Participant #1:

The ringing of bells across playgrounds, that shuffle of shoes down corridors and
chalk scraping across blackboards. These are the sounds of school heard the world
over.

Participant #1:
But COVID-19 brought silence to many classrooms. When the Coronavirus first
emerged, pausing lessons was a forgivable precaution. Question marks remained over
how transmissible the virus was and how sick it could make teachers, children and
their families. But disruptions lasted long after the answers became clear. Over two
years, nearly 153,000,000 children missed more than half of all inperson schooling.
More than 60 million missed three quarters, according to UNESCO. Estimates from
the McKinsey consultancy suggest that globally, school children are around eight
months behind where they would have ordinarily been. Being locked out of the
classroom has starved young brains.

Participant #1:
This is the economist asks I'm Anna Kelvoy, and this week we're asking how can
COVID-19 learning loss be overcome? My guest is Jaime Savedra? He's the global
Director of education at the World Bank, the largest financier of education in the
developing world. Esther Vegeta oversees a financing portfolio of 20 billion U S
dollars. An economist by training, he joined the bank in 2003 and spent a decade
working on poverty reduction. In 2013, he returned to his native Peru to serve as
education minister. Under his stewardship, the country's ailing schooling system went
from bottom of a class in Latin America to the region's star pupil. Now he's back at
the World Bank and his latest test is how to give the world's schoolchildren the best
chance of catching up. Hi, me Savidra. Welcome to the economist asks thank you for
having me. Now, you have said that school closures due to the covered 19 pandemic
have caused perhaps the worst educational crisis for a century. At the start of the
pandemic, did you expect education to be hit as hard as that? You are absolutely right
that this is the worst shock to education of the last century. At the beginning of the
pandemic we were living in a sea of ignorance and many countries chose to close
schools without really knowing if that was useful in order to fight the rate of
infections. Now, unfortunately, as time passed, the evidence started appearing that
actually the usefulness of the school closures in order to find that Vietnam was not
that high, actually many OECD countries started opening schools even before having
a vaccine. But unfortunately, in many other countries, the school closures continued
despite bars, restaurants and offices that started being open. The education side of the
crisis is a manmade crisis because as students are disengaged from the education
process, that generates learning losses. But one thing is to be closed one week or one
month. That is something that you can easily recover. The other thing is to be closed
for two years, which is what we have seen in South Asia or in Latin America, for
example. And how much do we know about the impact of the pandemic on children's
levels of education? And skills. So let me give you a couple of examples. In countries
as different as Brazil and the United States, which are countries in which we were
seeing some improvements in learning during the last decade with the last measures, I
mean, a few months ago, we see that learning has gone back to the levels of 2012 or
2013. So it's like in some countries, this pandemic has wiped out ten years of
progress. Now, if we put together the information that we have for about 20 countries,
what we see is that there's some correlation between the length of the school closures
and the magnitude of the losses. So roughly, we're seeing that one month of school
closures maps to one month of learning on average, right? So if you have a typical
Latin American country or South Asian country in which there has been almost two
years of school closures, then you can think that those kids are two years behind. So a
fifth grader that goes to school today actually will have the skills and the
competencies of a third grader on average. But we know that kids are not the same,
and we know that not all kids had exactly the same experience during the pandemic.
Tell me how much we know about how this impacts earnings potential in the future.
Do we know in data terms what the economic impact looks like of missing this
amount of schooling? The estimates have been changing. The last one that we have is
that for low and middle income countries, this generation, not economies as a whole,
but this generation might be losing about $11 trillion in terms of future earnings. Or
another way to put it, probably in simpler terms, is that unless we do something, a
typical child or young person who has lost schooling because of this pandemic might
have lower levels of productivity that can later map to a reduction in 10% of their
lifetime earnings. And that is a gigantic number for this generation. And in these
calculations, we're not taking into account something that's going to be much more
difficult to recover, which is the fact that early child education was wiped off the map
during the pandemic. Of course, this is a worrying picture all around, but if you had to
sort of focus on where you think the damage is greatest, are you saying that is in the
younger demographic? The data that we have on learning today for some countries
already show that kids in earlier grades are losing more than kids in higher grades. On
one hand, we don't have data for early child education. On early child education, what
we know is that the systems disappeared for very long periods of time, and actually
there was no remote learning at all for early child education systems. You might
remember that we have been saying for a long time, starting with all the work that Jim
Heckman did, I mean, no price in 2011 about the very high social returns and private
returns of early childhood education investments. Well, those investments disappeared
completely. As you mentioned earlier, there is a big variation in the length of time that
schools are closed due to pandemic in different countries. Which ones do you think
got it right? And where were the countries that you really feel suffered because they
kept schools closed for longer than necessary, even given how difficult it was to make
that call in the circumstances? We go from countries like Sweden, who basically
didn't close at all. Primary education close at some moments, only secondary
education. And the thinking there was, we don't have evidence that closing schools
has a positive impact on fighting the panemics. So given that we don't have evidence,
let's not close it. Most countries in the world close their schooling systems, but most
of the OCD countries started opening even between the first and second waves in the
United States and Canada was very varied across different states and provinces. And I
would say that across the world, south Asia and Latin America are the regions that
uniformly close for the longest, almost two years in both cases. And in addition, there
are a few other countries, right? So in Africa, for instance, Uganda closed for almost
two years in East Asia, philippines have very, very long school closures. They just
opened their schools just very, very recently. Indonesia also had long school closures.
From a regional perspective will be south Asia and Latin America are the ones that
kept their systems closed for the longest, and schools seem to be kept up for a long
time in places with powerful teaching unions. Mexico is an example. Parts of the
United States, there was even pressure from trade unions in the UK often to keep
schools closed when others were advocating for them opening. Do you believe that
there's responsibility there, that obviously they were concerned to protect their
members, the school staff. But do you think there is responsibility for the kind of lag
that we're seeing now in education? I think there is some. We cannot say, though let's
blame unions because I think in many countries has been a combination of both
political factors but also some lack of attention or lack of interest of society in general
because you could have seen in some countries union saying no, we don't want to
return. But then very active civil society or parents saying no, we do want to go back.
But you didn't see those clashes in terms of opinion. We also saw very disparate
reactions from different governments. I remember talking with Danish officials just
four months into the pandemic and they were saying, we really need to go back soon
because kids are losing a lot and we're really worried about marginalized children.
And we're talking about Denmark that has 100% internet connection. And on the
other extreme, then you find other countries that have been very indolent and have
started opening other parts of the economy and not schools. So that's something that
to a certain extent should worry us in terms of what's the real value that societies are
giving to education and how in many, many countries the interest of children was not
something that was front and center in the public policy debate. So that's something
that we should really worry about. I think it's a very interesting indicator of the view
of education within national cultures, within politics and priorities. And we reported
in the economists that in some countries where schools have reopened, as you've just
reflected, such as Mexico, by no means all children are back at their desks.
Sometimes that can be legacy worries about COVID 19 or COVID-19 coming back.
But it might also be that there's a sense that education is important, but not so
important that you can't miss out on some of it. And I would suggest that given the
focus that we've seen in education around the world in the last few years, that would
indicate that something is not getting through. So what needs to change? I think
something is not getting through and I think to a certain extent, even if parents are
worried, which is totally understandable, but parents are not epidemiologists, so
parents need to receive orientation and guidance from the authorities. So what matters
a lot in this case is leadership, is leadership that can provide the right information to
parents. And if you have the right leadership, then you could have information
campaigns that explain why going to school under certain conditions of course, is safe
and that the alternative is very, very large costs that our children are bearing. Can I
ask a bit about the practical measures that you think will help catch up? If business as
usual won't be enough, what are you really advocating for? So let's say I'm an
incoming government and my education minister has got to focus on this. What are
you going to be saying to them that they need to do more of? Obviously is a great step
that schools are open to start with. But even once that step is taken, authorities have to
be worried about very intensive communications campaigns. At the macro level, a lot
of work of the schools with community ensuring that kids come back to school. Some
are completely disengaged from the education systems, other might be working. So
that's not going to be automatic because that's not being today automatic. So one first
line of action is to ensure that everyone returns to school. A second critical line of
action is assessing the levels of learning. Today we don't have a lot of data because a
lot of countries are not measuring learning. Again, even middle income countries who
do have systems to measure learning, now they are postponing those measurements
and they're applying totally blind. A key line of action is to assess where is learning in
each country so that you can then design policies accordingly. A third thing is the need
to prioritize within the curriculum. I mean, we need to be pragmatic, right? You
cannot cover all the subjects that usually are in the curriculum. You need to be
pragmatic prioritize foundational skills, prioritize at least in primary literacy,
numeracy and social emotional skills. And then fourth, it's absolutely essential that we
teach each student at the level that they need. You're going to say I'm going to teach
what the curriculum say I need to teach at the level of a child. So teachers need
support in order to confront a much more complicated classroom. All this depicts a
very complex public policy challenge that it's difficult, but it's absolutely essential and
it's urgent. And finally, many other countries are implementing extra tutoring,
remedial education, bringing volunteers to support teachers. So there's a many of
policies that countries can implement. So I think what you're saying is it's quite a mix
of policies and perhaps re prioritizing to move on. But let's look at the funding for
that, if you like. The financial plumbing of the education system, which is so
important, particularly in the context we're discussing today. And the World Bank has
shown virtues, recently collected data. Around 40% of lower and lower middle
income countries have cut expenditure on education with the onset of the pandemic
by an average of 13 5%. How can we persuade governments to restructure spending
and boost it, especially at a time when there are so many other calls on public
finances? Really? I find myself quite often going around the world people telling me
go spend the money on healthcare, go spend it on resilience, go and spend it on job
support. And we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. And education seems to be whoever
gets more robbed, whether it's Peter or Paul. But education does appear to be in that
category. But education has been one of the robbed ones, right? Unfortunately, and it
shouldn't and it is true that governments are facing a very complex situation because
you have a jobs crisis, a health crisis, a food prices and energy crisis, you have a war
in the middle. But unfortunately it is absolutely essential to prioritize education
because that's one of your highest returns in terms of growth in the future and the
medium term. It is a tough job for the bank and other institutions to have these
complex dialogues that is needed with governments in terms of trying to persuade to
increase the share of expenditures that goes to education. That's a typical battle
between a minister of education and a minister of Finance. And I have been in that
side of the table. But one thing that I think is critical is that sometimes the education
community says that look, changes in education take time. It is true. I mean, structural
changes in the quality of education systems might take time, but it is also true that you
can make changes in education in terms of the quality of the interaction of teachers
and students and making sure that the minimum levels of materials are in schools.
And that can have an impact on the quality of learning in the short run. You can make
changes in two or three years if you put the right design and you have the political
will to do it. So it's not true that all changes in education will have returns only in the
long term. You can see changes in the experience of students and teachers and parents
in the relatively short term. Gordon Brown, the UN special envoy for global
education. Former British Prime Minister has suggested the World Bank should lend
more to lowincome countries for education. So 11% at the moment is spent by the
International Development Association on education. He's suggesting that the World
Bank should spend 15%. Couldn't the bank itself be using its resources in pursuit of
the goals that you're outlining? So the bank has increased, actually loans and grants to
education substantially during the last years. Actually the last three years, we're
averaging about 5 billion of additional commitments to education yearly. And in terms
of how much we lend to low income countries, which is true, it's around 11%. I wish
it would be higher, but it's not that the bank can decide unilaterally, okay? It's not
going to be 11%, it's going to be 15, or it's going to be 20. Because the World Bank
has a country driven model. It is a negotiation with countries in which it is defined
how much the country wants to use resources or financial support from the bank in
roads, in health and education, etc. Etc. So from my perspective, from the education
side of the bank for me should not be 15, ideally should be 20. But it is a matter of
having a discussion and persuading countries in order to do that. If I were to ask you
if you think with whatever means you're able to advocate for and you get some degree
of success, can these losses be recovered? What would you say to me? Yes, it can. It is
doable. I mean, this menu of policies that we were discussing before is something that
we are seeing that some countries are already implementing. We see countries like
Brazil or Chile or the state of Gujarat in India, or the state of Edo in Nigeria, or
Organa who are taking the right steps in terms of implementing these menu. Policies
at scale in some cases require some additional resources. But my sense is that the
main binding constraint is political will. All these policies are complex public
policies, of course, but it's not something that is impossible to implement. But it really
requires political will. And actually this is not something that one could predict. It's
something that we need to fight for. As I've said in other moments, we are in a battle
against learning poverty. We are now waging a war against learning poverty. So that
has to be the way countries see that we're not in normal circumstances, we really need
to mobilize whole society in order to make sure that this generation have the right
support and we can save this generation. Political will is obviously so important in
any education push. You certainly had it when you were education minister and very
well received for the advances that you made between around 2013 and 2016. The
difficulty, it seems to me, is not finding people like yourself who have an outstanding
commitment and political will when they've got their hands on the levers. It's how do
international institutions put as much resilience into the system as possible, even
when the political will sometimes evaporates? There is a firmer foundation and I
wonder just from your experience, how you would approach that. So international
organizations can help? Yes, of course can help and can leverage reform efforts of
countries. But actually it's difficult to replace the national efforts. I mean, if you see
the countries who have made it in education are countries that actually have taken the
political decision of making sure that all education decisions are done in a technical
way and have taken politics out of the decision making on education. The countries
who have decent education systems are countries in which teachers or principals or
bureaucrats are not there because of political affiliation. And that's a political decision.
Right, let's take all decisions in education, taking always into account only the interest
of students and children. Is there anything that you think we've learned from it's
slightly on the upside, from having to change the way that we delivered education in
the pandemic. So I think there are two lessons from the Pandemic in that regard. First
of all, education is about human interaction. So it's very difficult to replace schools as
a social space and it's very difficult to replace that magic of learning that happens
when you have a good teacher student relationship. At the same time, we have learned
that there is a gigantic digital divide that now technology is not yet an equalizer
factor, is an unequalizing factor as of today. But actually the future then will be about
that balance. The future would be about ensuring that the human factor that is critical
in education can be supported better by technology. The future would be the art of
balancing the human factor with technology. Technology, yes, can be critical to
improve the quality of education, but technology is about leveraging the work of
teachers and principals. Hi. Me savidra. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Thank you very much for the invitation and do let us know what you think. How have
you, your children, or maybe your grandchildren being affected by covert learning
loss? Write to us with your stories podcasts@economist.com, or you can tweet us at
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Participant #1:
You.