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NPR Ed
9 Out Of 10 Children Are Out Of School Worldwide. What Now?
Anya Kamenetz
April 2, 20209
Right now students are out of school in 185 countries. According to UNESCO, that's roughly 9 out of 10 schoolchildren worldwide.
The world has never seen a school shutdown on this scale. And not since
Great Britain during World War II has such a long-term, widespread
emptying of classrooms come to a rich country.
To get a little perspective on what this all might mean, I spoke with
several experts in the field known as "education in emergencies." Some
have been part of the response to national, longterm school
interruptions caused by war, refugee crises, natural disasters and
epidemics like Ebola. Others have studied the breakdown and recovery
process. Again, there is no situation that is precisely similar to what
schools around the world are going through now, but here are some
lessons these experts have learned from other education emergencies.
From New Orleans and Rwanda: It can take years for students to recover the learning they've lost.
Hurricane Katrina closed most public schools in New Orleans for the
entire fall term of 2005. Most of those students enrolled in other
schools elsewhere, from Baton Rouge to Houston and beyond. In many
cases, the schools they enrolled in were of higher quality than the
schools they had left — because the schools in New Orleans were
extremely low-performing before the storm.
So, you might think that the learning interruption wouldn't be that bad. You'd be wrong.
Doug Harris at Tulane University was part of a research team tracking
students as they returned to New Orleans and re-enrolled in newly
reorganized schools. He says it took two full school years — from the
spring of 2006 to the spring of 2008 — for those returning students to
fully recover their lost learning. There's "suggestive evidence," he
says, that the negative impact was worse for low income and African
American students.
Harris says that what hurt these kids' learning wasn't just the
interruption in class time. The economic impact and emotional trauma
were probably just as important. So was the dislocation itself: the
experience of enrolling in new and unfamiliar schools where Katrina
"refugee" students were not always welcomed.
All of these factors — social dislocation, economic uncertainty — apply
in spades to the coronavirus situation, says Harris. So, he says, we
should expect something similar in terms of recovery time. "The social
and economic situation always bleeds into the school," he says.
One paper that compared various communities that were affected, to
different degrees, by the Rwandan genocide in 1994 found that affected
children caught up in educational attainment by 2010 — 16 years later.
Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Philippines, Sri Lanka: Continuity efforts won't reach everyone, but they are still necessary.
Amid the coronavirus shutdown, many children in the United States can't
access distance learning because they lack computers and Internet
access, and some are struggling to participate because they have a
learning disability. Nevertheless, the federal government so far has
guided school districts to keep trying to push ahead with interim
efforts to keep students learning anyway, while doing their best to
reach as many students as they can.
"The choice to do nothing, because it can't reach all immediately, ends
up just exacerbating existing inequalities," says Sarah
Dryden-Peterson, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education with experience in sub-Saharan Africa.
She adds that, whether any assistance is offered during school closures
or not, families with the means will work hard to help their children
access education anyway. She says this was the case recently during
Hong Kong's school closures, where families who could afford to sent
their children abroad to school.
Dryden-Peterson's view tracks with what the international aid community
considers to be best practice, agrees Rebecca Winthrop, co-director of
the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. "Don't
stop helping people just because you can't help everyone, but
definitely have a pro-equity lens."
Syria, Venezuela, Myanmar, West Africa: Children are at risk for toxic stress — but continuity efforts can help.
Even the most fortunate of U.S. children are going through a version of
what's called an "adverse childhood experience" right now. That's the
term researchers use for a traumatic event in a child's life, such as
physical or verbal abuse, a divorce, or the death, incarceration or
substance abuse of a parent. The effect of these experiences is
cumulative — experiencing four or more of them is considered a major
risk factor for long term physical health problems, including
conditions like cancer and heart disease.
Sarah Smith is the senior director of education at the International
Rescue Committee. She says that when social disruption interrupts
education, we should expect effects on brain development, especially
for students who already had a risk factor or two in their biology or
their family life.
"Their social and emotional well-being is at risk," she says. "And
they're more likely to experience, for instance, toxic stress, which is
just a disruption in their brain development." This, Smith adds, can
have not only short-term consequences for emotional and physical
health, "but also long-term consequences for their overall well-being,
their ability to hold down a job, their ability to learn in school
later if they get back into school, and their fiscal health."
However, Rebecca Winthrop notes that efforts that keep teachers in
touch with students can help reduce these effects. "If provided in a
way that ... continues learning in some form, they can be a real
protective factor against anxiety and depression for kids."
New Orleans, Syria: Expect high school graduation and college-going rates to take a hit.
Doug Harris at Tulane says that, based on what he saw in New Orleans
after Katrina, he expects the current shutdown to drive down high
school graduation rates and college enrollments. Harris notes that
college enrollments in New Orleans have yet to return to pre-Katrina
levels, particularly at institutions that primarily serve low-income
students, such as the University of New Orleans.
There are economic factors for teenagers. "Their parents just lost
their jobs and they've got younger siblings to take care of while their
parents are out trying to find work and trying to manage things," he
explains. "So I think, unfortunately, we're going to see a spike in the
high school dropout rate."
Sarah Smith at IRC looks at the developmental reasons teenagers are
particularly at risk for leaving school. "Adolescence [is] a period of
rapid change and rapid development," she says. "So if they're
experiencing adversity while they're going through adolescence and
another period of change, it can be very detrimental."
Younger children, Smith adds, can be more resilient to a disruption
like this, as long as they are with their immediate family, who are
ideally the most important sources of support in their lives. But when
it comes to teenagers, the important people are "more likely to be
peers and mentors. If those ties to those people are disrupted, that
can really affect their overall well-being."
Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Rwanda: School systems are sometimes entirely remade.
Sometimes, the major disruption that closes schools becomes an opening
for dramatic changes to the structure of the school system. New Orleans
became an all-charter district. Puerto Rico, after the devastation of
Hurricane Maria in 2017, passed a law reorganizing the school system
and creating charters and voucher programs. And education reforms in
Rwanda emphasized broader access, student-centered teaching techniques,
and a shift in the language of instruction from French to English.
Harris' research, along with others, has showed generally positive
effects for reforms in New Orleans, although they were not without
tradeoffs. Students who returned to New Orleans in 2006 had caught up
academically by 2008, and they continued to make gains for the next
five years in test scores and educational attainment. That progress,
Harris says, has since leveled off. Rwanda has also been generally
recognized for prioritizing educational progress and access in the
recovery from the genocide.
In Puerto Rico, by contrast, the picture is far from rosy. The
indictment of the education secretary on corruption charges earlier
this year was a bad sign for educational progress. Patricia Virella, at
Sarah Lawrence College, a scholar who is originally from Puerto Rico,
says that, in her opinion, the closure of many public schools created a
loss that was cultural, not just educational: "the pride of learning,
the culture of Puerto Rico, and being taught by teachers who understand
our culture."
In the United States, education secretary Betsy DeVos has long been a
champion of alternatives to public schools, including homeschooling,
vouchers and charter schools. In the wake of coronavirus-related school
closures, she's proposed "microgrants" that would go directly to
families to supplement children's education. If enacted, this would
essentially constitute a federal homeschool voucher program, a big
change in federal policy.
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar, Somalia, China: Media can be part of the solution.
"During the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014, radio was used as a
way to be able to reach all children with school-based lessons," says
Harvard's Sarah Dryden-Peterson.
She's seen similar efforts in recent months, for example, "where
primary school students in China have been learning via television
broadcast."
In refugee contexts, currently with the Rohingya in Myanmar and with
Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Turkey, Sarah Smith of the IRC says her
organization is working with Sesame Workshop to produce media content
to help support early education and social and emotional learning.
Dryden-Peterson also says that while mass media is standardized and
widely accessible, it should also be balanced with more individualized,
lower-bandwidth, efforts.
"We see Somali refugee teachers, for example, using social media to
provide feedback on assignments to students, even when they're living
at great distances from each other. Simple text messages or short
videos that can be accessed without broadband."
None of these efforts can necessarily keep students progressing at the
same rate academically as they would if school were in session. The
intention, says Dryden-Peterson, is instead "to build a shared sense of
stability and belonging." In other words, to keep kids feeling
connected to the school community and to their education.
All of these experts told NPR that when students return to their
classrooms — in the U.S. and around the world — it will be in a new
world. They will need lessons and school structures that help them cope
with the new realities, that give them hope and the skills they need to
be part of solutions. This might mean assessing student's new starting
points, summer school, remediation or acceleration. It might mean
studying public health and epidemiology. It will certainly mean social
and emotional supports that help children, teachers, and families
recover from this unprecedented break.
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