The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a historic shock to education, shuttering schools for over 1.6 billion children worldwide.
This shock will worsen a pre-existing “learning crisis” in which many learners were learning very little.
The World Bank estimates that the percentage of children who are unable to read a simple sentence by age 10 could rise from 53% before the pandemic to 63% as a result of school closures.
These learning losses could stem from a combination of things – forgetting what was previously known, and missing what would have been learned if schools had not been closed.
These learning losses can accumulate in the long run. Students who re-enter school far behind the curriculum expectations might be too far behind to learn anything from daily instruction and fall even further behind.
While Covid-19 has held back learning, bold reform is possible and the pandemic presents a historic opportunity to revamp education systems. It could be a time to institute practices and policies that have been needed to address the underlying learning crisis for decades,.