The pandemic that has disrupted our world and exacerbated its inequities threatens to hold back a generation of young people — young people who, in most cases, we were already failing to equip to navigate an uncertain future. If we make it a priority to learn from the incredible leadership and innovations that have kept many of the most vulnerable children learning during the pandemic, we can ensure today’s young people do not become a left-behind generation.
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Feb 25 · 8 min read
More than 1.5 billion children have at some point been driven out of school by COVID-19, with half of them out of school for seven months or more. A survey from UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank showed that about about half of students out of school were unable to participate in remote learning. Even in high-income countries, learning opportunities have been severely reduced. In Germany, a survey of parents showed that the time children spent on school-related activities each day when schools were closed was cut in half, from 7.4 to 3.6 hours. Teachers of some of the most disadvantaged students around the world report that many students have already dropped out, having been sent to work or to be married early; that even for students still engaged there is very significant learning loss as well as impacts on mental health and wellbeing; and that many teachers have been forced to leave the profession.
We risk severe setbacks for this generation, and we must remember that many young people — especially the most marginalized — weren’t learning and developing optimally even before the pandemic, when more than half of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries had failed to learn to read entirely or were out of school. The World Bank projects that this “learning poverty” rate could grow by 10%, from 53% to 63%, affecting 72 million school-age children. Even in a country as wealthy as the U.S., McKinsey projects that on average, disadvantaged students will lose at least a year of learning, compounding the fact that the U.S. was far from providing each of its young people the kind of education necessary to access meaningful careers and solve the increasingly complex challenges the nation faces.
And yet, there is hope. Around the world, locally rooted, globally informed leaders — teachers, social entrepreneurs, and policymakers — have innovated, mobilized resources, and brought communities together to keep students learning throughout the pandemic. In so doing, they have generated new possibilities that could pave the way to reimagining an education system that was already deeply inequitable and insufficient for today’s students and today’s aspirations.
The question is not whether it is possible for this generation to thrive, but whether enough people will exert the leadership necessary to make the most of these possibilities, and whether we will prioritize supporting them to innovate and spread their new approaches.
Teach For Uganda fellow Denise Mirembe decided to hold small outdoor “cluster” classes for groups of ten students in her village community when schools closed — and discovered that this allowed her to connect with students and their parents in new ways. The focused, direct interaction in smaller groups has improved her students’ self-esteem and confidence. Denise finds they speak up more, ask more questions, and are more self-directed than they were before. All Teach For Uganda fellows are now implementing this model, keeping 8,000 students learning across 33 school communities. They’re considering how to work with school principals and other teachers to continue this approach long after the pandemic is over.
Teach For Uganda fellow Denise Mirembe (second from right, in orange) meets with parents from Bwondha village in Mayuge district to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their children’s education.
Early in the pandemic, the government of Nigeria’s Ogun State recruited Teach For Nigeria fellows to teach on radio and TV while schools were closed. These lessons were so successful that the organization recently launched the Teach For Nigeria Radio School, in partnership with two other local NGOs. Inspired by this effort, a group from Enseña Chile created their own radio lessons, which aired on more than 200 stations across the country and are now institutionalized in La Radio Enseña. Nayadeth Flores (16), a high school student in the central Chilean town of Los Álamos, had poor internet access and couldn’t download study guides and videos her teacher had sent via WhatsApp. She listened to La Radio Enseña and it helped her understand the lessons — about the differences between viruses and bacteria, the diseases they produce, and how to prevent them, including COVID-19.
Teach For Nigeria sees a long-term future in the radio lessons once schools fully reopen, to reach even the most remote villages with high quality instruction which local teachers can integrate into their own lessons.
La Radio Enseña is evolving into Canales Enseña (Teaching Channels) which is envisioned as “the Netflix of education” in Chile. It will house the 140 radio lessons already developed, along with new audio content, online and printed learning guides, an online platform where students and teachers can easily find content, and a WhatsApp chat bot called Aló Enseña to provide AI-driven automated learning support.
In other parts of the world, video-enabled innovations are helping make learning better and easier to access. In the U.K., where broadband internet access is high and many students have access to digital devices, Teach First alumni launched a virtual schoolhouse called Oak National Academy as a rapid response to the pandemic. Today, Oak provides access to the British curriculum in the form of more than 10,000 free high-quality video lessons across grades and subjects, allowing teachers to download resources, students to navigate the content themselves, and parents to use it as a resource to support their children. Similar approaches have made good teaching available around the world. The 321 Education Foundation, founded by Teach For India alumnus Gaurav Singh, built a free lesson bank called CAPE, whose videos are aligned to central and state board standards, but are optimized for use on basic devices with limited data connectivity. Along with giving students increased ownership of their learning, these video collections allow teachers to spend less time delivering direct instruction and more time facilitating learning with individualized attention and differentiation. Teach For Zimbabwe fellows began recording lessons as video files, so they can be shared on flash drives without an internet connection. They’re excited about the ways this will allow students to learn when they can’t attend school even in post-pandemic times — due to illness, the rainy season, or parental labor migration.