University and School Collaborations during a Pandemic

Front matter

Knowledge Studies in Higher Education 8

Fernando M. Reimers Francisco J. Marmolejo Editors

University

Contents

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis.

Fernando M. Reimers and Francisco Marmolejo

2 Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Efforts to Improve Basic Claudia Costin, João Lins, José Henrique Paim, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, Raquel de Oliveira, Teresa Pontual, and Vinicius Farias Santos

Chapter 1

Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. ss Higher Education Responses to the Global Pandemic of 2020

Fernando M. Reimers and Francisco Marmolejo

Abstract The rapid disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in multiple sectors and areas of daily life provide a unique opportunity to study the university’s capacity to respond to changes in the external environment, to be a learning organization, in service of addressing significant social challenges. In this book we study universities’ responses to one such challenge: the disruption to educational opportunities caused by the interruption of schooling brought about by the pandemic.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, universities innovated on several fronts. Unsurprisingly, some of those innovations focused on internal actions implemented to mitigate the impact of the pandemic by transitioning to online teaching delivery or extension of semester break, etc. (Crawford J et al. J Appl Learning Teaching 3.1:1-20, 2020; Leon-Garcia F, Cherbowski-Lask A, Leadership responses to COVID 19: a global survey of college and university leadership. International Association of Universities — Santander Universities. [AUP. https://www.iaup.org/ wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAUP-Santander_Survey_to_COVID-19_ Report2020.pdf, 2020). Beyond the solutions to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on their communities of students, faculty, or staff, universities also innovated to mitigate such impact on the larger community. While the contributions of universities to alleviate the pandemic’s impact have been most visible in public health (Daniels, R. J. 2020. Universities’ Vital Role in the Pandemic Response. Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine. https://magazine.jhsph.edu/2020/universities-vital-rolepandemic-response), they have extended to other areas of relief and support as well. Almost half of universities participating in a global survey conducted by the International Association of Universities indicated that due to the pandemic, their community engagement had increased (Marinoni G et al. The impact of Covid-19 on higher education around the world. IAU global survey report. International

F. M. Reimers (È<) Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: Fernando_Reimers @harvard.edu

F. Marmolejo Quatar Foundation, Doha, Qatar

© The Author(s) 2022 1 F. M. Reimers, F. J. Marmolejo (eds.), University and School Collaborations

during a Pandemic, Knowledge Studies in Higher Education 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82159-3_1

Association of Universities, Paris. https://www.iau-aiu.net/IMG/pdf/iau_covid19 and_he_survey_report_final_may_2020.pdf, 2020).

This book is a study of one such response of universities to the pandemic which has not yet received sufficient attention: their support of schools at the pre-collegiate level through a variety of innovative approaches to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on opportunity to learn.

In this chapter, we argue that studying such innovations provides insight into the responsiveness of universities to complex societal needs and into their capacity to operate as learning organizations open to their external environment. We introduce the study, explain its value in understanding the role and nature of higher education’s outreach, social impact, and capacity to deal with complex challenges, and summarize the chapters of the book and the results of a survey which was administered to over one-hundred universities to study the nature of their collaborations with schools during the first 9 months of the pandemic, between March and December of 2020.

1.1 A High-Impact Global Event

The global pandemic of Covid-19 marked a watershed moment for humanity. This highly impactful event caused many disruptions, directly and indirectly, interrupting the lives of many and altering the lives of many more. The pandemic will be remembered, to be sure, as a milestone, a marker of time, after which many aspects of human life were never the same. There is a serious risk that several of the changes caused by the pandemic will make the world less inclusive, less stable, and less sustainable during the coming years, creating challenges of a new order of complexity. The most recent forecast of global trends from the National Intelligence Council of the United States describes the impact of Covid-19 as having disrupted economies and political dynamics within and between nations, creating new uncertainties about the global economy, governance, geopolitics, and technology. The report concludes that the pandemic accelerated and accentuated pre-existing trends, bringing global health and healthcare into focus, revealing and widening social fissures, and highlighting deficiencies in international coordination. The effects of the pandemic extended into other domains, including disrupting global supply chains, increasing national debt, government intervention in economies, accentuating exclusionary nationalism and polarization, deepening inequality, exposing the digital divide, straining governance, and exacerbating the polarized information that undermines public confidence in government, among other challenges (National Intelligence Council, 2021, 11-13).

This description of the type of difficulties caused by the pandemic corresponds to what have been called “super wicked problems,” a term used by MIT president Rafael Reif to describe challenges like climate change: “it means an enormously complex societal problem that has no single right answer and no clear finish line, multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities, and no central authority empowered to solve it” (Reif, 2021).

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to... 3

On March 11 of 2020, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. At that point in time 118,000 cases had been diagnosed in 114 countries, and 4291 people had lost their lives. Over the next 13 months, those figures would grow to 164 million people infected, and 3,381,774 people having lost their lives (Johns Hopkins University, May 17, 2021).

In response to the pandemic, as a way to contain the velocity of the spread of the virus, segmenting the rate of infection over time to prevent the collapse of the medical infrastructure, many governments put in place measures that restricted physical contact among people, physical distancing measures, as well as restricted travel. The disruption of the ability to congregate, to move, and to travel impacted the functioning of many institutions: workplaces, schools, universities, businesses, houses of worship, and government itself.

The resulting direct impact of the pandemic included effects on people who were infected with Covid-19, in some cases taking their lives or deteriorating their physical or mental health. The direct impact also involved the economic and psychological consequences of having been infected or having had a family member become seriously ill or die. Many more people were impacted indirectly, including all those affected by the disruptions caused by the pandemic through jobs and income loss, mobility restrictions, disruptions to schooling, and severe limitations to other forms of association and interaction as well as the toll on mental health caused by living under stress during such a protracted period.

A considerable burden for governments was the financial toll created by financing the costs of the public health response to the pandemic, as well as the costs of the economic relief to individuals and businesses which some governments provided to mitigate the impact of the disruption to work and business.

The scale of the disruptions caused by the pandemic was unprecedented in recent history, causing a global economic recession not seen since the Great Depression (Reinhart & Reinhart, 2020). An analysis of the global economic effects of the pandemic forecasts multiple financial crises across the world, sovereign debt defaults in the developing world, a contraction in economic activity, decline in global trade, increased unemployment, a disproportionate impact on lower-income households, an additional 60 million people pushed into extreme poverty, and an increase in hunger. What’s more, the economic recovery will be slow (Reinhart & Reinhart, 2020).

A disruption of such scale and depth will likely compound many pre-existing challenges. For example, the challenge of reducing poverty will be heightened in a context of economic recession or slow growth. The economic burden of the pandemic will compound pre-existing challenges faced by governments whose economies were already burdened with considerable levels of debt. The challenge of political polarization and challenges to democratic governance will be exacerbated as more people see their economic circumstances decline, and as the resulting marginalization and inequality intensify political competition. The rise of exclusionary nationalism will likely increase in response to growing domestic challenges, causing further retrenchment from globalization (National Intelligence Council, 2021).

Given the scale of these disruptions, the Covid-19 pandemic is a serious coursealtering event, one that will change the life trajectories of individuals and the future of institutions and nations, setting them on paths which will make improvement of individual and collective well-being more challenging. Individuals, those who begin their careers in this economic depression, will find it challenging to recover. Those who prematurely end their employment because of the economic depression will experience reduced well-being for a long period. For institutions, whether they are businesses, universities, or hospitals, the economic toll of the pandemic will pose considerable burdens, driving some out of existence. This will hamper the innovation ecosystem. For nations, the burden of the adjustments necessitated by the pandemic will diminish prospects for development.

A United Nations report described these vast implications of the pandemic in this way:

The pandemic is more than a health crisis; it is an economic crisis, a humanitarian crisis, a

security crisis, and a human rights crisis. It has affected us as individuals, as families and as

societies. The crisis has highlighted fragilities within and among nations. It is no exaggeration to suggest that our response will involve remaking and reimagining the very structures

of societies and the ways in which countries cooperate for the common good. Coming out of this crisis will require a whole-of-society, whole-of-government and whole-of-the-world approach driven by compassion and solidarity (UN, 2020, 1).

This UN report explains that the pandemic has exposed and aggravated pre-existing vulnerabilities, and that recovering from its impact requires not just restoring the conditions that existed prior to the pandemic, but “building back better,’ pursuing the global development agenda, as articulated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Recovery is an opportunity to address the climate crisis, inequality of all kinds and gaps in our social protection systems. Instead of going back to unsustainable systems and approaches, we need to transition to renewable energy, green infrastructure, sustainable food systems, social inclusion, gender equality, and stronger social safety nets, universal health coverage, better preparedness for health emergencies and multi-hazard risks (UN, 2020, 8).

Of course, “building back better” is no small challenge in the context created by the pandemic, especially because so much of “building back better” involves working on “super wicked problems” that require collective action, not well addressed by market forces and made more difficult by the current democratic politics in contexts of low trust and intense polarization. Further social fragmentation, accelerated by the pandemic, will compound the complexity of addressing these challenges (National Intelligence Council, 2021). Climate change, for instance, is likely to require several changes in government, private industries, and individual behavior that have so far proven elusive (Reif, 2021). Even mitigating the health impact of the pandemic itself has proven especially challenging in the oldest democratic republic in existence, the United States.

For higher education institutions, the financial impact may accelerate the decline of institutions, already severely strained, to the point of closure (Startz, 2020). For reasons that will be articulated in this chapter, universities may be well positioned

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to... 5 to contribute to the structural changes necessitated in society that will allow for the collective action necessary to “build back better.” Whether universities would take on the task of leading in imagining and building a better future, while at the same time having to address the impact of the pandemic on their own internal constituencies and possibly having to reimagine their own existence and future, remains to be seen. But it is at least worth considering that in reimagining their purpose, universities may decide to become more intentional in contributing to imagining and building a better future precisely because this crisis has made this need so pressing.

In this book we ask the question of whether and how, amidst the crisis created by the pandemic, universities have stepped up to serve society with respect to a singular impacted domain: education, and not just education within the university, but pre-university education writ large. In what follows, we explain the need to “build back better” in education, why universities might focus on that challenge, and what the answer to such a question could tell us about the nature of the university as a learning organization with the capacity not just to respond to changes in its external environment but to shape that environment in building a better future.

1.2 Impact of the Pandemic on Educational Opportunity

Institutionalized learning was disrupted by Covid-19 as schools and universities adopted physical distancing measures. On March 3, 2020, UNESCO reported that school closures in 13 countries had interrupted the education of 290 million students around the world (UNESCO, 2020). By the end of March 2020, 3 weeks after the World Health Organization had declared the outbreak, national school closures had impacted 1,581,173,934 learners. All remaining learners, out of a total of 1,712,374,616, had been impacted by localized school closures (UNESCO, 2020). By the end of July 2020, only a very small number of schools and universities had reopened. Soon after, most schools and universities around the world suspended in-person instruction, and many of them adopted alternative modalities of education delivery, including using online learning and relying on radio, television, mobile applications, and printed materials.

Some of these alternative education arrangements represented innovative uses of existing technologies, which was the result of novel forms of collaboration and partnership among various kinds of organizations, including collaborations between schools and school systems and universities (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020).

Early studies of these innovations showed that online learning modalities were not effective in creating comparable opportunities to learn to those provided by school-based instruction and that they were not reaching all students with the same levels of effectiveness (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). For instance, a study of the education response to Covid-19 conducted between September and December of 2020 in Bangladesh, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the United States concludes that “these alternative arrangements produced losses in access to education, consistent access, and engagement with learning, how they resulted in instruction of limited quality and shorter duration than regular in-person instruction, and how remote learning arrangements devised in this fashion limited opportunities for socio-emotional development” (Reimers et al., 2021, 18).

The resulting limited options available to learn during the pandemic led to a growing concern over the impact of the pandemic on learning loss, student mental health, student disengagement with learning and potential dropout, and over the long-term impact of these conditions on students and societies, as well as concern over growing disparities in opportunity to learn.

A series of World Bank simulations of the global impact of school closures concludes that a 5- month closure with moderately effective alternative forms of education could lead to a loss of 0.6 years, reducing the average number of school years students receive at present from 7.9 years to 7.3 years. This would amount to a loss in $10 trillion in lifetime earnings for the current cohort of students. In addition, close to 7 million students could drop out because of the impact of the pandemic on income for their families (World Bank, 2020, 23).

The magnitude of the shock that the disruption to education, resulting from Covid-19, is expected to cause will likely extend beyond the predicted impact on individual earnings; it would compound the disruptions likely to result from the slow economic recovery that is expected to follow the pandemic. It would also compound many of the other challenges expected to follow, from increased political polarization and governance challenges to the possibility of addressing other development goals, as described in the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda. In effect, the education consequences of the pandemic could unleash a process of development in reverse, hence the priority of addressing how to “build back better” for education.

1.3 Response of Educational Institutions to the Pandemic and Why Universities Would Want to Help

Educational institutions, from pre-schools to universities, have used a variety of means to provide some form of educational continuity to carry out their instructional mission amidst the challenging conditions caused by the physical distancing requirements. For most institutions, this involved very rapid design and implementation of alternative means of delivery and continuous adaptation based on what they learned about the effectiveness of the approaches deployed.

In effect, schools and universities responded to the disruption caused by the pandemic with an unprecedented global effort in innovation in order to continue to operate and sustain educational opportunity in spite of the distancing requirements (Marinoni et al., 2020). These efforts, many dependent on the use of technology, quickly revealed that not all students had the same access to technology and other supportive conditions that would allow them to learn online (Ali, 2020). Other

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to... 7 students lacked the self-management skills to effectively learn online and to learn more independently than when they attended schools in person. These innovative efforts also revealed skill gaps among teachers for teaching remotely (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). Finally, not all institutions were prepared to support the new teaching-learning environment, and their regulatory arrangements were not attuned with the new demands.

These challenges also made evident that students and the systems and structures supporting them lacked the skills needed to navigate a volatile and uncertain world, such as capacity to learn independently, resiliency, flexibility, and creativity. As such, they reinvigorated pre-existing interests in helping students develop a range of skills, in educating them holistically, and in significantly improving educational institutions, particularly through the adoption of technology.

The need to meet such ambitious goals with an appropriate level of resources and institutional capacity, at a time when they faced many demands resulting from the crisis, led some education authorities to seek collaborations and institutional partnerships with universities and other organizations. The secretary of education of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for instance, asked some of the most affluent business leaders in the State to partner with the Department of Education in creating a multimedia infrastructure to sustain educational opportunity during the exigency (Dellagnello & Reimers, 2020). He also developed a partnership with the State University of Juiz de Fora, for support in building a formative monitoring system that would help teachers and school leaders assess student engagement and learning as they studied remotely. Similarly, Colombia’s Minister of Education built on a pre-existing partnership with a University (EAFIT) to support online learning, creating a robust multimedia platform to support remote instruction.

It is reasonable that some education system leaders should have reached out to universities for assistance in creating alternative means of delivery. Schools share with universities the purpose of educating students and, as such, they have knowledge of how to teach and support teaching. Some had prior experience teaching online and knowledge of digital pedagogies. In addition, because universities are larger and more complex, and have more resources and institutional capacity than schools, they can more easily and quickly develop innovative education approaches in a shifting context such as that created by the pandemic.

In addition to their greater relative capacity and resources, universities are ubiquitous. Today, more than ever before, most school systems, at the national or subnational levels, have access to at least one university. The considerable global expansion of universities during the last two decades made visible that the more than 28,000 universities throughout the world were a significant reservoir of global institutional capacity for rapid innovation in sustaining knowledge creation and dissemination.

Just as it was reasonable for school and system leaders to ask universities for help in sustaining education during the pandemic, it also made sense for universities to undertake such a task, for doing so would simultaneously address important needs while addressing universities’ own challenges of relevancy, effectiveness, and sustainability.

Many universities see it as part of their mission to contribute to the development of the communities of which they are a part, through research, education, and outreach (Puukka & Marmolejo, 2008). Universities play a central role as anchor institutions in communities, they are drivers of economic prosperity, and outreach to PreK-12 is one of the ways in which universities advance missions and strategies related to economic development, as well as to support equity and democracy. But supporting schools and school systems within the challenging context created by the pandemic was not just an opportunity for outreach, it was an opportunity to advance knowledge on how to tackle complex challenges. As institutions interested in addressing “super wicked problems,” the challenges created by the pandemic, such as the interruption of schooling, provide an opportunity to exercise and develop the capacity to tackle such problems.

During the pandemic, just as universities contributed to providing viable solutions to the development of testing, vaccines, PPE production and distribution, and other technologies and processes to address the health aspects of the pandemic, they also contributed solutions to upholding the continuity of education provision for the education system as a whole.

Sustaining education during the pandemic required more than finding alternative means of education delivery that overcame the physical distancing constraints. The interruption of in-person instruction created, for schools as well as for universities, the occasion to ask again what should be taught and how and to reprioritize the curriculum. Their shared interest with schools in the central questions of teaching and learning made universities a logical partner for schools, school networks and school systems at a time when a rapidly changing context upended the ability to learn and to teach in the way institutions are most accustomed to.

Beyond the opportunity to generate and mobilize knowledge to help sustain education systems, the education crisis created by the pandemic also provided an opportunity to engage students in higher education in the search for such solutions, in ways beneficial to their own education. Prior to the pandemic, many universities were already grappling with the challenges of helping their own students develop the breadth of skills essential to participate in the twenty-first century, including teaching them civic responsibility and leadership (Nghia Tran, 2018; Matsouka & Mihail, 2016). The many challenges created by the pandemic provided a multitude of “teachable moments” from which students could gain essential competencies; helping pre-collegiate institutions continue to educate was one such opportunity.

In addition to their challenges with relevancy and effectiveness, universities have been struggling to identify ways to deepen their effectiveness while remaining sustainable in the face of growing costs and declining revenues. Universities, particularly in high-income countries with aging populations, were already facing challenges of how to find more sustainable ways to educate students, particularly as most of the recent growth in enrollments has taken place in the developing world. The number of students enrolled in higher education grew from 100 million students in 2000, to 250 million in 2020, and is expected to grow to 594 million by 2040 (Calderon, 2012). Most of that growth will take place in middle income

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to... 9

594.1

2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 ® Arab States ® Central & Eastern Europe Central Asia © East Asia & the Pacific # Latin America & the Caribbean ® North America & Western Europe ® South & West Asia ® Sub-Saharan Africa

Fig. 1.1 Number of students enrolled, and projected to be enrolled (in millions), in higher education institutions by region from 2000 to 2040. Worldwide higher education enrolment by global region, actual from 2000 to 2015 and projected to 2040. (Source: Calderon, 2012)

countries in the developing world, with very limited growth in North America and Western Europe as shown in Fig. 1.1.

Facing spiraling costs and declining populations of high school graduates, universities in North America and Western Europe had increasingly sought to meet enrollment targets with a growing population of students from the emerging middle classes in the rest of the world. But the travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic prevented universities from relying on those students, leading to a significant loss in total enrollment and of revenue for many universities in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Burki, 2020). In Britain, it is expected that the Covid-19 crisis will produce losses ranging from 3 to 19 billion British pounds, most of it as a result of falling international student enrollment (about 2.8 billion British pounds) (Drayton & Waltman, 2020). In 2019/2020, the international student enrollment in US colleges and universities declined almost 2% in comparison with the previous year, resulting in a loss of 1.8 billion dollars from the prior academic year (NAFSA, 2020).

A further motivation for universities to help school systems mitigate learning loss and the interruption of learning is that the enrollment intake of universities draws from graduates of high schools. Any serious knowledge and skill gaps in a generation of learners would have ripple effects in their subsequent learning at the university level. Universities understand that the undergraduate experience can be greatly enriched and maximized if incoming students are more adequately prepared to cope with the academic and social demands of colleges and universities, and that the increased sophistication of the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in society make the typical 4-5 years of university life insufficient to develop the prerequisite technical and socioemotional skills. The teaching mission of the university builds on the work of teachers in primary and secondary schools. Any significant loss in knowledge and skills among high school graduates would, in time, affect teaching and learning at the tertiary level.

This obvious need for alignment across various institutions supporting the educational trajectories of students has in the past caused universities to seek ways to increase the coherence in that continuum. Some universities have established their own senior high schools, as part of the same university system. Others have engaged in various ways to influence the curriculum and instruction at pre-collegiate levels.

For instance, through rules governing college admissions, universities have influenced the high school curriculum as Harvard’s president Charles Eliot did in the late nineteenth century with the creation of a contact hour standard for secondary education in what would eventually become the “Carnegie Unit” after it was endorsed by the Carnegie Foundation to define a standard of 120 h of academic work in a subject. University engagement in pre-collegiate education is also illustrated by James Bryant Conant, Harvard president and chemistry professor, who wrote about how the lack of a solid pre-collegiate foundation in mathematics would deter students from pursuing calculus in college, an essential subject to pursue advanced careers in the sciences. Conant also wrote about the necessity to learn to read German early on, to enable access to research in the field of chemistry (Conant, 1970, 189). The review of Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum led by Conant, published in 1945 with the title “General Education in a Free Society,’ would have considerable influence in high school curricula. His involvement in the expanded use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test in college admissions would support access to college for students from public high schools, influencing the opportunities those schools would provide students to prepare for college. The books Conant wrote at the end of his life on the American high school and on teacher preparation influenced those two institutions.

Government policies have occasionally sought to foster greater collaboration between universities and schools, as did the National Defense Education Act of 1958 in the United States, a response to the soviet launch of Sputnik, that funded the involvement of research universities, such as Harvard and MIT, in designing precollegiate science, math, foreign language curriculum, and teacher preparation programs.

Another reason for universities to become interested in collaborating with schools, to continue functioning during the pandemic, is that they represent one of the few institutions with which most members of a society have contact, and they carry out a function that has long-term and high-value consequences for society. At a time when there are questions regarding the contributions that universities make to society, many of them would see it as aligned to their mission: as socially embedded institutions, to contribute to the communities of which they are a part. As such, universities would want to engage in efforts that mitigate the harm caused by the pandemic because it poses such a serious risk to development and well-being of society as a whole.

Universities have good reason to attend to their reputation in the eyes of the public, as public trust in them is declining. In the United States, for example, even though most people still hold a positive view and have more confidence in universities than in most other institutions, with the exception of the military, small businesses, and the police, the percentage of the population with a negative view of the contributions of colleges and universities to society has been increasing significantly in recent years. In surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2019 asking people to evaluate whether colleges and universities had a positive or a negative effect on how things are going in the country, 38% responded they had a negative effect, a 50% increase from 26% who held the same view in 2012 (Parker, 2019). The Gallup organization found a similar decline in confidence in colleges

1 Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to... 11 and universities, from 57% who expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education in 2015 down to 48% in 2019 (Jones, 2018).

The public has less confidence in colleges and universities than in the military (74% have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence), small business (67%), or the police (54%). However, there is more confidence in universities than in the church or organized religion (38%), the presidency (37%), the US Supreme Court (37%), the medical system (36%), banks (30%), the public schools (29%), organized labor (26%), big business (25%), newspapers (23%), the criminal justice system (22%), television news (20%), and Congress (11%) (Parker, 2019).