PISA scores for lower secondary students. They could increase the share of students not acquiring minimum proficiency from 40 to 50 percent (Figure 2). An estimated 7 million students are likely to drop out of school. The effects on girls and vulnerable and marginalized groups will likely be much worse.

Figure 2: The share of children below minimum proficiency is likely to increase by 25 percent

To gauge the long-term economic impacts of these learning losses, we projected how they could affect future earnings. In our intermediate scenario, a typical student’s future earnings will fall by $872 a year, reaching a total loss of $16,000 in lifetime earnings in present value terms. Using global data on household labor incomes, we allow these results to vary by country. We then add up the country-level results for all learners who are enrolled in primary and secondary education in the world. Combined, this generation of students stands to lose an estimated $10 trillion in earnings over its work life.

How do our figures compare with other estimates? For student who are expected to work, we estimate an income loss of 5 percent of lifetime earnings. In the United Kingdom, economists predict an earnings loss of 3% of yearly income. In the United States, one study forecasts a loss of 22.5% of income, another up to 13% of the US current GDP. Our estimates for the world as a whole are comparable in severity, despite slightly different methodological approaches.

The relative impacts of these losses on low income countries (LICs) are higher when measured in terms of their public investment in basic education. LICs could lose more than three full years of their investment in basic education; high income countries stand to lose less than two years of their investment. This underscores the especially urgent need to protect investments in education in the poorest countries. We know that human capital investments power long run economic development. Governments and development partners need to immediately step up efforts to protect and increase investments in people.

How to recover and accelerate learning As outlined in our recent education policy response, governments would do better if they plan their actions in three phases: coping, managing continuity and improving and accelerating. In deciding and preparing for reopening of schools, they should consult with their communities, teachers, parents, and students to understand and address their concerns. They should assess the safety of operations, developing clear protocols for hygiene and social distancing as described in Framework for Reopening Schools. In many settings, basic infrastructure for handwashing and hygiene will need

to be put in place. They should also increase investments and teacher training in remote learning and accelerated learning recovery.

While actions have to be tailored to each context, a common focus ought to be strengthening the capacity of schools to reduce risks of disease transmission and promote healthy behavior. Health and safety concerns may require managing the number of on-site students through double shifts, targeting early grades and vulnerable groups, and combining in-person instruction with remote learning. There should also be a focus on recovering lost learning by assessing learning loss, supporting socioemotional well-being, and targeted remedial measures. Also needed are loud reenrolment campaigns and cash transfers to make sure that school systems do not lose children permanently. Governments and school leaders also need to pay special attention to protecting vulnerable groups. Given the high risks of increased disparities, marginalized students must be a high priority in COVID-19 education response strategies. Students below and near minimum learning proficiency deserve special attention.

As challenging as COVID-19 is for education, it can be transformed into a watershed event for building more equitable and resilient education systems. Recovery from COVID-19 offers the opportunity to reimagine educational systems—using technology to improve outcomes, addressing inequality, and reducing learning poverty. It has long been clear that education and schools need to change to prepare children for the future and ensure that all children are learning. The investments being made now in remote learning—in multimedia content, remote training and support of teachers, and remote learning assessments—can be a launchpad for more personalized ways of providing education.

Reimagined education systems must eventually be able to individualize instruction. They should be able to provide compensatory learning to rapidly recover the learning lost to school closures or student dropout. They will need to work hard to integrate learning in the classroom and remote learning, enabling children to learn well both in school and at home. If they do all this, policy makers will not only be prepared to smooth interruptions in learning during this and future pandemics but also build today the education systems of the future.

For more on the simulations and their assumptions and results, see Simulating the Potential Impacts of the COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A set of Global Estimates. See the Framework for Reopening Schools for guidelines that aim to inform the decision-making process regarding school reopening, support national preparations, and guide the implementation process as part of overall public health and education planning processes.

Getting children back to school: “We are in a hurry”

JAIME SAAVEDRA | SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

“We were in a hurry!” That is what Jerrick Mortensen, an education leader from Denmark said recently in an event organized by UNICEF, UNESCO and the World Bank. Danish authorities were in a hurry to re-open schools even back in May. “Attending school is critical for the most vulnerable children,” he emphasized.

Worldwide, a quick critical measure to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic was to close schools. Closing was easy. However, as the world has found, the process of re-opening schools is hard. But the sentence “we are in a hurry” reveals a commendable sense of urgency.

Why the urgency? To cope with school closures, most countries rushed to implement remote learning plans. These have generally been multiplatform programs that combine online, TV, radio, and paper material. However, while remote learning can be a great complement of in-person education, it is not a replacement. As a result, learning poverty – being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 – could increase in low and middle-income countries up from the 53% pre- pandemic level to a record 63%. Unless we do more.

Even affluent children who might be having a decent remote learning experience, are able to advance in their academic skills, and even learning some socioemotional skills, are losing out on other elements of the social experience of in-school education.

But it’s the millions of children from more disadvantaged backgrounds that are suffering from a poorer learning experience – their home environments might not be conducive to learning, and they may not have a device or internet connectivity, or even any reading material. Many more might suffer from stress and mental health issues, particularly if parents do not have the skills or mental space during an economic crisis to provide a supportive environment. Many will end up dropping out of the system completely (7 to 10 million, according to World Bank

estimates). Children with disabilities find it even more difficult to access the services they need. And others might suffer from various forms of abuse.

We were already living in a world where inequality of opportunity was intolerably high. But the schools have always played an important role in reducing inequality of opportunities – giving everyone, including the poor, a space for learning. For many, that is now gone, and the unequalizing impact of the pandemic is potentially immensely large. By mid-2020, almost 900 million children are still out of school. The closures are meant to protect their health, protect their relatives’ and teachers’ health from the pandemic; but the cost in terms of the future of many of those kids is extremely high and the price being paid in terms of further inequality in our societies is enormous.

Can a balance be found?

We live in extraordinary times where the only certainty is uncertainty. As time passes, some school systems are opening successfully, others with more angst and confusion. Countries where the pandemic does not seem to be under control yet are struggling to decide if it is safe enough to return, and will have to manage a protracted period of unknown scenarios with unknown probabilities, particularly since a widely available vaccine is still several months away.

Regardless, it is essential to share the sense of urgency of Mr. Mortensen – the urgency in defining a flexible and adaptable path to a return to a richer educational experience and of putting in-school learning back into the lives of all students.

How to return to school safely must be an urgent priority for all nations. In many cases, high levels of community transmission rates of the virus mean re-openings are still impossible. But systems must be prepared for a careful return to schools as soon as the sanitary conditions allow. Preparation is key because the return will be – and in some cases already is – quite complex.

If local virus transmission rates go down to manageable levels, schools and communities should be prepared to enforce strict hygiene practices and other transmission control measures – physical distancing and others – in order to get children back into school. Ideally, authorities test, trace, and isolate anyone who falls ill, and schools are ready to return to remote learning if COVID-19 cases go up again.

The decision to reopen schools is a combination of a public health / science question, balanced with the urgent need to bring kids back. Schools may be able to open only in some areas, in a staggered way, some grades at a time, or for only few days a week or a few hours per day, and in smaller classroom sizes (as some countries are already doing). Not all teachers might be able to work on a presential basis.

In other cases, if community transmission rates are not yet going down, it is wise to design creative and pragmatic alternative learning processes: First, it is useful to pragmatically simplify the curriculum, and define a minimum set of essential competencies that can reasonably be expected of students for this year and next. The fundamental skills and socioemotional support might be the priorities, and online, TV, and radio programming should support that simplified curriculum. The school calendar could be adjusted creatively, the 2020 school year might be extended, the 2021 school year might be compressed, and vacation periods adjusted, in order to cover an essential curriculum within each year.

Second, teachers require support to continue adapting to a remote environment and continue developing ways to maintain the communication and the ability to coach students in their learning process as well as find ways to remotely assess how much learning is happening.

Third, the home environment is as important as ever. Hence, so, too, are policies aimed at drastically improving the conditions at home, such as expanding connectivity, facilitating cheaper –

or free – access to the internet for educational purposes, expanding the use and availability of technological resources, and providing printed learning material at home. Across the board, the home environment is extremely unequal, so investing in improving opportunities of the poorest is essential.

Fourth, continuous and intensive support to empower parents and caregivers is needed so they can provide a safe and nurturing environment to their children.

This is a complex management challenge that requires a lot of creativity, planning, and resources. Fortunately, many of the investments needed to manage this situation will help build many of the traits that will be critical for the schools of the future. Education needs to be more resilient, providing a continuity of the educational experience between the school and the home. Hence, investing in improving the home environment and providing more support to parents is critical for the future. Investing in technology at school and supporting better connectivity at home will make the work of the teacher more effective. Investing in teachers – supporting them in becoming learning coaches and growing their digital skills – is an opportunity. These investments can bring the future to today.

Each country is defining its own path. Countries should be prepared to manage the uncertainty. In some cases, it will mean returning to classrooms under certain conditions, and where that is not possible, improving remote learning conditions as much as possible.

The objective is not to “lose” a generation of students and avoid making the already intolerable levels of inequality even larger.

On World Teacher's Day: A recognition of hard work during challenging times

JAIME SAAVEDRA | OCTOBER 05, 2020

On World Teacher’s Day, we take a few moments to recognize the hard work teachers do on a daily basis. Education at its heart is about human interactions between teachers and students, as well as parents, principals, and the broader community. From the COVID-19 pandemic, we have discovered that while remote learning will always be a good complement of in-person education, it is not a replacement. Teachers remain at the heart of learning. Providing them with technological infrastructure and facilitating remote teaching are critically important during #COVID19 to keep our children’s learning up during these challenging times. Thank you, teachers!

The costs of COVID-19 in education in Latin America. Acting now to protect the future of our children EMANUELA DI GROPELLO | OCTOBER 07, 2020

A boy in a school courtyard.

Sofia’s parents have saved enough to send her to secondary school in a poor neighborhood of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Sofia, who started the year with some skills gaps, was finally making great strides thanks to additional teacher support. Early March, however, everything changed with her school closing. Some limited distance education was offered, but Sofia’s home does not have internet connectivity, so she was not able to take advantage of this option. TV and radio education have helped but have not offered the same content or teacher support that her school did until March. Struggling to remain engaged, Sofia is now thinking of dropping-out and looking for work to help her family.

At the start of the pandemic, many children and youth in the region, particularly the most disadvantaged, were still facing serious educational challenges. While enrollment continued to increase over the last decades and learning outcomes were on an overall slow positive trend, about 50% of children could not yet read with proficiency by the late primary age, and, on average, 15year-old students were three years behind in reading, mathematics, and science when compared to their peers in the OECD countries. This learning crisis was even starker for the most disadvantaged students: gaps between the top and bottom quintiles in secondary education PISA scores were the norm in most countries of the region, and equivalent to at least 3 schooling years. The recently launched 2020 Human Capital Index, computed before the crisis, shows that Latin American youth were only 56% as productive as they could be if they had full health and education.

The education costs of the pandemic Six months into the pandemic, countries have had to make formidable efforts to mitigate the potentially dramatic consequences of school closings on their children and youth, by setting-up distance education options. A formidable challenge in a context where less than 60% of individuals use internet in the region. Most countries have raised to the challenge and moved rapidly and creatively to use education technology to deliver remote-learning solutions, in some cases, like Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, building on pre-existing investments and efforts, in other cases, by stepping-up and learning from others. Knowledge sharing, actively supported by the World Bank, has been tremendous leading to the implementation of increasingly multi-modal solutions, where traditional means such as TV, radio and printed materials, complement internet-based solutions, to make remote learning more inclusive. World Bank education projects have been adapted to support content for distance schooling, ICT solutions, and multi-modal delivery and support, including innovative strategies, such as the use of SMS and WhatsApp helplines, to engage teachers and parents.

However, recent evidence in some countries painfully reminds us that distance learning cannot replace face-to-face learning, even more so for the most vulnerable. Even assuming coverage is in principle secured thanks to multi-modal strategies, and support strategies are in place, participation and engagement are difficult to achieve. A study by the Foundation Lemann shows that, while 92% of students are participating in remote learning activities in the south region of Brazil, only 52% of students are doing so in the, poorest, north-west region. And even if take-up is good, the continuity and quality of the teaching and learning process pose significant challenges, especially for the most vulnerable children and youth with much less family support and access to complementary digital devices. Even in a country like Chile, where many schools are able to offer distance learning, a recent study, jointly developed with the World Bank, shows that, when taking into account coverage and effectiveness indicators, distance education would only be able to mitigate between 30 and 12% of learning losses associated with school closings, depending on the duration of the school closing (6 or 10 months). Importantly, effectiveness decreases to a low of between 18 and 6% for public schools, where the most disadvantaged students are enrolled.

As a result, the region is on a path to experience significant learning losses potentially jeopardizing the education outcomes of an entire generation of students. Initial simulations undertaken by the World Bank, under different school closing scenarios and assumptions on the effectiveness of distance education, reveal stark prospects. The region’s Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS, a metric that combines the amount of schooling that children typically reach with the quality of learning during school years, relative to some benchmark) could drop by almost one year if schools stay closed for 7 months, and by half a year if schools stay closed for 5 months. Additionally, the share of students below minimum proficiency levels on PISA scores would increase from 53% to respectively 68% and 64%.

These are grave projections especially if we consider that most countries are already well on their way to 5 months and some are already going for 7 months of closures. Worryingly, according to the latest UNESCO-UNICEF-World Bank survey, countries in Latin America are the most reluctant to reopen nationwide: less than 30% would do it compared to 40% or more in the rest of the world.

While this may be a legitimate reflection of the severity of the pandemic in the region, can this also be a sign of limited readiness to re-open?

These results are still an under-estimation of the true cost of the pandemic, especially for the most vulnerable children and youth. The average hides huge disparities within countries, with children and youth from the most disadvantaged backgrounds suffering the most for multiple reasons related to access to distance education, parental support and economic hardship, among others.

According to the same study on Chile, students from the lowest income quintile could lose up to 95% of their yearly learning. Recent results published on Costa Rica show that the poorest students could be losing almost an additional year of schooling vs. the richest.

Still, these results do not yet capture many other negative effects of the crisis. Many students, particularly from lower-income groups, will disengage themselves and simply drop-out of school. A recent World Bank policy note on Colombia shows that school closures could lead to between 53,000 and 76,000 students dropping out of school by December 2020. The country is actively pursuing strategies to counter these effects. Staying at home is also affecting students’ mental health, as well as their vulnerability to risky behaviors. This is especially the case for children from the most vulnerable households who are experiencing a completely different learning experience at home than children from wealthier backgrounds. In the medium and longer-term, and with the

economic crisis hitting the region very hard, countries may suffer significant losses in human capital and productivity. It is expected that learning losses may translate into an aggregate economic cost of foregone earnings of between 0.8 and 1.2 trillion US$ lost (in 2017 PPPs).

Getting ready now to get children and youth back to school These huge costs can be mitigated if governments act NOW to continue improving the effectiveness of distance schooling and make sure schools are ready to reopen. Continuing to improve the reach, take-up and quality of remote learning is essential. Multi-modal delivery, with explicit strategies to reach out to the most disadvantaged groups, parental and teacher engagement with interactive communication, prioritization of the curriculum, and learning evaluation strategies are emerging critical drivers of effectiveness according to an on-going review of the World Bank. But even with the best efforts, remote learning cannot replace face-to-face learning.

Reopening schools is an excruciating decision which needs to be informed by public health data.

While timing cannot be entirely controlled for, what governments can and should do now is investing in school readiness for safe and effective reopening. Several organizations, including the World Bank, have teamed up to provide guidance on key readiness criteria for reopening and start extracting lessons on what works. Among the emerging lessons, what stands out is that with sufficient capacity and resources, schools can successfully implement context-appropriate health and hygiene protocols, and that early and regular communication and support to teachers, parents, and students can help address concerns, surface innovations, and ensure a safe, widely accepted reopening.

Reopening effectively will also entail important management and pedagogical decisions, including systemic and targeted measures to ensure that schools teach at the right (post-COVID-19) level.

Simplifying the curriculum and adapting the academic calendar year have shown to be working to facilitate learning recovery, and so have remediation programs and supporting teachers and principals to implement them, also in a blended (face-to-face/remote) learning setting, which may become the new normal. Schools need to be prepared to re-start with flexibility as soon as possible.

A focus on socio-emotional skills and child and families’ well-being, and strategies to prevent dropouts of youth at-risk, will also be critical. Education projects and technical assistance supported by the World Bank in several countries of the region are already striving to support safe and effective school reopening, building on these lessons. A smart use of technology, with clear guidance, development of capacities and effective monitoring, is at the core of the engagement.

Preparing for safe and effective reopening will require governments to invest the necessary resources now, provide additional education funding to schools and communities hit the hardest and explore the potential for using resources more efficiently. A smart use of technology and well thought through teacher allocation and curricular reforms may provide opportunities for higher efficiency, while laying the ground for longer-term improvements in education systems.

Governments of Latin America need to consider the looming education crisis for what it is: a once in a lifetime generational crisis which will affect the education outcomes, human capital and productivity of an entire generation of children and youth. There is no time to lose to take further action and keep Sofia’s dream of completing her secondary education successfully.

To rebuild our education systems, we must focus first on leadership JAIME SAAVEDRA | WENDY KOPP | OCTOBER 15, 2020

With over 1.5 billion children having been out of school due to the pandemic, we are both often asked about what’s being learned regarding the role of technology in education. There are lots of learnings – about powerful approaches to leveraging technology in both low-bandwidth and highbandwidth environments, and how massive gaps in access to connectivity and devices exacerbate existing inequities – and we've each written other pieces about these issues. But there’s an ingredient that’s even more crucial than technology to keeping students learning, one that needs far more attention and championship. That is leadership.

When we say leadership, we aren’t just talking about those in positions of authority at the top – we mean people who have taken initiative to support students at every level of the system. Kids have continued learning where they've had access to stakeholders who are exerting the leadership necessary to adapt as quickly as the pandemic throws up new barriers to learning, irrespective of how much access to technology they’ve had. Worldwide, we have seen teachers rapidly transforming themselves into innovative leaders, finding creative ways to maintain student engagement and enable learning even in the most complex circumstances.

With no communications technology available to his students in rural Uganda, Emmanuel Kimuli handwrote math assignments for students to pick up daily from his home, choosing problems calibrated to each child’s ability to ensure that they would continue to learn. In Ghana, Emefa Kumaza held conference calls with her students so they could keep learning, scheduling the calls in the evenings when parents returned home with the family's only cell phone. She found that learning in group calls was more effective and energizing than the one-on-one calls she’d tried initially. A Malaysian study found that during the shutdown, the top three challenges Malaysian students faced were poor internet connection, learning structure, and lack of engaging instruction – in that order.

Yet when students were asked what they wanted most, it was the other way around: students chose engaging instruction over more advanced tech solutions.

The leadership that has kept students learning does not begin and end with teachers. Students themselves have shown a new level of ownership and initiative during the crisis, which has proven vital to their own learning and, in some cases, to keeping their peers learning. Sixteen-year-old Raghvendra Yadav has been working with teachers to start an online learning program in seven schools in India. It’s growing by the day, teaching science, art, commerce, coding, and leadership – and students are so eager to participate that they borrow neighbors’ phones when they don’t have their own. Raghvendra describes himself not so much as a leader as “a ladder” to help unleash student’s potential and to realize the power of their own voices. In Denmark, student Lykke Storgaard reached out to classmates who were not showing up to online classes, and discovered some were suffering from depression, not laziness. “You never know who is struggling. If someone doesn't show up for school, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to. If you reach out to someone it can make a big difference, which shows the importance of human connection in learning,” she says.

During the pandemic, it’s become clear that learning often requires involving the entire family. In one traditional Moroccan community, families were reluctant to engage in their teachers’ innovative digital teaching plan. But then some of the most influential mothers began to speak up about why the initiative was valuable, and they persuaded other families to take part in video lessons and in sharing their children’s work over WhatsApp. Parental leadership enabled students to keep learning, and parents’ engagement in their children’s education was strengthened.

At the government level, leadership is required to set direction and provide support so people can implement that direction well. Local leadership needs to figure out a coherent strategy so that all the teachers and students in a school are utilizing a particular approach, putting their energy and resources behind it, and continuously improving on it together. We know that good leadership can make a difference: governments that have invested in building leadership capacity are faring much better in their response to the pandemic.

This pandemic has the potential to critically worsen global education outcomes if we do not act fast.

Simulations done by the World Bank Education team shows that this generation of students stands to lose an estimated $10 trillion in earnings over their lifetimes. Learning Poverty, the share of children who by age 10 cannot read and understand a simple text, might go up, putting countries off-track to achieving their Learning Poverty reduction goals. But these are simulations, not predictions. This outcome is not inevitable. If strong measures are taken, we can avoid these losses.

Addressing this education crisis will require substantial investments – in technology, yes, but most importantly in people, at every level of the system. Ensuring this generation thrives will require extraordinary leadership on the part of students themselves, parents, teachers, and system leaders.

As we move forward, we should keep in mind the implications of this, and think through what more we can do to foster the leadership necessary to reinvent and strengthen our education system. We need to consider: how we recruit, train, and coach teachers and school and system leaders; what we can do to enable all stakeholders including students, parents, teachers, and head teachers to take initiative and lead; how we can integrate leadership development into our schools and teacher development programs; and how we can enable local leaders to learn from each other across borders, as a means of fostering their leadership by exposing them to what’s possible and what’s working in other places.

Let’s prioritize our educational investments and craft our approach to the crisis with a clear recognition that leadership will be the most important ingredient going forward, just as it has been the most important ingredient in keeping students learning during this era.

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Accelerating Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Through Focus, Measurement, Support and Accountability GIRINDRE BEEHARRY | OCTOBER 19, 2020

A student reads at his desk while wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. / Shutterstock

Today, nine in ten girls and boys in low-income countries (LICs) cannot read with comprehension by their tenth birthday. The pursuit of secondary education, the pathway to employment for the majority of youth in LICs, is thus severely compromised. While the full education impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet known, evidence from previous crises suggest that children’s learning will suffer. Given the already low level of reading comprehension in LICs, this learning loss should be of concern to all. A robust collective response is urgently needed.

While there are few examples of countries showing significant improvements in learning among LICs, we can show meaningful progress in the next few years. To do that, we need to focus on a few objectives, measure progress against them and respond to the findings, support countries to achieve them, and hold ourselves collectively accountable for their achievement. The World Bank’s Learning Target to halve age ten illiteracy by 2030 offers a platform around which we can rally.

Focus Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), with 7 targets, 3 means of implementation, and 43 indicators, is all-encompassing. While there is no explicit prioritization among laudable objectives, de facto prioritization is happening all the time because there are insufficient funds to meet all objectives. Before the pandemic, low and lower-middle income countries already faced an annual funding gap of $39 billion for achieving SDG4. With domestic and aid budgets hammered by a

pandemic, it is hard to picture a scenario where all these objectives are adequately funded. We believe we should, as a floor objective, ensure children are on track to achieve minimum proficiency in reading and math in early and late primary (SDG4.1.1 a and b). The Learning Target is a good proxy.

What makes achieving solid foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) so critical in LICs? First, the pre-COVID-19 levels of learning were already catastrophic and are likely to be even worse now. For example, pre-COVID-19 just two percent of Malian children met minimum proficiency levels for early grade reading. Second, practically all SDG4 goals depend on the achievement of FLN. It’s a gateway skill: we cannot achieve, in a meaningful way, twelve years of schooling for all girls without it. Finally, equity: most poor students today can ‘access’ schooling, but they drop out disproportionately because schools fail them. By focusing on universalizing FLN, we are sure to primarily address the poor and marginalized.

Measurement Focusing on foundational learning is only the first step. Measuring and monitoring performance towards this goal need to follow. How does the education aid architecture monitor performance today? UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics (UIS) is responsible for reporting on the achievement of minimum proficiency in reading and math. However, UIS is hampered because countries do not have the necessary data. Only 17 out of 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa currently have recent assessments at the end of primary school of sufficient quality. This data is not comparable over time, and a lack of alignment with, or participation in, cross-national assessments makes comparison between countries impossible. This limits the ability to target resources or learn from those who are making faster progress. Furthermore, missing the chance to assess progress in earlier grades means there is little opportunity to course correct. More coordinated investment is needed to support reliable data at the country level, and UIS is a chronically underfunded agency that needs the means to do its job.

Support To translate goals and data into action, countries will need support to increase technical know-how and build implementation capacity around improving early grade reading and math. Helping countries understand why students are failing to acquire the most basic skills and providing them with the right tools and know-how to do something about it is not straightforward. Clear guidance on improving learning outcomes at scale is limited and rarely translated effectively for use incountry; efforts such as the World Bank’s forthcoming Literacy Policy Package and USAID’s Reading MATTERS framework – which outline evidence-backed interventions, and key components of systems, for improving reading – are steps in the right direction. Countries also need support to build strong local implementation capacity.

Accountability If we – the global education community – take our commitment to achieving the Learning Target, and SDG 4.1.1 a and b, seriously it is incumbent on us to take periodic stock of progress, reflect on why we are (or are not) improving, and change course as needed. The lack of accountability today also means that there are no immediate consequences for anyone – not technical agencies, not funders, not governments, not education systems, not civil society organizations – except students.

My plea to the group of partners and accelerator countries bent on reducing learning poverty, is to keep ourselves honest, review progress regularly, and learn from each other.

What is the opportunity around the Accelerator Countries program?

It is welcome that the World Bank is translating its commitment into action by launching the Accelerator Countries program within its new Foundational Learning Compact (FLC), which will support willing countries to decrease Learning Poverty. An initial cohort of ‘accelerator countries’ have been recognized for having the political and financial commitment to support an evidencebacked program to improve foundational skills. More countries are expected to be added over time.

We are also excited to see them joining forces with UNICEF in five of these countries, to increase the political salience of learning and strengthen local accountability towards results.

We know from exemplars of systems that rapidly improved learning outcomes that a sharp focus on learning, measurement, and accountability – matched with a coherent system of support – are all key components of success. We are excited by the approach of the Accelerator Countries program, because it includes some of these elements: first, it will dedicate its resources to working with countries who are sharply prioritizing learning outcomes. Second, through its government-owned ‘investment case’ approach, there is potential for increased alignment of stakeholders around a common plan. Third, the use of data to monitor progress against a learning target is at the core of the model. Finally, its investment in implementation capacity will be welcome support to countries, whose persistence and managerial skill will be key for success.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing in the Accelerator Countries program to help up to five accelerator countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to tackle Learning Poverty. My invitation to others is to join this collective venture and support – technically or through catalytic financing – the accelerator countries that step up to improve learning.

Girindre Beeharry is Director of the Global Education Strategy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, guest blogging for Education for Global Development.

Learning for All: Beyond an Average Score JOAO PEDRO AZEVEDO | DIANA GOLDEMBERG | OCTOBER 22, 2020

A boy in Guatemala.

Before COVID-19, the world was already in a learning crisis. At historical rates of progress, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target of ensuring that all girls and boys complete free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education, leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes by 2030, is out of reach. More than half of children in low- and middle-income countries are either out-of-school or fail to learn to read with comprehension by age ten. At the secondary level, the situation is even direr.

Learning losses due to the pandemic will likely be large. We are only starting to grasp how learning inequalities may play out. Looking at historical data, can we find patterns that can help us better plan our actions in the near future? As countries build back educational systems that are more resilient, equitable, and inclusive – capable of delivering learning for all – how likely is that learning inequality might undermine this process?

Education SDGs: beyond average scores Let us consider lower-secondary students' learning outcomes, as assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA provides comparable data of 15-year-old pupils' performance in mathematics, science, and reading. Much attention is spent discussing country ranks and improvements of the average PISA test scores. But the average gives an incomplete picture in an unequal world. And we know that multiple sources of inequality generate variations in learning at school and at home across gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and disabilities.

Through the SDG process, countries have agreed to monitor learning for all through the share of students achieving a minimum proficiency level. For instance, in reading, lower secondary students should recognize the main idea in a text, understand relationships, or construe meaning within a limited part of the text when the information is not prominent and make low level inferences.

Failing to master these basic competencies will preclude them from participating effectively and productively in life as continuing students, workers and citizens. To go beyond the test score of the average student reflects a strong commitment to focus our attention on improving learning for the kids that fail to reach these minimum standards of skills/competences.

These two performance measures of education systems – average scores and the share of students achieving minimum proficiency convey important information. They are akin to observing the changes in average income per capita and in the share of the population living in poverty, when assessing a country's growth and welfare performance over time. The average income per capita and the average test score are summary measures of all individuals. The share of the population living in poverty and the share of students below the minimum proficiency level refer to the percentage of students failing to acquire a minimum set of competences and are deprived of minimum standards of living and of acquired competences, respectively. In education, just like in the economy, those measures do not necessarily move in the same direction.

Unbundling progress in the share of students achieving minimum proficiency Economists have long investigated the relationship between poverty, growth, and inequality, and understand that those are jointly determined. Changes in poverty rates can be unpacked into the contributions of changes in the mean (average income per capita) and income distribution (inequality). A similar decomposition can be insightful in the education context. An improvement in the average test score with growing inequality will be qualitatively different from a process in which the average test score increases by the same amount, but inequality remains constant.

We explore data from countries that participated in multiple PISA rounds. Each bar in Figure 1 represents the decomposition of the annualized change in students' share below the SDG threshold in reading between two rounds of PISA for a given country. The countries in red performed worse in recent years. That is, the share of students who cannot read proficiently increased by at least 0.1 percentage at an annualized rate. The countries in green have seen improvement: more students achieving minimum proficiency in reading. Lastly, for the countries in yellow, the proficiency share remains reasonably similar. We decompose the change in the share of students below minimum proficiency (black line) into the contribution from the average score (dark bars) and the distribution of scores (light bars).

Figure 1- Decomposition of changes in the share of students below minimum proficiency (BMP) The reader can use our interactive visualization to extend this analysis to mathematics and science and subgroups of students by gender, location, and quintile of socioeconomic status. We also include any two years of PISA participation – not just the longest interval of time in which the subject was the major focus of assessment. An alternative decomposition methodology is also used, but more of that in another blog. Results remain qualitatively similar – as you can see by interacting with the filters in Figure 1. Another way to visualize these results is by averaging all countries that improved or worsened. This is done in Figure 2, which summarizes the decomposition for reading in over 300 observations (each corresponding to a country and pair of years of participation).

Figure 2 Absolute and relative contributions to changes in the share of students below minimum proficiency (BMP) Some stylized facts emerge: ➤ A rising tide [almost always] lifts all boats •

All countries which improved their proficiency level also have increased average test scores.

In Peru, the share of students who cannot read the basics fell from 80% to 54%, or an annualized rate of change of approximately -1.4p.p. per year. During this period, average scores rose from 327 to 401 points between 2000 and 2018, while inequality in learning worsened - meaning if the inequality in test scores would have remained the same as in 2000, the improvement on the share of students below the MPL would have been 3p.p. higher, or the equivalent of two additional years of average improvement.

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Only in a few countries, the share of students achieving proficiency worsened despite small improvements in average test scores. In Georgia, the mean score rose by 6 points between 2009 and 2018; nevertheless, the students' share below the minimum proficiency threshold increased by 2.4 percentage points. So it was students with higher test scores that improved the most.

➤ When average test scores fall, the inequality in learning always got worse; and there was no clear pattern when proficiency level improved •

•

In all countries where the share of students below minimum proficiency increased, the inequality in learning worsens the situation. In South Korea, the average scores in 2018 were almost the same as in 2000, but the share of youth who cannot read at minimum proficiency increased from 6% to 15% as inequality in learning increased.

The proficiency level can improve even when inequality in learning worsens. Between 2006 and 2018, the share of students below minimum proficiency in Colombia increased by almost 6 percentage points, although average test scores surged 27 points, reflecting larger improvements in learning for children with relatively higher learning achievement.

Visualizing country examples can clarify the decomposition. Figure 3 shows overlaid distributions of reading scores in a country for two PISA rounds - the first in blue and the latest in red. In countries like Peru, the two snapshots in time have similar shapes but different average test scores, given the impression that the curve slid, the rising tide that lifted all boats. In South Korea, the mean remained the same, but the distribution's shape (inequality in learning) changed significantly between the years.

Figure 3- Distribution of reading scores in two rounds of PISA for selected countries

Note: The animated GIF cycles through countries that participated in multiple rounds of PISA. For each country, the distribution of reading scores is displayed in the first (blue) and last (red) year of participation. The shaded areas denote students' share below the minimum proficiency (BMP), represented by the vertical line (407.47 points). The mean and BMP are displayed for both years in the legend box, and the footnote reports the decomposition of the BMP change into the contribution of the mean score and the distribution of test scores (the bar values in Figure 1).

Design policies for scale with a focus on learning for all The SDGs gave us a consensus on minimum proficiency levels of learning. We must build on that to document and understand the drivers of change. Learning for all requires overcoming inequalities across and within countries.

Across countries, we must be obsessed with achieving results at scale. Small-scale successful interventions that benefit a small group of children will not suffice to address the magnitude of the learning crisis. Interventions and policies need to be designed for scale. This does not neccesarily mean that we need to overhaul the entire education system in the short term to achieve improvements in learning. More focused policies at scale, as described in the “Ending Learning Poverty Reportâ€? and exemplified by the state of CearĂĄ in Brazil, can generate significant short-term improvements, while at the same time countries take on the more difficult longer term task of building robust education systems.

In order to ensure that learning occurs for all, we must measure and track changes in learning for kids failing to reach minimum proficiency levels. Assessing the performance of educational systems based on average scores or achievement gaps between groups is not enough.

We should be intentional and systematic on how we document and understand the learning inequality within systems. Not all educational systems propagate inequalities in the same way.

We expect COVID-19 to negatively affect the learning distribution, as it has happened before in all episodes of decline in learning proficiency. Periods of reduction of learning proficiency have never been distributionally neutral. Going forward, we must mitigate and remediate the learning losses of the most vulnerable. We have the opportunity and responsibility to reimagine and build back educational systems that are more resilient and able to better protect the learning from the most vulnerable, especially at moments of crisis.

How to improve human capital? The need for cost-effective education investments NOAM ANGRIST | DEON FILMER | ROBERTA V. GATTI | HALSEY ROGERS | SHWETLENA SABARWAL | OCTOBER 30, 2020

A child born in a low-income country can expect to be 37 percent as productive as if she had full education and full health relative to 70 percent for a child born in a high-income country.

In 2019 it was estimated that 53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In poor countries, the level is as high as 80 percent. With over 1.6 billion children out of school at the height of the COVID-19 epidemic, these numbers are likely to get worse. And since many countries are experiencing sharp economic downturns, the pandemic has also tightened government budgets, especially for education. Together, these numbers reinforce the need to prioritize cost-effective investments in education.

The World Bank’s recently launched Human Capital Index (HCI) reveals striking gaps in human capital across countries: a child born in a low-income country can expect to be 37 percent as productive as if she had full education and full health relative to 70 percent for a child born in a high-income country. Most of the differences across country-income groups in human capital are attributable to the education component of the index. Of the 33-percentage-point difference between the scores of the average low and high-income country, almost 25 percentage points are accounted for by the differences in learning-adjusted years of school, a measure that combines expected years of school with learning as measured by harmonized learning outcomes (i.e., test scores that are made comparable across countries).

Another important insight from the HCI is how little learning has improved in the last decade, as shown in Figure 1 below. An analysis of learning outcomes between 2010 to 2020 reveals little to no progress in learning across nearly all income categories. This is in contrast to the improvements we have seen in health (child and adult survival and stunting), which account for about half of the HCI’s changes over the last decade, and the increases in enrollments (especially at pre-primary and secondary school levels), which account for the bulk of remaining changes.

So, what can be done to build human capital by improving learning? A new paper released in the World Bank working paper series by Angrist et al. (2020), How to Improve Education Outcomes Most Efficiently? A Comparison of 150 Interventions Using the New Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling Metric, reveals ideas that have worked. The authors find that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at quality comparable to what the highest-performing education systems offer) for just $100 per child—compared with zero years for other classes of interventions.

The main message is that despite the huge challenges children and schools face in low- and middleincome countries, the right investments can deliver huge returns. It also shows how by using evidence, policymakers can make the best use of available resources to improve learning and access, while avoiding costly mistakes. Three of the most cost-effective approaches are: targeted information campaigns on benefits, costs and quality; interventions to target teaching instruction by learning level rather than grade (such as “Teaching at the Right Level� interventions and tracking interventions); and improved pedagogy in the form of structured lesson plans with linked student materials, teacher professional development, and monitoring (which includes multi-faceted interventions such as Tusome in Kenya). In India, targeted instruction can yield up to 4 additional learning-adjusted years of schooling per $100. Other interventions like providing school inputs alone (such as providing more computers or textbooks without other necessary changes) perform poorly because they tend not to boost access or learning substantively. So the choice of interventions matters: spending the marginal dollar of government expenditure on high-efficiency rather than low-efficiency educational investments could yield substantial benefits.

This evidence has fed into the work of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), cochaired by Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee and Silvia Schmelkes, the former director of the Mexican National Institute of Educational Evaluation, who are joined by 10 other leading experts (see full panel here). Convened by the World Bank and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and hosted by the Building Evidence in Education working group, this panel will meet periodically assess the latest available evidence and new classes of interventions. The panel’s first report, which focuses on smart buys in education, draws on this new LAYS-based cost-effectiveness research.

The types of improvements in quality education shown to be possible in Angrist et al. (2020), with up to 3 years of high-quality schooling gained, could produce substantial changes in human capital accumulation. It’s important to note that it’s not enough to invest in interventions like these, no matter how well chosen: meaningful and sustained improvements need to be supported by systemlevel reforms (as elaborated on in the 2018 World Development Report). But implementing and scaling up cost-effective interventions will be a crucial part of making systems work better for all children and youth. The HCI shows that large gains in education quality have been difficult to attain to date, but are possible. And given the learning losses we’re seeing due to COVID-19, they’re not just possible—they’re essential. Investments in the most cost-effective education investments will be needed more than ever before, and this new research highlights a way forward.

The remote learning paradox: How governments can truly minimize COVID-related learning losses CRISTIAN AEDO | VATSAL NAHATA | SHWETLENA SABARWAL | NOVEMBER 10, 2020

A student studying at home, Karail Taltala Slum, Dhaka. Photo Credit: Mowshomi Akter

Remote learning is having a moment. With prolonged school closures and re-closures, this moment is becoming more consequential by the day. And governments are all-in. A recent survey of 149 countries shows that nearly all have included remote learning in their education response to COVID19.

But examine this pivot to remote learning closely, and you see a paradox. Governments are prioritizing online solutions to minimize learning losses. However, the students who are most at risk of learning losses cannot access online solutions. Globally, 60 percent of national remote learning solutions rely exclusively on on-line platforms. Yet, almost 47 percent of school students do not have access to the Internet at home. We call this the Remote Learning Paradox.

Source: Author calculations from ITU, World Bank, UNICEF & UNESCO Data

In some cases, the remote learning paradox is also visible at the country level. For example, despite Cambodia’s internet penetration being only 40 percent, it has allocated about 54 percent more for online learning (US$ 1.7 Million) compared to TV & Radio (US$ 1.1 Million). Rich countries are not immune either. In the US, where schools are nearly exclusively online since mid-March 2020, nearly 14 percent of households with school-age children do not have internet access.

It is precisely these students - who do not have access to internet - that most need government support to prevent learning losses. Around 3 out of 4 students who cannot be reached by existing remote learning opportunities come from rural areas and/or poor households. Students from the poorest 40 percent of families account for 74 - 86 percent of those who cannot be reached by existing remote learning solutions in middle-income countries and 47 percent in low-income countries. At the same time, students from poor families are more likely to have low learning, and are much more susceptible to experiencing further learning losses and higher dropouts due to COVID. “I am frustrated that teachers are not taking enough measures to educate us, even though they are getting paid regularly. Poor students are usually bound to do some household chores to support their family financially which affects their learning. They are not taking any online lessons. They need help.” - Lulu Bhuiyan, older brother of a secondary school student in Dhaka, Bangladesh This is not to say that governments are not investing in offline solutions at all. Most countries have multi-modal systems in place, which supplement online solutions with TV/Radio programs and/or take-home packages. However, often off-line solutions receive less resources, attention, and emphasis compared to online solutions.

We undertook a systematic review of government COVID-19 Education response plans from around the world and found that South Asian countries made about three times as many references to online interventions as to offline initiatives. This despite the fact that online learning can reach only 7 percent of its 430 Million students, while TV reaches 60 percent. And this is not just true for South Asia. Somalia’s plan references online learning twice as much as offline learning; Philippines’ plan mentions online learning about 211 times compared to only 41 for TV. And this is not just true for governments, it may be true of parents and students themselves. In India, even as poor families struggle with WhatsApp lessons, few are interested in the over 32 remote-learning television channels. In Bangladesh, most poor secondary students (86 percent) are aware of government provided TV-based learning programs; yet only half of the students with access to these programs choose to access them, even when they don’t have access to online learning.

What explains the remote learning paradox? One set of explanations, which we don’t explore, rest on political incentives. Another hypothesis is that online solutions receive relatively more attention because they are perceived to be more effective, more promising, and more exciting than offline solutions. In a recent survey of 149 ministries of education, only 6 percent of countries rated online learning platforms as ineffective. In contrast, 13 percent countries rated TV and 22 percent rated Radio as ineffective.

This could partly be driven by hype. Online solutions present a heady world of buzzwords and delicious promises- personalized learning, adaptive learning, immersive learning, so much learning! And these are not always empty catch-phrases. As evaluations of computer-assisted learning and Mindspark – both of which can work offline, but at some point require internet connectivity and device investments - have shown, online solutions can provide strong results. And provided access is ensured, they can also be cost-effective!

But the idea that online solutions should get more attention because they are more effective is misleading in at least three ways. First, as shown above, online solutions don’t reach nearly as many students as offline solutions do, especially those in urgent need of help. Second, there are several examples where expensive online solutions have not only been ineffective, they have reduced student learning (examples from Romania and from the US).

The third way this is misleading is reverse causality. One could make the following argument: it’s not that online solutions get more investments because they are more effective. Instead, online solutions have higher likelihood of appearing more effective because they get more investment.

The global ed-tech market which was valued at US$ 163 billion pre-COVID19 is expected to be valued at US$ 404 billion by 2025. Many companies offer free and engaging content online as a marketing strategy. The popular technology mantra is: if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. This is the formula companies like Coursera have followed. Similarly, India’s most valuable Edtech startup BYJU’S saw 7.5 million new users on its platform since it started offering free access to content.

In contrast, there is often a (false) perception that TV and radio learning offers only boring, outdated, and non-engaging content. This may be true in some cases. Broadcasted lessons may have poor or uneven quality. But this only reflects a lack of investment.

“We have collaborated with Radio Sarathi FM (Local FM) which broadcasts curriculum-based classes for Grade 1 to 8. We have 1000 students and around 60% of them have been listening to radio. In radio, sometimes they broadcast the contents prepared for TV hence it sounds awkward at times … they should tailor contents to radio listeners … subjects like Nepali and Social studies are easy(ier) to grasp because the contents are presented in drama/play format. It would be good if difficult subjects could also be presented in a simplified way.” - Mr. Dhalmani Bhandari, Head teacher, Baglung, Nepal It doesn’t have to be this way. When offline solutions have engaging and well-crafted content, they can be both high-coverage and high-effectiveness. The widely popular Sesame Street, an American educational TV show, has been adopted worldwide for local audiences and shown evidence towards improving foundational skills in Indonesia and India. Similarly, Ubongo, an educational show for kids in Tanzania has seen similar results. And even basic TV programming can be valuable for the poorest students. In Bangladesh, 76 percent of poor Grade 9 students who watched government’s Sangsad TV, found the broadcasts motivating.

Basic phones are also offering strong offline remote learning. An intervention in Botswana which used basic feature phones reduced innumeracy by 52 percent and average numeracy skills increased by 24 percent compared to a control group. The intervention was able to reach even remote regions of Botswana and only required SMS & phone calls. Eneza Education (in Kenya, Ghana & Ivory Coast) offers learning and revision material via basic feature phones and has impacted over 6 million leaners with a 23 percent improvement in academic performance after usage for 9 months.

Ultimately, online or offline, it is the quality of the content that matters (see for example this study).

The bottom line is: countries around the world are under-investing in offline solutions, which are critical to preventing learning losses and dropouts among the poorest children. Offline solutions can have massive reach, and if designed well, they can be highly effective in keeping at-risk students connected and engaged with education.

Poor children need and deserve learning solutions they can access today – and these solutions must be designed and delivered with much more care, expertise, and resources. It has been done, it can be done.

Learning for All: Within-country learning inequality JOAO PEDRO AZEVEDO | DIANA GOLDEMBERG | NOVEMBER 12, 2020

A girl pays attention in a classroom in El Renacimiento school, in Villa Nueva, Guatemala. Photo: Maria Fleischmann / World Bank

On a previous blog, we highlighted the importance of monitoring learning for all through the lens of a minimum proficiency level, which focuses on those students at the bottom of the learning distribution – as countries have agreed in the Sustainable Development Goals. We examined how proficiency has changed over time, showing that this measure is sensitive to changes in the learning distribution and that increases in learning inequality have always been accompanied by the worsening of educational outcomes.

What comes to mind when you think about inequality in educational outcomes? Most people immediately picture disparities by sex, socio-economic status, or race and ethnicity. These are examples of horizontal inequality: inequality between different socially and culturally formed groups. Unfortunately, horizontal inequality remains widespread. In Afghanistan, twice as many girls as boys aged 9-12 have never been to school. In Brazil, youth from the top income quintile are 55 percentage points more likely to complete secondary education than youth in the bottom quintile. And in the United States, Asian students are almost twice as likely to graduate from college than Black students.

There is also inequality within groups, known as vertical inequality. Differentiating between these two types of inequalities – between groups (horizontal inequality) and within groups (vertical inequality) – is valuable for policy design, since the tools and approaches required to deal with each are quite different. Much has been written regarding inequalities in access; in this blog, we focus our attention on learning inequalities.

Inequality between groups The interactive dashboard below contains data from 109 countries over 16 rounds of international learning assessments since 2000, with observations for over 6 million students. Choose a country, assessment, subject, and breakdown – by sex, urban/rural, or socio-economic status (SES) quintile – to see how the distributions of student scores across groups differ. Besides the distribution plots, a table reports the main summary statistics of these groups: the mean, the standard deviation of scores (SD), and the proficiency level used to monitor the SDG 4.1.1 (or any share of students below a proficiency threshold chosen in our interactive dataviz).

Let’s focus on the share of students below minimum proficiency. It is customary to measure inequality by reporting the gap between groups. But it is essential to look at the overall system performance, not just its inequality: equal opportunity in a poor-performing educational system does not suffice to deliver learning for all. For example: 1. Senegal and Canada had the same SES gap in the latest PISA-D/PISA results: students from the top SES quintile were 15 percentage points more likely to achieve minimum reading proficiency than students in the bottom quintile. But the overall levels were dramatically different: in Senegal, 91% of students were below the minimum proficiency, while in Canada, only 14% were.

2. Peru had the largest SES gap in reading in the last PISA round, at 57 percentage points. Despite the high inequality across groups, levels are not low. In fact, the affluent Peruvian achieve learning outcomes superior to the average student in Luxembourg.

Figure 1- Distribution of test scores by groups within a country Inequality within groups These differences across groups – sex, urban/rural, and SES quintiles – are only a small part of the story. Jointly, they account for 13% of the overall inequality of scores within a country (with inequality across SES quintiles being the single most relevant of the three). Without getting too much into the weeds, we arrive at this number by calculating inequality indices of the Generalized Entropy class. What is special about this class of inequality measures is that they are subgroup consistent and additively decomposable. That is, they allow to parcel out the amount of inequality between and across groups.

You may notice that the groups mentioned above fail to capture differences in school resources and regional disparities. So let’s consider each school participating in the assessment as a group. Now 34% of the inequality is between schools and 66% within schools.

Even when we combine the two approaches, by considering subgroups with all possible combinations of schools, urban/rural, students’ sex, and SES quintiles, we find that only half of the inequality happens across these subgroups. Of course, the exact amount fluctuates by country subject assessment and year. But the overarching conclusion is stable over time and across assessments (and you can explore it in our data visualization): half of the inequality is between students in the same schools with the same sex and socio-economic status quintile.

Figure 2- Between- and within-group inequality decompositions Why does it matter, and what can we do about it?

These findings are both sobering and encouraging. Realizing that the usual pathways in the quest to tackle education inequality – equalizing learning across groups – can only take us half-way towards

this goal is sobering. But it is encouraging to find so much variation in learning for similar students: it means a lot of progress can be made by bringing all students in a group to the level of its top performers.

This exercise of decomposing inequality in international learning assessments shows the importance of monitoring both horizontal and vertical learning inequality, or inequalities between and within groups. Our within-group inequality is a measure of what cannot be attributed to students’ observable characteristics, such as their sex, socio-economic status, and the school they attend. What remains unobservable is complex: educators and psychologists have developed measures to capture and explain learning differences across students, but scaling up these measures in a comparable way across countries remains a challenge.

Going forward, it is essential to be deliberate and intentional on what we measure and how we measure: 1. Chose measures that are sensitive to changes in inequality: The results above highlight that inequality within groups (vertical inequality) is significant, especially among the most deprived students. Thus, it is crucial to complement the standard measures of learning performance with inequality-sensitive indicators. For a discussion on measures that focus on the students below the minimum proficiency and are distributional-sensitive, please see this paper presented at the latest SDG Technical Cooperation Group meeting.

2. Use differentiated instruction to target vertical inequality: Classroom instruction that is engaging and aligned to children’s learning levels, such as Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) or structured lesson plans, prioritizes all children mastering foundational skills. These approaches were highlighted as some of the smart buys in education, and for a deeper discussions on the aspects that have made these approaches successful check the ALIGNS principles around setting clear learning goals, instructional coherence, teacher support and contextual salience.

3. Identify units from which valuable lessons can be extracted: Monitoring horizontal and vertical inequality can be a powerful strategy to customize policy recommendations and to identify positive deviants. Context matters: an intervention that improves learning in a country with low inequality may not be equally effective in a country with high inequality. And within a country or district, identifying the schools with the lowest vertical inequalities can shed light on effective new strategies to get all children learning.

Tackling inequality in education calls for careful measurement and the use of measures sensitive to inequality changes. Efforts to equalize learning across groups are essential but not sufficient. We must also scale programs and interventions that tackle inequality of similar students within schools and demographic groups. We have the tools for this, and we owe it to our children.

The Gujarat Model: Managing Learning Continuity During COVID-19 P. BHARATHI | CRISTIAN AEDO | SHABNAM SINHA | SARAH IYPE | NOVEMBER 20, 2020

Mobile learning van, Gujarat, India.

As Gujarat, a state on the western coast of India, geared up to address coronavirus (COVID-19) related emergencies, its authorities knew that 25-30% of students had limited or no access to remote learning devices.

Reaching the unreachable was a challenge. Rapidly responding, the state prepared detailed guidelines to ensure that no student was deprived of education. Learning support was provided at the local levels (villages/hamlets/habitats), pairing students with and without devices; promoting peer learning; creating a mobile bank; offline learning; home-visits by teachers and field staff; providing access to online classes at citizen service centers or village offices; as well as mobile learning vehicles.

Pancholi Hans, a student at a critical milestone of his academic life in grade 10, celebrates as he has just ranked among the top-performers in an online weekly assessment, gauging the impact of another week of engaging virtual classes. Like Pancholi, millions of students in public schools, often from socio-economically disadvantaged groups, confined to the four walls of their homes as a consequence of the COVID-19, are benefitting from the government’s exemplar and proactive contingency response. As the pandemic continues to unfurl, shake up systems, and paralyze operations, it risks leaving a scarring impact on the education sector, already reeling under an astounding learning crisis. However, despite the adversity, stories of progress offer glimmers of hope for a better tomorrow.

Gujarat, India’s fifth largest state, home to Pancholi and 11.48 million students, 0.4 million teachers and 54,000 schools, is leveraging the crisis as an opportunity to catalyze transformation. The state’s Education Department has carefully crafted an amalgamation of policies, weaved into an integrated COVID-19 response strategy, guiding comprehensive action to ensure that learning continues.

A Holistic Home Learning Program

With the spike in coronavirus cases and the onset of school closures, the state expeditiously developed a holistic Home Learning Program. The state realigned the entire syllabus for the first quarter of the revised academic year (June to September 2020) for Grades 1 to 12, breaking it down into chapter- and subject-focused weekly schedules. Teachers and subject experts collaborated to develop high-quality teaching-learning material including presentations for virtual sessions; lesson plans; and key points, summarizing chapters. Practice worksheets with co-curricular activities like drawing, storytelling, and poetry were instituted. Content is available through both digital media – econtent and energized textbooks via state’s websites; YouTube channels; Facebook; web-links circulated on WhatsApp, and through physical media, in print.

With material in place, the next step focused on ensuring it reached every student. Measurement facilitated customized needs-based delivery. Gujarat regularly measures the learning level of students. The state has instituted an incredible system of Periodic Assessment Tests (PAT), which are formative weekly tests on each subject. Question papers, linked to time tables/schedules and mapped to learning outcomes, are delivered digitally to all schools with centralized systems to gauge student responses. Data analysis is used to guide instruction. In 2019-20, over 103 million tests were conducted and now, during COVID-19, PAT is being used to circulate material and personalize remote education to the learning levels of each student.

Digital devices for accessing home learning Secondly, Gujarat undertook an exhaustive device-mapping exercise to measure the type/medium of access to remote education, be it television, smartphones, regular cellphones, tablet, radio, or none of these. For instance, for the 50% of students identified as having access to television, the state collaborated with a national broadcasting channel to stream six hours of daily learning programs, 30 minutes for each grade; and runs a 24/7 broadcast on a dedicated channel.

The government has also leveraged the Microsoft-Teams platform. Technology-proficient teachers form groups of 15 students each and conduct virtual classes. To date, over half million virtual

classes have been completed. Its effective implementation is driven by personalized usercredentials for 5 million students and 0.2 million teachers, including a dashboard to enable decentralized monitoring and review.

Further, the state makes extensive use of the national open Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) platform that enables QR-coded textbooks to be scanned with a cellphone, opening up a world of resources in multiple languages for reference and further reading. In fact, Gujarat recorded the highest number of direct plays of e-content, among all other Indian states, between April and October 2020.

Gujarat has thus adopted a multi-modal approach, using a mix of low-tech and high-tech interventions, to deliver personalized, adaptive education.

No One Left Behind: Remote Learning for All

A visually impaired student following an inclusive lesson on Television

The state’s initiatives are a template for equity. Disability-friendly content is disseminated through several mediums on themes including therapy, activities of daily living, numeracy and literacy etc.

Virtual classes have settings to support inclusive learning; special educators ensure regular contact through calls and conducting home visits for targeted support.

The sudden shift to remote learning, posed significant challenges for teachers and the larger community. Training and capacity building workshops were held at decentralized levels to facilitate implementation of home learning. Key themes covered included COVID-19 preparedness, online teaching practices, community engagement and awareness generation.

Realizing Education’s Promise; Building Systemic Resilience Gujarat’s comprehensive COVID-19 response has been successful due to its well-thought out and decentralized implementation framework, with streamlined activities from the state-level to the student. With the development of suitable content, disseminated through multiple channels, customized to the needs of student, and through stakeholder engagement, Gujarat is helping realize education’s promise by assessing learning, acting on evidence, and aligning all actors towards learning.

Moving forward, the state wants to improve the teaching-learning process, preparing for the “new normal” as schools reopen, through a baseline assessment to measure learning loss; the development of learning enhancement programs – to mitigate the estimated dual learning loss, of those children behind grade-level, and of children whose learning has been affected by the pandemic; syllabus rationalization; class-readiness programs; and the realignment of assessments.

These interventions, augmented by World Bank’s support under the Gujarat: Outcomes for Accelerated Learning (GOAL) project, currently under preparation, will help build long-term systemic resilience to deliver quality education for all children.

Learning in the time of COVID-19: the role of learning assessment in reopening schools DIEGO LUNA-BAZALDUA | VICTORIA LEVIN | JULIA LIBERMAN | NOVEMBER 23, 2020

Boy sitting at his desk with his mask on. / Shutterstock

In early 2020, most countries around the world made the decision to partially or fully close schools to contain the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19). This resulted in an unprecedented number of students being unable to attend school in person – at the peak of school closures in late March 2020, over 1.6 billion students were affected worldwide. More than half a year later, in midNovember 2020, as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in many parts of the world, over 670 million students reside in countries that are implementing full school closure policies, and over 150 million students are in countries where schools are partially closed. School closures have had severe consequences on students' learning opportunities as well as their socioemotional and cognitive development. The estimates of learning losses associated with school closures suggest that affected students can lose nearly $10 trillion in lifetime earnings, adding to countries' considerations for reopening schools.

As countries evaluate when and how to reopen schools safely, one key question is how schools will support learning and learning recovery. During school closures, some students continued to learn through various remote modalities, such as online learning platforms, television and radio, and paper packets, while others stopped learning altogether. When schools reopen for in-person instruction, students will return with very different levels of knowledge and skills, with disadvantaged students most likely to exhibit the greatest learning losses. The key to learning recovery in this context is the alignment of instruction and additional supports to where students are in their learning trajectory. Learning assessment – the process of gathering and evaluating information on what students know, understand, and can do – is an essential ingredient in this process of evaluating the state of student's learning and in supporting learning recovery and advancement towards learning goals. As such, learning assessment should be a key element of any policy package supporting school reopening, as it puts the focus back on learning.

To help policymakers, school leaders, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders in the learning process address important questions, such as "What do students know and are able to do when

they return to school?" and "Are students catching up with their pre-COVID-19 learning trajectory?," the Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) team has prepared a guidance note on using learning assessment in the process of school reopening. The note provides detailed guidance on how different types of learning assessment can be used to support learning and learning recovery after school reopening. It is expected that the learning assessment approaches and country cases presented in the note can also help countries build more resilient national learning assessment systems and guide them in future shocks that interrupt in-person instruction.

For example, classroom assessment is best used to support teachers to adjust their instruction to the students' level and to provide constructive feedback to students, which is crucial for learning recovery.

Large-scale assessment is best suited to support informed system-wide decision-making to support schools and students, including to inform resource allocation to schools and students who need it the most even in the context of tight fiscal space due to economic repercussions of the pandemic. Likewise, the note also addresses how high-stakes examinations, which are often used for certification of studies or selection to the next level of education, may need to be adjusted in the context of school reopening.

The guidance note recognizes the diversity of contexts and constraints that countries are facing, and guides in the preparation and implementation of assessment-related activities under different resource scenarios. For example, with respect to diagnostic classroom assessment, the guidance note suggests reliance on existing instruments to assess learning and prioritizing assessing foundational skills in early grades when resources are scarce, while countries with more resources can develop new assessment instruments and expand the assessment activities to other subjects and grades.

As countries consider approaches to including learning assessment in the process of school reopening, the note provides guidance on how to prepare and administer assessment activities and how to ensure that the results from assessments are used as intended. The guidance note provides key actions and their approximate timing relative to the school reopening date to inform this process and ensure that attention is paid to issues such as instrument design, logistics, training of assessment administrators (whether they are teachers or hired proctors), data analysis, and reporting of results. Importantly, the note also provides examples of how countries around the world have already implemented (or are planning to implement) different types of assessment activities to support learning and learning recovery: •

•

• •

Countries like Chile are implementing diagnostic assessments of literacy, numeracy, and well-being, both in-person and remotely to determine how to support students during the ongoing pandemic.

As part of its partial school reopening process, Kenya has implemented large-scale assessments administered by teachers in the classroom covering relevant subjects of the curriculum to monitor students as they return to the classroom.

Countries like South Korea have been implementing continuous formative assessment in the classroom and online since schools reopened.

For some countries like Vietnam, the previously developed plans and logistics for administering a large-scale assessment could coincide with eventual school reopening. These assessments are expected to provide evidence of COVID-19 learning losses and enable resource allocation decisions to support schools and students lagging behind.

As students return to schools around the world in these uncertain times, the first priority will be to ensure their health and safety and support their socioemotional well-being. Putting the focus back on learning will be the next task, and the process of assessing student learning will be key in ensuring learning continues to take place when students are back in the classroom.

The guidance note referenced in this blog was produced by the Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) team in November 2020 and may be updated in the future.

Shifting mindsets to support disability-inclusive education HANNA ALASUUTARI | QUENTIN WODON | DECEMBER 03, 2020

World Bank / Ruchi Singh

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink how to promote learning and resilience in education systems, especially given clear signs of growing inequity. Learners with disabilities are among the most marginalized groups and the risks the pandemic poses for them are still essentially sidelined or considered as an afterthought. It is critical to leverage lessons from the pandemic for learners with disabilities and rethink how all learners can benefit from good pedagogical practices which utilize principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as well as individualized support.

The World Bank is moving forward to ensure that its education projects and programs are disability inclusive by 2025. This is the first of 10 Commitments on Disability Inclusion announced in 2018 and guidance for disability inclusion in education is provided in the Inclusive Education Resource Guide.

December 3 marks the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The 13th Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (CRPD) has been organized virtually this week. It is an ideal moment to consider what are the critical shifts in mindsets needed to achieve inclusive education systems for all learners, including learners with disabilities as guided by the Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities.

Inclusive education as part of sector planning and whole of government approach A broader inclusive lens including disability inclusion must be at the center of any education intervention. Inclusive education sector analysis and planning is critical in this process. A comprehensive approach to support disability-inclusive education must focus on both making the overall provision of general education services inclusive and focusing interventions also directly to support learners with disabilities. Inclusive education requires a whole of government approach. It can contribute significantly to broader social inclusion. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for rethinking education system development with an inclusive lens considering also

disability-inclusive social protection and health system development and wider family and community support.

Attention of every teacher and school leader is needed The role of teachers in inclusive education is fundamental. Inclusive education should not be a special skillset owned by only a few professionals, even if it is important to educate some teachers to become experts in individualized approaches to support learners with disabilities and provide effective support to other teachers and learners within general education classrooms. All teachers and school leaders need to be supported in understanding that every learner matters and matters equally. This is the only way to ensure that quality inclusive education becomes a reality for learners with disabilities.

The shift to virtual provision of education due to the pandemic has had a huge impact on children with disabilities, leading to learning losses when the social learning experience has not been supported by in-person learning, reasonable accommodations, or specific support services. In many cases, accessibility of remote learning solutions for learners with disabilities might not be even considered. It is important to ensure accessible alternatives to support learning of students who might use sign language, require screen readers of other assistive devises or specific support at home. Community members, parents, caregivers, and non-governmental organizations can all play a role in supporting inclusive education through a multi-professional and -sectoral approach, for example through phone support or home visits respecting social/physical distancing in these difficult times.

Inclusive education pays off A fundamental mind shift is also needed towards redesigning policies and funding to support more inclusive education systems. Concentrating on ‘low hanging fruits’ does not take countries far enough in creating more inclusive education systems. Profound cultural shifts, longer term strategies, and adequate planning are all needed, with specific short and mid-term targets to monitor progress. The pandemic is putting pressure on government budgets to meet competing urgent demands in multiple sectors. Yet especially today it is important to invest in inclusive education and broader human capital.

Children with disabilities continue to lag behind in both educational attainment and learning, resulting in lower expected earnings in adulthood. This is the case globally, as well as in Africa. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index (HCI) provides an intuitive measure of a country’s productive potential. The productive potential of individuals depends in part on the number of years of education they complete and how much they learn while in school. It is clear that due to lower educational attainment and learning, persons with disabilities are less likely to achieve their full productivity potential. In Africa for example, analysis suggests that children who have difficulty seeing in the classroom perform less well on standardized tests, and yet we know how to ensure that these children can benefit from school eye health programs.

Children with disabilities are also more likely to experience multidimensional poverty, including lack of access to health services, lack of employment opportunities, and higher risks of social exclusion as well as poor quality of life if they are out of school. There is a strong economic argument to invest in education of children with disabilities. The labor market benefits from education are very similar for individuals with or without disabilities. Our research from Africa shows that completing primary school is not enough: children need to go to secondary school to reap larger benefits. In addition, the returns to education are the same for individuals with or without disabilities. This means the benefits of investments in education for children with disabilities are as large as those for other children. Given that human capital wealth accounts for two thirds of the changing wealth of nations, this provides a strong argument to invest in the education of children with disabilities.

We know how to implement programs to serve all learners, including learners with disabilities. We also know that making schools more inclusive benefits all students. As the World Bank works towards fulfilling the commitment to ensure that all its education projects and programs will be disability inclusive, we invite you to share your own experiences and ideas on what can be done to improve educational opportunities for all children at scale.

Is the COVID-19 slide in education real?

ROBIN DONNELLY | HARRY A. PATRINOS | DECEMBER 08, 2020

Children in class.

Emerging pieces of evidence of an actual COVID-19 learning loss and of its likely implications for the future of the generation currently in school show that it is essential to mitigate the long-term effects of the pandemic as much as possible.

COVID-19 driven school closures have brought significant disruption in education across Europe and Central Asia (ECA). Emerging evidence from some of the region’s highest-income countries is showing that the pandemic is resulting in learning losses and increases in inequality. It is likely that lower-income countries are suffering even more. To reduce and reverse the long-term negative effects, countries need to implement learning recovery programs, protect educational budgets, and prepare for future shocks by building back better.

At the peak of the pandemic, 45 countries in the region closed their schools, affecting 185 million students. Given the abruptness of the situation, teachers and administrations were unprepared for this transition and were forced to build emergency remote learning systems almost immediately. As of early December, 5,623 schooling days have been lost across all of the countries in Europe and Central Asia. Starting in early March 2020, most school systems across ECA were closed.

One of the limitations of emergency remote learning is the lack of interaction between teacher and student. With broadcasts, this is not possible. However, several countries showed initiative by using other methods to promote interaction between teachers and their students, including social media, email, telephone and even the post office.

Learning losses are real Across ECA, evidence is emerging to show that school closures have resulted in actual learning loss – a ‘COVID slide’. Research analyzing these outcomes is ongoing, but early results from Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have shown both learning losses and increases in inequality. Evidence is also emerging from Kazakhstan of a significant reduction in existing knowledge during the school closures. Alarmingly, these losses are found to be much higher among students from less-educated homes. This finding is reinforced by a study which shows that children

from socioeconomically advantaged families have received more parental support with their studies during the school closure period.

Bleak outlook for other countries. These emerging data not only provide insights into the region’s highest-income countries but can also be used to predict outcomes in middle- and low-income countries, which are likely to be suffering even worse consequences. Despite their substantial technological capability, Europe’s high-income countries have experienced learning losses and increased inequality as a result of the abrupt transition to virtual learning, so these outcomes are likely to be even more acute in lower income countries where there is much less technological capability and larger portions of families live below the poverty line. Across ECA, one-third of the region’s nations are not fully connected to the Internet. Additionally, only 50 percent of schools have sufficient IT equipment and internet connectivity to deliver a minimal level of educational content.

As a result, it can be expected that the negative consequences in the region’s middle- and lowincome countries are likely to be significant.

Outside of the classroom, learning losses may translate into even greater long-term challenges.

Decreases in test scores are associated with future declines in employment. Conversely, increases in student achievement lead to significant increases in lifetime earnings, as do increases in years of schooling is associated with an 8 to 9 percent gain in lifetime earnings.

In response to rising COVID-19 cases, some countries have implemented a second wave of school closures. Others are still relying on partial virtual instruction. With the use of virtual learning still prevalent, it is essential that actions should be taken now to reduce the long-term effects of the pandemic as much as possible.

In the absence of any intervention, the learning losses arising from the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have a long-term compounding negative effect on children’s future well-being. This includes learning losses, less access to higher education, lower labor market participation, and lower future earnings.

Recommended Interventions To mitigate these challenges while also building a more resilient system that can withstand future crises, we make three core recommendations – implementing learning recovery programs, protecting education budgets, and preparing for future shocks.

1.

Implement learning recovery programs.

Most immediately, governments must ensure that students who have fallen behind receive the support that they need to catch up to expected learning targets. The first step must be to carry out just-in-time assessments to identify these students and their support needs.

Research has shown that 12-week programs of tutoring can result in students making the kind of progress that would be expected from three to five months of normal schooling. In Italy, middle school students who received three hours of online tutoring a week via a computer, tablet, or smartphone, saw 4.7 percent boost in math performance, English, and Italian.

Another proven method to improve reading scores quickly is Teaching at the Right Level, an approach that works by: assessing children’s learning levels, grouping children based on learning levels rather than age or grade, using a range of engaging teaching and learning activities, focusing on foundational skills rather than solely on the curriculum, and tracking children’s progress. With this, randomized trials have shown that tailored educational systems that make instruction more relevant to the current level of students’ competences has a significant impact of learning outcomes, particularly among lagging students. As teachers identify the best learning recovery programs for their students, it is imperative that particular attention is paid to low-income and disadvantaged students who fell further behind during the school closures. With this, governments also need to support teachers with more resources and additional training.

2. Protecting the education budget. Given the significant financial strain that economies have been under during the pandemic, government budget cuts can be expected and this may jeopardize the gains that have been made in recent years in terms of access to education and improved learning outcomes. To ensure a resilient recovery, it is essential that the education budget is protected and that the schools that need financing the most are supported. To help the most vulnerable students, governments should be directing much of the funding and resources to support schools delivering remote instruction, particularly if those schools are serving high-poverty and high-minority populations. To encourage students to remain in school, incentives such as scholarships may need to be implemented.

Learning recovery programs will not be feasible without substantial financial support. In the presence of budget cuts, affluent families will be able to continue to fund educational supports like tutoring; however, lower income families will not as easily be able to fill this gap. For example, the UK announced a £1 billion pupil catch-up fund that contained a portion set aside for tutoring and the National Tutoring Programme with a £76 million budget. Therefore, significant budget allocations and further actions are needed to return to previous levels of learning.

3. Preparing for future shocks by building back better. Looking to the future, it is not only imperative that we recover from the pandemic but that we use this experience to become better prepared for future crises. To support this, countries need to build their capacity to provide virtual education in the future. Schools should be better prepared to switch easily between face-to face and remote learning as needed. With this in mind, it will be necessary to develop flexible curricula that can be taught in person or online. Additionally, teachers need to be better equipped to manage a wide range of IT devices in the event of a future lockdown. Offering short training courses to improve their digital skills will help. Using the post-pandemic to rebuild education systems and make them resilient is a priority. At the same time, it is important to build the future education system that will not be subject to lost learning during the next pandemic.

What PISA for Development results tell us about education access and learning levels in developing countries JAIME SAAVEDRA | MARGUERITE CLARKE | DECEMBER 10, 2020

As 2020 comes to a close, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage education systems around the world, keeping hundreds of millions of children out of school. While the recent news about successful vaccine trials is promising and signals a light at the end of the tunnel, the harsh reality is that millions of youth who lost access to schooling during the lockdowns may never return. Those who do return will have suffered significant learning losses. The World Bank estimates that learning poverty could increase from 53% to 63% globally, which implies that 72 million additional children could fall into the ranks of the learning poor. That will have repercussions for decades to come.

Without effective policy responses when schools reopen, approximately $10 trillion of lifecycle earnings could be lost for this cohort of learners —because of lower levels of learning, lost months due to school closures, or greater potential for dropping out of school.

Given these scenarios, the newly released results from the OECD’s PISA for Development (PISAD) survey of out-of-school youth are particularly relevant and thought-provoking. The survey, which took place in 2018, measured the knowledge of 14- to 16-year-old out-of-school youth in five countries – Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Senegal. This was in addition to an earlier (2017) in-school assessment of 15-year-olds in these countries. The results from the out-ofschool survey, which were released on December 1, together with results from the earlier in-school assessment, clearly show the learning crisis that existed in these countries even before COVID. The results are a message to education systems around the world of the cost of failing to educate youth with the basic competencies needed to survive in today’s world and of allowing them to drop out of school early.

The PISA-D results reveal that while more children than ever may be going to school in the participating countries, too many leave before completing the primary cycle (in fact, according to

Figure 1, only 43% of the 15-year-olds in these countries – about half the OECD average – were enrolled in at least grade 7 and therefore eligible to sit the school-based tests). Many more fail to achieve even minimum levels of proficiency in reading and mathematics. For example, the proportion of 15-year-olds in these countries achieving at least minimum proficiency in reading is less than 15% while in mathematics, it is less than 10% (compared to an average of 76% and 71% respectively in OECD countries). This is despite almost half of these youth having attended school for up to nine years.

Figure 1: Performance in reading and mathematics amongst in-school and out-of-school youth Percentage of 15-year-olds performing at Level 2 or above1

The education challenges facing the PISA-D participating countries The PISA-D participating countries should be acknowledged for the progress they have made in ensuring wider access to schooling, but they still have a long way to go to ensure that every child completes at least nine years of basic education and acquires at least basic skills in reading and mathematics (a principal aim of Sustainable Development Goal 4). While it is rare for a child never to enroll in the participating countries, more than half of the children in these contexts, boys and girls, drop out of school before they reach the secondary level. Almost all of the children that drop out have previously repeated grades and have not acquired even minimum levels of proficiency in reading and mathematics by the time they leave.

Crucially, when it comes to school-based factors, it is the quality of instruction, particularly the teaching and learning of reading skills in the early grades of primary education, that is the key to successful academic outcomes at age 15. The levels of reading ability of students at the ages of seven or eight are the strongest predictors of whether a child will achieve at least minimum levels of proficiency in basic skills by the age of fifteen. Being able to read is also a strong predictor of whether students will stay in school.

Currently, however, more than 70% of the children in PISA-D participating countries who go on to complete lower secondary education are unable to achieve even minimum levels of proficiency in reading and mathematics, and practically none of the children in these countries who fail to complete lower secondary education have achieved minimum levels of proficiency in reading or mathematics.

What can be done about it?

Improving learning levels for in-school and out-of-school youth will not be achieved by using business-as-usual approaches. Instead, there needs to be a new vision for education: one in which learning happens for everyone, everywhere. The COVID-19 crisis has further exposed the weaknesses of education systems around the world and underlined the urgency to act. The PISA-D data have shone additional light on the issue. Too many education systems are not delivering even basic skills for all children, let alone preparing them for the demanding world they will live in as adults. A renewed policy approach is required to address the educational challenges of today while helping countries lay the groundwork to seize tomorrow’s opportunities. This policy approach needs to consider the five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system: learners, teachers, learning resources, schools, and system management. Investments and reforms in each of the pillars are needed today to lay the foundations for the future of learning. For some educational systems, the transformation of education delivery may seem far off and maybe unattainable in the short run. However, policymakers can implement key policy actions today to lay the foundations for the future of learning. The youth of today deserve no less.

How could COVID-19 hinder progress with Learning Poverty? Some initial simulations JOAO PEDRO AZEVEDO | DECEMBER 15, 2020

Even before COVID-19 forced a massive closure of schools around the globe, the world was in the middle of a learning crisis that threatened efforts to build human capital—the skills and know-how needed for the jobs of the future. More than half (53 percent) of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school entirely. This is what we at the World Bank call learning poverty. Recent improvements in Learning Poverty have been extremely slow. If trends of the last 15 years were to be extrapolated, it will take 50 years to halve learning poverty. Last year we proposed a target to cut Learning Poverty by at least half by 2030. This would require doubling or trebling the recent rate of improvement in learning, something difficult but achievable. But now COVID-19 is likely to deepen learning gaps and make this dramatically more difficult.

Temporary school closures in more than 180 countries have, at the peak of the pandemic, kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school; for about half of those students, school closures are exceeding 7 months. Although most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote and remedial learning strategies in place, learning losses are likely to happen. A recent survey of education officials on government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that while countries and regions have responded in various ways, only half of the initiatives are monitoring usage of remote learning (Figure 1, top panel). Moreover, where usage is being monitored, the remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population (Figure 1, bottom panel), and most of those cases are online platforms in high- and middle-income countries.

Source: Authors' calculation using the UNESCO-UNICEF-WB Survey on National Education Responses to COVID-19 School Closures (n=116) http://uis.unesco.org/en/news/survey-national-education-responses-covid-19-school-closures-due-12-june-2020

COVID-19-related school closures are forcing countries even further off track from achieving their learning goals. Students currently in school stand to lose $10 trillion in labor earnings over their working lives. That is almost one-tenth of current global GDP, or half the United States’ annual economic output, or twice the global annual public expenditure on primary and secondary education.

In a recent brief I summarize the findings of three simulation scenarios to gauge potential impacts of the crisis on learning poverty. In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-related school closures could increase the learning poverty rate in the low- and middle-income countries by 10 percentage points, from 53% to 63%. This 10-percentage-point increase in learning poverty implies that an additional 72 million primary-school-age children could fall into learning poverty, out of a population of 720 million children of primary-school age.

Figure 2 Learning Poverty could increase by 10 percentage points in Low-and Middle-income countries, in the most pessimistic scenario out of 100 children in Low- and Middle-income countries

Source: Azevedo (2020). Pessimistic Scenario (of 70% of school closure, very low mitigation effectiveness, no remediation, and WB-MPO June). For more details on the simulation methodology, see Azevedo et al (2020)

This result is driven by three main channels: school closures, effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, and the economic impact. School closures, and the effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, will affect the magnitude of the learning loss, while the economic impact will affect dropout rates. In these simulations, school closures are assumed to last for 70% of the school year, there will be no remediation, mitigation effectiveness will vary from 5%, 7% and 15% for low-, middle- or high-income countries, respectively. The economic channel builds on macro-economic growth projections, and estimates the possible impacts of economic contractions on household income, and the likelihood that these will affect primary school age-school-enrollment.

Most of the potential increase in learning poverty would take place in regions with a high but still average level of learning poverty in the global context pre-COVID, such as South Asia (which had a 63% pre-pandemic rate of learning poverty), Latin America (48%), and East Asia and the Pacific (21%). In Sub-Saharan Africa and Low-income countries, where learning poverty was already at 87% and 90% before COVID, increases would be relatively small, at 4 percentage points and 2 percentage points, respectively. This reflects that most of the learning losses in those regions would impact students who were already failing to achieve the minimum reading proficiency level by the end of primary—that is, those who were already learning-poor.

To gauge at the impacts of the current crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa we need to examine other indicators of learning deprivation. In these two regions children are on average the furthest below the minimum proficiency level, with a Learning Deprivation Gap (the average distance of a learning deprived child to the minimum reading proficiency level) of approximately 20%. This rate is double the global average (10.5%), four times larger than the East Asia and Pacific Gap (5%), and more than tenfold larger the Europe and Central Asia average gap (1.3%). The magnitude of learning deprivation gap suggests that on average, students on those regions are one full academic year behind in terms of learning, or two times behind the global average.

In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-19 school closures might increase the learning deprivation gap by approximately 2.5 percentage points in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America. However, the same increase in the learning deprivation gap does not imply the same impact in qualitative terms. An indicator of the severity of learning deprivation, which captures the inequality among the learning deprived children, reveals that the severity of learning deprivation in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa could increase by approximately 1.5 percentage points, versus an increase of 0.5 percentage points in Latin America. This suggests that the new learning-deprived in Latin America would remain closer to the minimum proficiency level than children in Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence, the range of options required to identify students’ needs and provide learning opportunities, will be qualitatively different in these two groups of countries— more intense in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East than in Latin America.

In absolute terms, Sub-Sharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa would remain the two regions with the largest number of learning-deprived children. The depth of learning deprivation in Sub-Saharan Africa will increase by three times more than the number of children who are learningdeprived. This is almost three times the global average, and four times more than in Europe and Central Asia. This suggests an increase in the complexity and the cost of tackling the learning crisis in the continent.

Going forward, as schools reopen, educational systems will need to be more flexible and adapt to the student’s needs. Countries will need to reimagine their educational systems and to use the opportunity presented by the pandemic and its triple shock—to health, the economy, and the educational system—to build back better. Several policy options deployed during the crisis, such as remote learning solutions, structured lesson plans, curriculum prioritization, and accelerated teaching programs (to name a few), can contribute to building an educational system that is more resilient to crisis, flexible in meeting student needs, and equitable in protecting the most vulnerable.

The results from these simulations are not destiny. Parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners can work together to deploy effective mitigation and remediation strategies to protect the COVID-19 generation’s future. School reopening, when safe, is critical, but it is not enough. The simulation results show major differences in the potential impacts of the crisis on the learning poor across regions. The big challenge will be to rapidly identify and respond to each individual student’s learning needs flexibly and to build back educational systems more resilient to shocks, using technology effectively to enable learning both at school and at home.

Read@Home: Effective partnerships to reach vulnerable children in North Macedonia BOJANA NACEVA | MARTIN GALEVSKI | MELISSA KELLY | DECEMBER 17, 2020

Elvira, 7, and her siblings received storybooks in Albanian. She said, “I just started reading in school and I can’t wait to become good enough so I can read to my younger brother and sister and entertain them with the stories from the books.”

Reading can transport children to new worlds and strong reading skills are essential to succeed in school. When families regularly talk, interact and read with young children, they are more likely to have stronger language and cognitive skills, be ready for school and show reading achievement in Grade 3. When children learn to read in their mother tongue, or the language that they speak at home, they build literacy skills more quickly, which forms the foundation for reading in other languages.

But too many children do not have books at home. A recent study covering 35 countries of varying income levels found that only half of all children had at least one book at home. Some parents may not understand the role they can play in boosting kids’ learning by reading with them. Globally, just half of all parents report regularly engaging in games, songs and reading activities with young children.

Read@Home is a new effort to get reading, learning and play materials into homes, targeting families who are unlikely to be reached with many of the remote learning approaches being rolled out by ministries of education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read@Home is not just a crisis response; rather, it is a key component of system-building that will help countries address learning poverty and be resilient in the face of future shocks. Over the past 6 months, the World Bank has been working with governments in 10 countries, including North Macedonia, to identify existing partners, books and tools to help parents and family members support their children’s learning.

The Government of North Macedonia, with support from the World Bank, has launched Read@Home in the country, with a major push to distribute books to all children from low-income families in their mother tongue. By getting books into the hands of children and engaging parents to read with them in the language that they speak at home, Read@Home could

boost children’s reading comprehension assessment scores in the early grades, which are on average 20 percent lower for students whose first language is not Macedonian.

In its first roll out, Read@Home in North Macedonia is targeting 40,000 children ages 3-12 years living in families with a monthly income of less than 260 EUR. These families are the recipients of the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) or national social safety net program.

In October, 15,000 young children from all over North Macedonia received a small package of colorful, illustrated storybooks in their mother tongue. Included in the package were some ideas and questions for their parents to try out during story time as well as some games that they could play together at other times during the day. One of those children was Elvira (pictured above), 7 years old, who lives in the village of Indjikovo just outside of the capital, Skopje. Elvira and her siblings received storybooks in Albanian. She said, “I just started reading in school and I can’t wait to become good enough so I can read to my younger brother and sister and entertain them with the stories from the books.”

For the younger children (aged 3-7 years), a partnership with Think Equal and the International Stepby-Step Association (ISSA) in North Macedonia helped identify high-quality storybooks in Turkish, Roma and Bosnian in addition to the more prevalently available Macedonian and Albanian languages. Each child receives a package of four picture books in their mother tongue with accompanying questions and activities for each book.

Children aged 8-12 years are receiving a selection of storybooks in their mother tongue that are part of their school curriculum. While these books are required, they are difficult for vulnerable families to afford, so this intervention will directly contribute to children’s learning in the classroom and at home by placing children benefitting from Read@Home on a more equal footing with their peers.

All families receive guidelines on age-appropriate ways to engage children in reading and a visual poster with key messages on reading at home. The team commissioned Vane Kosturanov, a North Macedonian artist who is well-known for his paintings of houses, to design the poster for each age group.

The Read@Home packages for the younger age group were delivered using the existing social safety net program delivery channels. The World Bank and Ministry of Labor and Social Protection teams partnered on the development of the distribution lists to identify the residence and mother tongue of the beneficiaries. Social workers participated in a short virtual training to first orient families to the package and then to follow up to build parents’ confidence and address their challenges to practice reading activities at home. The distribution was conducted by Red Cross Macedonia.

The Read@Home packages for the 8-12-year-old children will be distributed through the same channels in January 2021.

To understand how Read@Home is changing practices at the household level, the team is conducting an evaluation with a sample of beneficiary households. Data is being collected through a phone survey developed by the World Bank’s Scaling Up Measurement in Early Childhood team. The phone survey will collect data on parental support at home, household context, engagement with educational resources, internalized/externalized behaviors, and child discipline. It has been adapted from the ECD COVID-19 survey currently being piloted in 15 countries around the world.

The Minister of Education and Science, Mila Carovska, and Minister of Labor and Social Protection, Jagoda Shahpaska, officially launched the joint Read@Home initiative on October 17, 2020, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The ministers personally distributed book packages to several families and Minister Carovska read to children in a first-grade class. During the day, each minister highlighted the importance of partnerships to improve access to quality education and reduce the cycle of poverty. Minister Carovska noted that, "We can end poverty only through the right to access quality education for every child. I call for all of us to work together on reform

processes in education that will provide prosperity for citizens." Read@Home in North Macedonia is an example of how strategic partnerships can build on existing resources to quickly reach children and families and foster a culture of reading.

Please visit our webpage to learn more about Read@Home, part of the World Bank’s efforts to promote continuous and accelerated learning in response to COVID-19.

A silent and unequal education crisis. And the seeds for its solution.

JAIME SAAVEDRA | JANUARY 05, 2021

Young girl sitting at her computer.

A girl in 6th grade is sitting in a comfortable chair in front of her laptop engaging in a class through Zoom. Her 15 classmates are all connected. Since the pandemic induced lockdown, their parents, like hers, are mostly teleworking, and are able to supervise how they are engaging. She just got new headphones and a tablet where she can have her digital workbook open. She is shy and feels comfortable asking questions via chat. This way of interacting fits with her personality, so she is enjoying the class. Too many hours on Zoom is a drag, though, and sometimes she just mentally disconnects. A boy, just a few miles away is taking turns with his siblings to watch one hour of TV programing for 6th grade in the recently launched public TV educational channels. His teacher sends him homework through WhatsApp, but he can only see it at night on his mother’s smartphone. She is out most of the day working and must take the phone with her. His teacher came to his house some weeks ago to give him a brand-new textbook and a workbook. That was great, as there is no other reading material at home. He has not seen most of his classmates for many months. Actually, his teacher has not been able to contact several of his classmates for a long time either. These dramatically different experiences -and many shades of gray in between, are happening in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Kenya and Colombia. Some were able to easily cope with the changes after schools closed, but not the majority. 2020 marks a different childhood experience that these young people will remember for the rest of their lives. And a different education service, during many months, that might impact their skills and economic prospects for the rest of their lives.

This pandemic has generated suffering of an unthinkable scale across the globe. It is the worst economic, health and social crisis of the last 100 years. A once in a century event. But this suffering has been tremendously unequal, something that should not be a surprise given the increasing level of inequality we were already witnessing. An unequal suffering that invades many aspects of human life. The likelihood of not being properly treated if infected -and hence dying- is higher for the poor. Unemployment and less possibility of teleworking is higher for unskilled workers. Hours worked have fallen proportionately more for women.

Education opportunities have been lower and also dramatically unequal. Most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote learning strategies in place. But the quality and effectiveness is varied, and low. A recent survey of government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that only in half of the cases there is close monitoring of the usage of remote learning.

And in those cases, remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population.

This generation, who is -or should have been - in school during 2020 is bound to lose at least US$ 10 trillion in foregone future earnings. Unless we do something, this generation might do worse than the previous and the future one. This potential economic loss is linked to the loss in learning (and hence future productivity): at the WB we had assessed that before the pandemic Learning Poverty (the share of 10-year-olds that cannot read and understand a simple text), was already at an extremely high 53% in low- and middle-income countries. With the pandemic forcing massive school closures, we now project that Learning Poverty could increase to 63%. That is, 72 million more primary age kids will be learning poor. Reading is not all but it is a precondition to advance many of the aspects of education we care about. And the ability of a system to assure that their kids read with and understand a simple text is a good proxy of its overall quality.

In addition to lower learning in basic education, other mechanisms are at play. We expect large increases in dropout rates both in secondary and higher education and most likely the total number of schooling years of this generation will be lower. Younger children, those who were 5 to 7 years old in 2020 and were supposed to receive early childhood education services, lost that option completely, as no form of remote learning has been possible for them. Remember all the arguments in favor of the early years’ investments proving they had the highest private and social returns? Well, all those returns disappeared. Those children will never get those valuable years back and will be at a disadvantage compared to previous and later generations.

We were already witnessing an education crisis. A silent, slow moving crisis that was denying a future to many students. The pandemic is making this crisis even more serious.

In addition, data that suggest how unequal these learning losses are is slowly appearing. We have some evidence from rich countries. Despite their extensive technological reach, for a few European countries for which there is learning data post closures, there is evidence of learning losses and higher inequality as a result of the pandemic. In the Netherlands researchers found a decrease in student performance on a national exam equivalent to a fifth of a school year (roughly the actual time out of school due to the pandemic) and a growing inequality, likely due to children from betteroff families receiving more parental support and having better remote learning environments. In the US, regardless of the type of college, fall of 2020 college enrollment rates for low-income high school students plunged by 29%, nearly double that of students from higher-income high schools.

Among middle income and poor countries, we only have some data of usage of different forms of remote learning, and they reveal different experiences for different children. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 45% of children had no exposure at all to any type of remote learning. Of those who did, it was mostly radio, TV or paper material. In a typical African country at most 10% of kids received some material through the internet. In Latin America, the situation is better, 90% of children received some remote learning; but less than half of that was through the internet. The rest, was radio and TV. In many middle income countries, a small minority, mostly in elite schools had several hours a day of synchronous instruction; on the other side of the income spectrum, many students had to settle for a few hours for their grade by TV or radio. In Chile, a country better prepared than most Latin American countries, it is estimated that the poorest quintile might lose 88% expected learning for this year, while the richest quintile “only� 64%. Note that in the southern hemisphere, the school closures that started a few weeks after the pandemic, coincided with the start of the school year (April or May). There was no northern summer vacation from May to August to try to figure out

what to do. The school closures smacked at the precise moment to affect the school year almost in its entirety. The average Latin American country has lost 160 days. And for many children, inclassroom instruction vanished completely.

This horrendous year, however, carries the seeds for a promising change. It has shown that innovation and technology adoption is possible. Mental blocks can be lifted, and quickly. Starting in April, millions of children started communicating with their teachers and having their homework reviewed through WhatsApp or other social media. Not the panacea -and not everyone had access to a smartphone but allowed many children to maintain contact with the education system. In many systems, millions of teachers have started learning the use of social media and ed-tech tools at an unheard pace, forced by the circumstances.

And many other mindsets are changing. Education, as if there was any doubt, is mainly a social endeavor. Parents now have a whole new understanding about how much they can do to support their children’s learning, and at the same time, the immense influence that a teacher can have in the lives of children; and about the complexity of a teacher’s job. In the short run, this raises the stakes of smart and creative school management policies that could help increase face time between teachers and students in the coming months, trying at least hybrid experiences. Authorities, teachers, and parents have to cooperate and reach a balance to minimize both the negative health impacts and the negative education impacts.

In the medium term, this better understanding of the role of teachers raises the stakes of making teaching a socially valued career. A good teacher is the most important factor to guarantee quality education and makes a huge difference in a student’s life. This pandemic has shown that many great teachers have found creative ways of engaging with their students, with technology or without it. Yet, in many countries, we still see teachers selected from low quality applicant pools, political considerations defining selection, promotion and deployment of teachers. Countries that do not change that will simply fail. But that is changing. In the state of Edo in Nigeria, in the states of Ceara and Sao Paulo in Brazil, in Peru, in Turkey, shifts towards a meritocratic career are being consolidated, and countries are investing in coaching, schools based practical training, providing feedback to teachers to excel in their classroom engagement and giving them tools to perform better in class.

Going forward, as schools reopen even with modified schedules and curriculums, educational systems will need to be more flexible and adapt to the student’s needs. That flexibility requires giving teachers the tools and support to provide a more personalized and flexible learning experience that ensures that all children within the classroom learn. That is a critical element to making systems more equitable. Technology can have an incredibly powerful role to provide these tools and complement the work of the teacher. That is another critical lesson that some countries are starting to build on: the pandemic has shown that the digital divide has to be closed at a much faster rate. Technology will be critical also to make systems more resilient, allowing for a continued educational experience at home and at school.

All this will require resources. Closing the digital divide will not be cheap, having the right number of teachers and investing more in a professionalized well-respected career, will also require resources.

The complex management of the school system -which is being pushed to its limits, requires resources. It is a challenge for both Ministries of Education and Ministries of Finance defining the investment path that is needed in the coming years to provide a minimally decent service for all its children and youth. This investment path requires a financing path that maps into higher domestic resources mobilization, mainly taxes. There is no magic. A renewed social contract, and a political commitment to invest what is needed to provide the right opportunities to all is unavoidable.

Considering an adaptive learning system? A roadmap for policymakers TRACY WILICHOWSKI | CRISTOBAL COBO | JANUARY 06, 2021

copyright: Shutterstock

Educational technology, or EdTech, has been a promising avenue to address some of the most challenging policy questions within educational systems in low- and middle-income countries.

However, after decades of promises to disrupt and revolutionize education, the impact of EdTech on learning outcomes has been mixed. The drive to provide tech-based support to improve teachers’ instruction and facilitate student learning has become urgent, given school closings and re-openings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the few silver linings of the pandemic, is that it has transformed the field, shifting the focus from disruption to mitigation and inclusion, with the potential to reduce inequity.

The evidence-base for what EdTech interventions work for improving student learning outcomes in low- and middle-income settings is limited. A recent systematic review (by Rodriguez-Segura, 2020) of existing credible studies found that technology as a standalone intervention will not work to improve teaching practices or student learning. Of all the EdTech interventions included in the review, those focused on self-led learning were of the most salient ways to improve student learning outcomes.

Facilitating Self-Led Learning through an Adaptive Learning System Self-led learning, or the ability for students to take charge of their learning, at their own pace or level, can be a game-changer during (and after) the pandemic. Self-led learning can be developed without technology but with intensive teacher support. However, Rodriguez-Segura explains that because EdTech interventions can enable students to learn at a fitting pace with minimal external support, they seem particularly enticing. One example are adaptive learning systems that respond

to interactions in real-time by automatically providing students with individualized support. One common challenge teachers face is tailoring their instruction to each student’s learning needs.

Teachers can address this challenge by differentiating instruction and dividing the classroom into smaller groups based on students’ learning levels.

Adaptive systems can automatize this process by modifying the presentation of material in response to student performance. The systems (can) “learn” from student progress and adjust the path of learning. In some cases, they have been shown to be cost-effective and can sharply improve productivity in delivering education, with the potential to complement classroom instruction, reinforce lessons, and fill in content gaps. This methodology is closely related to rigorous evaluative research that has shown how targeting teaching instruction by learning level, not by grade, can lead to significant learning outcomes.

Five Enabling Conditions for Establishing an Adaptive Learning System Adaptive systems’ primary function is to provide remedial education and help students improve curricular mastery. They can complement instruction when schools are open and can be used by students independently when schools are closed. For instance, in Ecuador, adaptive systems have helped prevent student dropout during school closures. However, adaptive systems are not a “silver bullet”. In order to work, there are several enabling conditions that must be established.

1. Most adaptive systems are proprietary and require high upfront costs to develop or adapt.

Adaptive systems have only been developed for a few subject areas (i.e. math and early reading) and are currently limited to these subjects. Thus, when considering an adaptive system, policymakers have two main options: (i) adapt a pre-existing, proprietary system for their context or (ii) develop a system from scratch. Both have their drawbacks, the former involves adapting and translating a software that is likely only available in English/Spanish and mapped to a foreign curriculum; policymakers must also pay licensing fees for users to access the platform, which can incur ongoing costs. Both options have a host of associated costs, including translations, server maintenance, training, software updates, a support desk, among others.

2. Regardless of whether a government adapts or develops a system from scratch, adaptive systems must be mapped to the curriculum. Adaptive systems require a detailed curriculum mapping and content development to support the learning objectives outlined in the curriculum. If a government decides to adapt a pre-existing, proprietary system for their context, they may run into issues in changing the content to match their curriculum. If they develop a system from scratch, they can either outsource the curriculum mapping or embed this step in the planning process.

Irrespective, it is essential for policymakers to involve teachers in this process, which has been shown to improve teacher uptake and buy-in during implementation.

3. Adaptive systems require a robust digital infrastructure to ensure widespread adoption. Although evidence suggests the impact of adaptive learning can be more acute for students of lower socioeconomic status, and thus minimize learning losses, it’s often the case that the students who are most at risk of learning losses often do not have access to online solutions.

Thus, it’s imperative for teachers and students to access the system, both by having a device with the appropriate content on it and wireless capability to connect to that content. Although the price of tablets and smartphones has dropped significantly, and low- and middle-income countries have invested in access to affordable, high-quality data, adaptive systems require wireless devices and strong bandwidth, which could incur high up-front costs (and other associated cost like technical support, maintenance, monitoring, among others).

4. Adaptive systems must include training for teachers to be deployed effectively. Teachers’ willingness to adopt new practices and buy-into the system play a major role in determining the efficacy of the program. Adaptive systems are not meant to replace teachers, but rather enhance

their role (see “Reimagining Human Connections”). It’s important that teachers are trained on what is expected of them, as without an understanding of this role shift, policymakers risk disenfranchising them. Specifically, teachers should be trained on how to: (i) use the platform to shift the role from an instructor to a tutor, (ii) utilize and access the platform and associated technology, (iii) use the technology for students’ knowledge development, (iv) utilize the findings from students’ participation on the platform to automatically provide individualized support to students, (v) utilize the data from the platform to plan future lessons and differentiate instruction based on students’ needs. This training should be paired with an engagement plan, in which teachers can share good practices and promote the benefits of the platform through different channels and contexts.

5. In addition to teacher training, adaptive systems must effectively engage students. Like teachers, it’s important to engage students in the rollout process. Engagement initiatives targeted for students aim to create intrinsic and extrinsic incentives for them to use the platform consistently. One such program nominated a number of students who received training on how to navigate the platform, handle connectivity errors, troubleshoot technical issues, and contact the helpdesk. An additional approach can be to gamify the experience, students can earn ‘points’ (or other form of social recognition) based on the usage or progression on the system per week (top performers can be recognized among peers). Similar approaches can be used with teachers.

When these enabling conditions are met, adaptive systems have the potential to improve how teachers instruct, enhance student learning, and help policymakers to better understand what is happening in classrooms (or outside of them). At a minimum, these systems require (i) adequate curriculum calibration, (i) initial assessment, (ii) customization of the instructional process, and (iii) ongoing monitoring. However, for them to work, these systems require an extensive rethinking of the role of and dynamics between students and teachers. Even in the best-case scenario, these changes take substantial time to roll out.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we can no longer rely on traditional forms of schooling.

It is increasingly likely that in the future of learning, technology could diversify the means to support students. As shown, adaptive systems could be an opportunity to support self-led learning as well as other forms of learning (making it more accessible, impactful, and engaging). However, given the complexity of adopting and deploying adaptive learning systems, education systems must address the five basic enabling conditions. Without these conditions in place, adaptive systems will not only underdeliver, but can also be a costly lesson for low- and middle-income countries.

Special thanks to Diego Angel-Urdinola, Iñaki Sanchez, and Mike Trucano for their insightful contributions to this blog.

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