Schools and Society During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Front matter

fernando M, pais editor >

Schools and society During the COVID-19 Pandemic

How Education Systems Changed and the Road Ahea

Contents

What Can We Learn from the Educational Effects Fernando M. Reimers

Brazil. How Two Municipalities Achieved Above-Average

Results in Reading in the Early Years of Elementary School

Chapter 1 A What Can We Learn from the Educational = 3% Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Fernando M. Reimers

Abstract This chapter provides a conceptual foundation for the book, discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity to re-examine the relationship of schools to society. The chapter introduces the study, examines the educational effects which could have been expected from the pandemic, reviews some of the available empirical evidence about such effects, introduces each chapter, and discusses the theoretical implications of the study.

The question of how schools relate to society, in the dual sense of how they contribute to society and how they are affected by societal structures, processes and changes, is central to the understanding of educational institutions. The study of how societies and schools shape each other involves questions such as: Can schools make societies more prosperous, equitable or democratic? What are the similarities, and the differences, in how different societies educate their children? How much have schools changed over time and is the pace of change greater or smaller than the pace of change of other societal institutions? The COVID-19 pandemic created the opportunity to add these questions to that list: how did schools respond to the changes created by COVID-19? How will schools mediate the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of those who lived through the pandemic?

Moments of rapid change, either in schools or in society, are singularly interesting to advance our understanding of the relationship between schools and society because they help us examine questions such as: How do sudden societal changes translate into new demands on schools? How do schools respond to such new demands? For instance, what happens to schools during transitions in regime type such as from autocratic to democratic government, or during periods of economic crisis, or during the creation of new political boundaries defining nations, or because of political or societal conflict and volatility? These sudden and significant changes can help expand our understanding of how societal change shapes schools. Conversely, the understanding of how schools shape societies is advanced as we

F. M. Reimers (2) Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: Fernando_Reimers @ gse.harvard.edu

© The Author(s) 2024 1 F. M. Reimers (ed.), Schools and Society During the COVID-19 Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42671-1_1 study how education reforms reshape societal structures and practices. When they teach students who have previously been denied an education, for instance, such as when they teach girls and women in societies where they have been previously denied this right; or when they bring together children who are otherwise segregated by other social structures or norms; or when they teach subjects which challenge established social ideas, such as the relationship between human actions and climate change, or the challenges that racism and discrimination present to life in a democracy.

The global public health crisis created by the pandemic of COVID-19, starting in 2020, created a significant sudden transition in the societal context of schools. It is hard to overstate the gravity of this global crisis which, as of August 23, 2023, had infected 769,774,646 people and taken the lives of 6,955,141 (World Health Organization, 2023).The pandemic shocked populations the world over, impacting not just health, but many other social institutions. The functioning, finances, and priorities of families, workplaces, and governments were all changed, mostly for the worse. These shocks created by the pandemic are interesting for the study of the relationship between schools and society because of how rapidly they spread throughout the globe, impacting virtually all humans. In a matter of weeks, human populations had to make adjustments to their lives to preserve them. For many people such adjustments were significant, reducing their participation in many of the activities that were previously habitual: circulating in cities, congregating and interacting with others, shopping for food, working, earning a living, or having to adjust to the impact of illness or loss of life of relatives. Each of these changes to the social context in which schools operate affected schools —creating new demands for students and teachers and families and altering the support families could provide students and teachers to carry on their work. In addition, there were direct changes in how schooling was delivered resulting from the limitations placed in the ability to congregate caused by the pandemic. The scale and magnitude of these contextual changes created by the pandemic are therefore of special interest to further our understanding of how schools and societies relate to each other, capitalizing on the extreme changes brought about by this rare event. Among the questions of interest are: did these changes influence the societal priority given to education? Did they influence the priorities, goals, and purposes of schools? Did they influence how schools worked, what they teach, and how they teach it? Did they impact the organization of schools and school systems? What do these changes teach us about educational institutions as systems, about their capacity to respond to changes in their external environment, and about their capacity to coherently integrate the various components and processes that are involved in their functioning? Which of these changes were short-lived and which were long lasting?

The goal of this book is to further such understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed education systems. We take stock of how educational opportunity changed in various education systems around the world because of the pandemic, and we examine what education systems and societies learned from the educational changes that took place during the pandemic. Our focus is not just on the first order effects, the changes brought about by the pandemic during the moment

1 What Can We Learn from the Educational Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic? 3 of the crisis when schools closed, but on effects three years after the onset of the pandemic.

This work is the product of the Global Education Innovation Initiative, a global collaborative created to advance understanding of how to make education systems more relevant to the needs of a changing world. We study how education systems seek to stay relevant in the face of societal changes, how schools change as societal goals change, and how schools try to support societal change. Since 2014 we have conducted a series of comparative studies of large-scale system level change: a study of national reforms to broaden the goals of the curriculum (Reimers & Chung, 2016), a study of large-scale programs of teacher professional development to support teachers in effectively teaching to a broader set of educational goals (Reimers & Chung, 2018), and a study of ambitious education reforms around the world (Reimers, 2020). When the pandemic broke out in 2020, we turned our focus to researching how 1t was impacting educational opportunity, conducting the first comparative education study of education during the pandemic (Reimers 2022). That first study, conducted between May and December of 2020, focused on the immediate effects of the pandemic. The results presented in this book build on that earlier work, this time looking at medium term impacts of the pandemic three years into it. In these pages, we seek to discern what were the educational consequences of the pandemic, what did governments do sustain education during the pandemic and with what results and, finally, what did education systems learn from it all.

As in our previous studies, we rely on mixed methods to write national case studies that look in depth at such impact, integrating and synthesizing various sources of evidence, trying to create an integrated and complete overview of how the relationship between schools and society fared during this global health crisis. We attempt to take a long view in our analysis, asking not just what was lost and what was disrupted, but also what was gained. Each case study, presented in this book as a chapter, was conducted by a team of scholars with deep knowledge of the system they were studying. We met as a group several times during the research, first to agree on our goals and methods and subsequently to discuss drafts of the chapters. Final revisions of the chapters benefited from feedback provided by authors of other chapters and from each author being able to read the complete manuscript.

As with previous studies of the global education innovation initiative we have focused on national education systems that are diverse in size, level of economic resources, and degree of institutionalization. The reason such diversity is important is because the relationship between schools and society is shaped by existing structures, policies, and capacities that differ across systems. We do not claim that the education systems in these countries are representative of those in any other group of countries, but they reflect some of the variability which characterizes the diversity of education systems around the world. The case studies refer to Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, and the United States. This study focused on the formal education systems in the compulsory cycle of education, emphasizing public schools. We did not examine higher education, technical education, pre-school education, adult learning, or non-formal education.

In this introductory chapter we conceptualize how the pandemic could have been expected to impact education systems, review what previous research has revealed about the effects of the pandemic on education - including some silver linings - introduce the studies in the book and theorize the significance of this knowledge for the understanding of the relationship between schools and society.

What Educational Impacts Could We Have Expected from the Pandemic?

Conceptually, it could be expected that the COVID-19 pandemic would shock the entire ecosystem that supports school attendance and learning. We can think of this ecosystem as an interlocking arrangement of various subsystems, all interacting with each other: students in families, in classrooms, and in schools, schools in systems, and national systems in interaction with each other and with international agencies as part of a global education system.

The pandemic would have impacted the students themselves, their well-being, their engagement with school, their learning, their opportunity to interact with peers and to access the stabilizing routines of the school day, and their own sense of purpose, agency, and outlook on life. It would also have impacted students’ parents and families, including their own health and wellbeing, their interactions with students, the demands they made of students, their support for students’ engagement with schools and learning, and their own engagement with teachers and other school personnel. The pandemic would also have impacted teachers, their own well-being, sense of purpose and agency, their own ability to engage with students effectively, to support their learning and their own opportunities for professional development, and in some cases also their own satisfaction with and commitment to the profession. Particularly affected would have been pedagogies which involve students in experiential learning, or which require group work, as the shift to remote teaching, with limited professional development, would have led most teachers to default to a content transmission mode. Similarly, the pandemic would have impacted school leaders and administrators, their own priorities for what schools should teach, the way in which they related to students and to teachers, their ability to carry out functions such as assessment, or to stay the course with ongoing efforts of improvement. The very organization of schools would have been impacted, beginning with reorganizing how to deliver instruction within the constraints created by measures to contain the spread of the virus, but also the processes to make decisions, the way to relate to other organizations such as technology companies or community partners. At a systemic level, the pandemic would have impacted high level priorities, financing, the use of information to make decisions, labor-management relations, the focus on delivery, and the ability to achieve coherence across the multiple systemic priorities, challenges, and ongoing efforts of improvement. Education systems are usually nested in complex arrangements of inter-governmental relations —across

1 What Can We Learn from the Educational Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic? 5 different levels of government, and across sectors—and those too would have been impacted by the pandemic. Finally, the global education system, too, was impacted by the pandemic. This is a construct to refer to the many transnational organizations, inter-governmental, non-governmental, commercial, that interact with education systems, or school networks, such as the United Nations Agencies, the bilateral international assistance agencies, transnational education charities or advocacy organizations, multinational education companies, etc. Table 1.1 summarizes these expected impacts of the pandemic on the education eco-system.

It is hard to imagine a more disruptive set of forces of the entire education ecosystem than those unleashed by the pandemic. Furthermore, those effects unfolded in at least three-time frames:

Table 1.1 Ecological model of education actors and sub-systems impacted by COVID-19

Actor and The pandemic would have impacted...

sub-system

Students Their Well-being, their engagement with school, their learning, their opportunity to interact with peers and to access the stabilizing routines of the school day, and their own sense of purpose, agency, and outlook on life

Families Their health and wellbeing, their interactions with students, the demands they make of students, their support for students’ engagement with schools and learning, and their own engagement with teachers and other school personnel

Teachers Their Well-being, sense of purpose and agency, ability to engage with students effectively, to support their learning and their own opportunities for professional development, and in some cases also their own satisfaction with

| and commitment to the profession Pedagogies Their ability to involve students in experiential learning and group work, as the shift to remote teaching, with limited professional development, would have led most teachers to default to a content transmission mode l School leaders

Their priorities for what schools should teach, the way in which they relate to students and to teachers, their ability to carry out functions such as assessment, and to stay the course with ongoing efforts of improvement

School systems

How to deliver instruction within the constraints created by the measures to contain the spread of the virus, but also the processes to make decisions and how to relate to other organizations such as technology companies or community partners

High level priorities, financing, the use of information to make decisions, labor-management relations, the focus on delivery, and the ability to achieve coherence across multiple systemic priorities, challenges, and ongoing efforts of improvement

Inter- Education systems are usually structuted as complex arrangements of

governmental | inter-governmental relations — Across different levels of government (national,

relations state, local), and across sectors —And those too would have been impacted by | the pandemic

The global This is a construct to refer to the many transnational organizations - inter-

education governmental, non-governmental, commercial - that interact with education

system systems or school networks. They include the United Nations agencies, the bilateral international assistance agencies, transnational education charities or advocacy organizations, multinational education companies, etc e First Order Results of the Crisis: immediate changes such as the suspension of in-person instruction, the creation of alternative arrangements to deliver instruction and support to students and families, or to evaluate student knowledge and decide how to promote students from one grade to the next.

e Medium Term Effects: those taking place after the immediate onset of the crisis, the efforts to remediate the learning loss caused by the pandemic, to regain a sense of normalcy after the pandemic, the adjustments to the instructional process to respond to the impacts of the pandemic on students or teachers.

e Long Term Effects: those that seem more or less permanent in the various elements of the eco-system described earlier, such as the increasing familiarity with the use of online technology, or the changes caused by loss of talent, caused by teachers and administrators who ended their education careers.

These multilevel and multi-staged educational effects of the pandemic define a total shock to the education ecosystem, impacting students the world over. Understanding the impact of the pandemic requires therefore understanding its systemic and global impact, not just examining such impact in a piecemeal manner, in a singular group of students or teachers, or in a narrow set of outcomes.

The pandemic of COVID-19 was the most significant shock to education systems globally since public education was first ‘invented’ as one of the institutions of the enlightenment (along with public research universities and with democracy). This shock interrupted learning opportunities for most children, in many cases during a very protracted period. There is reason to be concerned about the long-term consequences of such educational losses because they will diminish the life opportunities for individuals and their ability to contribute to their communities. However, just as important were the efforts exerted during the pandemic by educators, communities, organizations of civil society, governments, and international organizations to sustain educational opportunity, and the efforts they continue to exert to recover opportunity in the face of the grave challenges created by the pandemic. These efforts created and deepened new and significant forms of collaboration and of educational innovation among teachers, among organizations of civil society and government agencies, and among international organizations, and reopened important conversations about the purposes of schools and the priorities they should pursue. In some cases, the responses to the pandemic reshaped ongoing efforts of improvement, and stimulated efforts to transform education systems to address preexisting shortcomings.

In some respects, the crisis created by the pandemic brought the whole world together in an attempt to sustain the powerful idea - universally adopted in the wake of World War II, another global tragedy - that all people have a right to be educated. Paradoxically, a plague that brought about much loss in educational opportunity, and that made painfully visible the gravely unequal conditions in which different children fared during the crisis, also renewed the hope that education was the cornerstone to build a more just and sustainable world. It reminded us that the global education movement comprises not just governments, but local and transnational actors, teachers, students and communities, and that the process of educational

1 What Can We Learn from the Educational Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic? 7 change depends not just on top down government initiatives, but on bottom up innovation and on lateral collaborative initiatives. As the chapters in this book will show, these responses varied across countries, as the impact of the pandemic was mediated by existing structures, priorities, resources, and efforts of improvement.

What Is Known About the Educational Impact of the Pandemic?

Relative to the total educational impact of the pandemic just hypothesized, what is known to date is relatively little, and rather piece-meal. Much of what has been studied has focused on the impact of the pandemic on school access and learning in a few subjects, on student well-being and mental health, and on a few countries. Much of what is known is limited because it draws on national level analyses, for instance of learning loss. In doing so, it ignores the considerable heterogeneity of responses at the subnational level and the variation in implementation of national mandates and policies - including variation in efforts to mitigate the impact of the crisis or to recover learning loss. Such analysis of ‘policy intent’ ignores also the policy responses of individuals such as parents and teachers, obviating the fact that many of them chose not to, or were unable to, attend school or engage with alternative modalities of education. Another limitation of that knowledge is that much of it adopts a “black box’ approach to computing learning loss by calculating ‘averages’ that obviate the important contexts which define existing systems: their levels of preparedness to teach remotely, the levels of professionalization of their teaching force, their institutional capacity to coherently implement policy, the levels of resources, or ongoing efforts of improvement. As a result of these limitations, such studies accounting for the extent of learning losses can offer little guidance on how systems should be transformed either to address the learning loss, to prevent it in the future, or to address preexisting shortcomings. Research on learning losses doesn't really tell us much about what education systems “learned” during the pandemic, other than confirm, with more precision, what could have been expected as the pandemic broke out.

In March 2020, soon after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, a group of almost 200 system level education authorities and administrators from around the world were surveyed in a cross-national survey inquiring about the anticipated effects of the pandemic. Most respondents acknowledged that the plans were insufficient and anticipated great difficulty in continuing to educate for as long as in person instruction was interrupted (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020a). Furthermore, respondents foresaw increased educational inequality as the result of the differential effectiveness with which the plans to educate during the pandemic would be reaching poor and socially marginalized children. The survey revealed that few education authorities had, at that moment, a coherent education strategy

(or any strategy for that matter) for how to educate during the pandemic. These early predictions proved, for the most part, accurate.

For example, several reports have calculated the number of days in person instruction was suspended in each country, though they do not account for the fact that many subnational levels, and schools, followed such guidelines to varying degrees. UNESCO, for instance, created a dashboard noting how many weeks schools had been fully or partially closed in each country during the years 2020 and 2021, based on reports from national governments. Analysis of those data show that there were differences across regions in the duration of school closures, and that schools were closed for longer periods in low-income countries than in high income countries, with closures lasting about half the time in high income countries than in low- and middle-income countries (UNESCO, 2023). Four UNESCO-UNICEF- World Bank-OECD cross-national surveys carried out between 2020 and 2022 revealed considerable differences in country education responses by level of income of the country and by world region. In the first two years since the outbreak of the pandemic, schools were closed, on average, 20 weeks; however, school closures were much longer in South Asia (35 weeks) and Latin America (37 weeks) (UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank and OECD, 2022).

An early review of research on the global educational impact of the pandemic noted that most studies focused on higher education. The review of the studies focused on elementary and secondary education concludes that the shift to remote learning constrained instruction, led to learning loss, challenged assessment and experiential learning, and affected the psychosocial well-being of students. Those effects were compounded by inequalities in the distribution of resources and in the social background of students (Tan, 2023).

There have been empirical studies of the learning loss! that took place during the pandemic. A review of 40 studies on learning loss and dropout conducted in 2022 found that most of the evidence indicated learning loss among poorer students and increased dropout for older students. The evidence on learning loss was more consistent for high income countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States) and more heterogeneous in low- and middle-income countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte D”Ivoire, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia) with some studies showing no learning loss and lower learning loss than predicted. The evidence on dropout rates pertains primarily to low- and middle-income countries (Brazil, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria,

'The term ‘learning loss’ refers not just to what students ‘forgot’ during the pandemic, but to the knowledge and skills they did not learn, during the pandemic. It has been typically calculated by comparing the level of skills and knowledge on curriculum-based assessments of students in a given grade, with equivalent assessments administered to students in the same grade in years prior to the pandemic. While the implicit assumption of most of those studies is that such loss is a reflection of the inadequacy of the educational arrangements made to teach during the pandemic, it should be considered that many other conditions changed in the lives of students during that period which could have also impacted their learning.

1 What Can We Learn from the Educational Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic? 9

Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda) plus South Africa, and all those studies showed increases in dropout rates, ranging widely from 1% to 35% (Moscoviz & Evans, 2022).

A recent meta-analysis of such studies shows that, by the end of 2022, there were still relatively few methodologically sound studies: only 42 studies covering 15 countries - Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States - were found to be accurate and effective, with most studies covering high income countries (Betthauser et al., 2023). That review reports that the available studies are not adequate to examine variation of school closures within countries, across grade levels, or with respect to different modes of instruction (Ibid). The average learning loss across studies and grades is equivalent to a third of a school years’ worth of learning (0.14 standard deviations). Looking at the date of those estimates, the review concludes that learning deficits occurred early in the pandemic and did not close or widen over time: “This implies that efforts by children, parents, teachers and policy makers to adjust to the changed circumstance have been successful in preventing further learning deficits but so far have been unable to reverse them” (Ibid). Most of the studies reviewed show that inequality increased during the pandemic and that the learning deficits are larger for math than for reading. The review does not identify variation in learning deficits across grade levels but finds larger learning deficits in middle income countries (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa). Another study of school enrollments before and after the pandemic in 12 countries in Latin America estimates that by the end of 2020 enrollment rates were 2% lower than in 2019 (Bracco et al., 2022, 3).

In the United States, assessments carried out by the National Center for Education Statistics show that student performance in math and reading assessments in grades 4 and 8 declined during the pandemic. For mathematics, in fourth grade declines were greater for the lowest performing students, and differed across states, with declines in 43 states but no changes in 10 states. In the eighth grade all but two states showed declines. In grade four the greatest declines in math were for Black and Hispanic students, for Native Americans, and for those children of two or more races. For grade 8, similar declines were observed across all groups. Declines were much lower for reading, and greater for the lowest performing students in grade 4. There was more variation across states, with 30 of them showing declines and 22 of them no changes in grade 4, and 33 of them showing declines and 18 no changes in grade 8. The percentage of students who began the school year behind grade level, which averaged 36% before the pandemic, increased to 50% in 2021-22 and to 49% in 2022-23. The same study shows variation across schools in how they were attempting to recover losses from the pandemic: 88% were using diagnostic assessments to identify student needs, 81% were using remedial instruction, 29% were extending class time on targeted areas, 19% extended the school day, 85% identified academic needs with formative assessment data, 59% tailored accelerated instruction, 10% extended the school year and 4% extended the school week (Carr, 2023).

Longitudinal studies focusing on reading and math, following cohorts of students in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, in the United States show that most of the learning loss occurred in the academic year 2020-2021. Learning gains in the next academic year, 2021-2022, were like learning gains before the pandemic, modestly helping to recover some of the learning loss. However, learning gains during the year 2022-2023 were lower than gains before the pandemic, and progress in closing pandemic learning loss stalled. At the end of the 2022-23 academic year substantial achievement gaps remained, relative to pre-pandemic levels, and they had increased during the academic year. The authors of the study estimated that recovering learning loss would require, on average, 4.1 months of additional schooling in reading and 4.5 months in math. They also projected that the amount of additional instructional time necessary to recover learning loss would be higher for the students in higher grades (Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2023).

Variations in learning loss across the United States are likely the result, not only of education policies, but of contextual factors including how the health pandemic affected the population of different states. An analysis of variation across states in health policies and outcomes finds important differences across states in infections and deaths, related to poverty rates, years of education of the population, levels of interpersonal trust and percentage of the population who are racial minorities, and to state health protective mandates (Bollyky et al., 2023, 1341).

Besides these differences across contexts, it was not just the deficient approaches that different schools, sub-systems, and systems adopted to educate during the pandemic, and the compounding effects of the pandemic on income and health that limited the educational opportunities of poor children. The segregation of students of various social strata into different streams also magnified the losses for impoverished children, with poor children often segregated into schools of low quality and with less resources to mitigate the impact of the crisis.

Furthermore, the educational responses of governments around the world to the pandemic varied widely, with some governments prioritizing education and school openings, while others kept schools closed for much longer periods of time. These differences also manifested across varying education authorities and levels of government within the same countries. These differences, across countries and jurisdictions, persisted over time as some governments eventually implemented programs to support teachers and students, whereas others did not. These differences reflected policy choices, levels of institutional capacity, and contextual differences resulting from varying levels of resources and infrastructure such as the percentage of the population vaccinated (Reimers, 2021).