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How to get students back on track after the Great Education Disruption
As the 77th UN General Assembly gets underway, much of the attention will go toward how to breathe new life into the Sustainable Development Goals. Why? Because the pandemic wiped out years of progress on meeting the 17 SDGs, especially No. 4: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.
COVID disrupted the lives of some 1.6 billion students around the world. Almost 150 million missed about half of in-person classes in 2020, and 24 million will never return to school.
So, how can we get education back on track before it's too late? Several experts weighed in during the Global Stage livestream conversation "Transforming Education" hosted by GZERO Media in partnership with Microsoft.
The data on the pandemic's crippling effect on education are not enough to get a real sense of the "picture of this time," said Leonardo Garnier, special adviser for the UN's Transforming Education Summit. Still, now we have an opportunity to invest in education like we've never done before — including in low-income countries where the government and businesses actually benefit from a cheap, uneducated labor force. Investing in education, Garnier added, is not only a moral imperative but a wise economic decision because it comes with big long-term payoffs like more educated women entering the workforce.
American Federation of Teachers Executive VP Evelyn DeJesus, for her part, explained how during the pandemic kids were walloped by multiple traumas, arguably the least of which was having to learn on Zoom. She believes it would have been a miracle if test scores hadn't dropped. While recognizing the failures of remote learning, DeJesus still thinks we need to spend big — no more belt-tightening — on broadband access for all, and resents how education has become a political football in America.
COVID's wrecking ball to education exacerbated divisions not only between but also within countries, which in the future will disrupt politics when people get angry from losing out on opportunities, said Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts. How can we stop this? With more global cooperation on education, which should be a "continuum" for everyone, everywhere.
Vickie Robinson, general manager of Microsoft's Airband Initiative to expand global broadband access, said that despite the disruptions caused by the abrupt switch to remote learning during the pandemic, we still need to invest in digital infrastructure because it might just happen again and we can't afford for our kids to lose any more school time. Who should do this? Robinson believes the responsibility for digital inclusion should be shared by governments and the private sector.
Finally, one silver lining from COVID on higher education is that for many workers it shifted the focus from going to the right school to having the right skills, noted Jonathan Rochelle, VP of Product Management, Learning Content & Instructor Experience at Linkedin. And it'll continue, since acquiring skills in lifelong learning must be "a moving target."
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Want global equality? Get more people online
We think we live in a digital-first world — but there's no "digital" at all for 37% of the global population.
That's a big problem in today's economy, where you'll miss out on many opportunities for advancement if you're not connected. The digital divide is thus widening the equality gap.
Being offline "places an automatic limit on your ability to be productive and has major ramifications for our society," says Vickie Robinson, head of Microsoft's Airband Initiative to expand broadband access throughout the developing world.
Robinson believes major progress on connectivity is crucial in order to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals by the 2030 deadline because getting people online can be a catalyst to achieve all the other SDGs.
"If we really want to tackle some of these big problems and meet these SDGs in a fundamental way ... getting our arms around digital access for all is a way that we can do it."
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Will the next president bridge the digital divide?
Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of WIRED, helps us make sense of today's stories in technology:
What are the biggest tech questions that will be facing the next president after the election and will they do anything about them?
I think the biggest question might be the digital divide. In an era of the pandemic where schools are online, medicine is moving online, work is moving online. It is a tragedy that there are 160 million people in this country who do not have good broadband access. And that's a failure of policy in many, many ways. That is a huge issue. I also think the tech dynamics with China are a huge issue, and I think that figuring out the government's role in regulating and supporting startups in artificial intelligence is huge. Will the candidates do anything about them? Joe Biden might do something about the digital divide. Donald Trump has actually been okay on AI, but tech policy has been a disaster under Trump and probably won't be a priority under Biden.
What happened at the Section 230 hearings this week?
Well, one thing that didn't happen, we didn't talk about Section 230. A total missed opportunity for the Senate to actually debate and reconfigure a really important law that is foundational to the internet. But it is a partisan moment, a few days before election, and sadly, it's what I expected.