Global Education and the Issue of Post COVID-19 Learning Gaps

By Zainab Cheema 

We’ve talked about the pandemic’s impact on education in the United States, but what about global education? Social justice has become an urgent concern in education, given the disparate effects of learning loss on communities across the United States. But how does conversation change when we broaden our attention to track COVID-19’s impact on the global school systems, not just US ones? This blog post will compare US and global learning equities using data from newly released studies by McKinsey & Company and the World Bank. Given that learning loss can potentially translate into lower achievement and life earnings, this is a starting point for discussing how to help global education to not just recover but also become more equitable. 

Post Pandemic Global Education Trends

In April 2022, McKinsey & Company released its report on the pandemic’s impact on global learning. Many of the learning trends that occurred in the US during COVID-19 also manifested on the global stage. For instance, just as the US students in high poverty areas have lagged behind as compared to their peers in wealthier parts of the country, students in low income, pre-pandemic-challenged countries have struggled more during pandemic and have experienced the largest learning delays as compared to high performing countries. According to McKinsey, students in South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean may be more than a year behind where they would have been had the pandemic not occurred. In North America and Europe, students might be an average of four months behind. Nationally as well as globally, COVID-19 has intensified the achievement gaps determined by race, class, and nationality.

Health or Education: The Choice for Middle Income and Low Income Countries

While COVID learning delays were a global phenomenon, they were most evident in regions of the world that the World Bank characterizes as “middle income countries”—developing countries that contribute to a sizeable percentage of the world GDP but which also have significant populations below the poverty line. For instance, in Mexico and India, students respectively lost an average of 11.7 and 12.4 months of schooling.  The McKinsey report shows that these countries implemented COVID lockdowns and attempted to switch to distance learning, but they lacked the systems and infrastructure to be able to support students with the transition. Students in Europe and the United States had on the whole better support for the learning revolution under pandemic lockdowns. For middle income countries, the choice appeared to be between health and education—and no surprise, health won out.

Learning loss in low-income countries was actually less severe than in middle-income ones. The data shows that schools in low-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa actually had less loss of learning because they did not pivot as much to distance learning as did the high income and middle-income regions of the world. From Feb. 2020 to Jan 2022, schools in sub-Saharan Africa continued to provide in-person schooling for an average of 47 weeks, as compared with South Asia’s 5 weeks and Latin America’s 6 weeks. If choosing between one’s health and one’s education was the choice made by middle income countries, lack of infrastructure and resources meant that low-income countries didn’t even have that as a choice.

Compounded Effects of Learning Loss

Across the board, learning loss was perhaps most acute for students from younger levels. Distance and blended learning are particularly challenging for younger children who are still developing their social and emotional skills and who need context-rich F2F reinforcement. The trend of world-wide learning delays is particularly devastating for younger children. Without intervention, a third-grade student who has lost a year of schooling during COVID could lose up to three years’ worth of learning in the long run. This could in turn cause losses in student’s future earnings and productivity. The compound effect of learning delays could add up to significant loss of development for societies.  Abhijit Bannerjee, co-chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, has urged the importance of re-integrating children back into the school systems to make up these learning delays. Designing inclusive and comprehensive catch up programs for younger children is going to look different for different countries.

Reflecting on the pandemic’s impact on education nationally and globally opens up space to begin thinking about how to redesign education towards social justice and away from the inequities that have defined it. Case in point, education trends in the United States and around the world were shown to be strongly influenced by unequal distribution of resources along the lines of race, class and location. After COVID lockdowns ended, American students in Black majority schools were a year and a half behind mathematics, as compared to their counterparts in white majority schools, who were only two months behind. According to the World Bank, before the pandemic, more than half of students in low- and middle-income countries were already living in “learning poverty—unable to read and understand a simple text by the age of ten. That number may rise to as high as 70% because of pandemic related learning delays. McKinsey estimates that if action is not taken to redress the learning deficits caused and exacerbated by COVID-19, we could be facing a global economic loss of up to 1.6 trillion per year by 2040.  

We Need Global Solutions in #Education

Global disparity means that countries that most need innovative programs and learning systems can often remain deprived. Part of the difficulty is measuring how to redress inequities in global education. For instance, establishing a baseline for common standards for education in conditions of emergency could be an important step. However, these standards would have to be inclusive towards different countries’ cultures and situations. COVID-19 illustrated just how interconnected our globe is. Solutions to world-wide deficits in learning have to be imagined on the global level, as well. 

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