We need to talk about racism in schools

The fault lines are open and fractions are rising in the United States. Inequalities, which have always been there, are now fully exposed because of COVID-19, including its effect on marginalized communities. The death of George Floyd shined the spotlight even brighter on the racial inequality and segregation embedded in this country’s education system.

Image: waferboard

Ongoing discrimination, alienation and segregation in schools promote exclusion in education and damages the opportunity to build more inclusive attitudes among members of the population. It’s time for this to stop.

Read more on The Hill

Your Questions Answered – pose your questions live to the authors of the 2020 GEM Report

Launched on 23 June, the 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education draws on the latest available data, evidence, and commissioned research from leading experts around the world.  The Report benefits from a 18-month production cycle and is authored by an international team of researchers based in UNESCO, under the leadership of the Report’s director. Today, in our Any Questions Answered session hosted on this blog in the comments section, you can ask what you will to the team and we will endeavour to respond.

Our aim in writing the 2020 GEM Report, All means all, was to provide up to date policy analysis, recommendations and a call to action for all educators to widen their understanding of inclusive education to include all learners, no matter their identity, background or ability.

So, did we succeed in our aims? Were you surprised by the Report’s findings and recommendations? Are you intrigued by how we arrived at some of the Report’s top line figures? Do the Report’s findings reflect your own experiences and research on inclusion and education?

Jean-Paul Gaultier, Hillary Clinton, Shakira, Pele, Yalitza Aparicio and others join in calling for more inclusive education

High-profile influencers from around the world joined the GEM Report in calling for more inclusive education systems. The 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report showed that exclusion in education had deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, about  40% of low and lower-middle income countries had not supported disadvantaged learners during school shutdowns. Celebrities, all with strong personal reasons for giving their support, joined the Report’s calls for countries to focus on those left behind, as schools reopen after the COVID-19 shut-downs.

Colombian superstar Shakira tweeted:

La crisis educativa de Covid-19 fue alimentada por desigualdades preexistentes y los países no han prestado suficiente atención a los más necesitados. La educación debe ser para todos, no para pocos. Apoyo las solicitudes de inclusión en el @GEMReport de @UNESCO #AllmeansAll pic.twitter.com/7D53iCqokF

— Shakira (@shakira) June 23, 2020

Former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton tweeted:

.@UNESCO’s new @GEMReport is an urgent call for more inclusive education to make a more inclusive world. Let's answer the call. https://t.co/PotG8qlA92 #AllMeansAll

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 23, 2020

“Those of you who know me well, know I care deeply about the education of our youth. But this education is not always easy to access, and this is why I became a UNESCO ambassador. Even before schools shut due to the virus, many were already left without access to proper education. So I am asking you to read and share the GEM Report from UNESCO, which calls for schools to be more inclusive after this global shutdown,” said football legend, Pele.

Introducing a new online tool: Profiles Enhancing Reviews in Education (PEER)

English / Español

Yesterday, along with the launch of the 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education, we also launched a new website, PEER, to support the monitoring of national education laws and policies. It provides systematic, comprehensive information on laws and policies for every country in the world and is meant to support policy dialogue and peer learning.

The first set of country profiles cover inclusion and education, the theme of the 2020 GEM Report. Thanks to the work the team did coding the information obtained from laws, policies, strategies and plans, new indicators on inclusion and education fed into the 2020 GEM Report.

PEER is the third online tool the GEM Report has produced as new global public goods in education, along with:

• Worldwide Inequality Database in Education, education-inequalities.org (WIDE), launched in 2012, showing education inequalities between and across countries
• Scoping Progress in Education, http://www.education-progress.org (SCOPE) launched in January, 2020 with interactive visualisations of SDG 4 data

New 2020 GEM Report shows inclusion has never been as relevant as countries count the education cost of Covid-19

English / Español

The 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education, All means all, was launched this morning at an online event featuring an interactive high-level panel and clips of videos and animations of its key messages and recommendations.

This year’s report shows that, all over the world, layers of discrimination on the basis of gender, remoteness, wealth, disability, ethnicity, language, migration, displacement, incarceration, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, religion and other beliefs and attitudes deny students the right to be educated with their peers or to receive education of the same quality.

Using SCOPE to teach educational development

By Anne Campbell, Ph.D. and students at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies

It is not a simple task to prepare students about educational development around the world. At the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, we try to do this by providing international perspectives, practical learning, and immersive education for international careers. To better align the time and resources available with current events and students’ interests, we re-design our Education and Development course annually.

Teaching this course involves introducing students to the most recent and relevant perspectives, initiatives, organizations, and debates in education and development. To better prepare students for careers in the field or future study, they must understand and appreciate the importance of data-driven decision making—a process which begins with the awareness of and ability to find and analyze global education data. This year we included The GEM Report’s Scoping Progress in Education (SCOPE) tool (education-progress.org) as a formal resource for further exploration.

Why and how is SCOPE useful to students?

The tool provides students with a broad, comparative perspective on the state of educational development across five key themes: access, equity, learning, quality, and finance. Further, it complements the themes in the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, which students also explored in class, while providing them with the opportunity to interact with the most recent data available. Users are also able to easily compare data among countries and engage with powerful, eye-catching visualizations. Additionally, the portal also allowed students to apply and connect knowledge from other classes, including topics such as inequality in education, data-driven policymaking, and data analysis and visualization.

Knowledge is power: Handling the COVID-19 pandemic in schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

By Bushra Rahim, who is currently working for the Government of Pakistan. She is a Fulbright scholar, AusAid alumna, and a Charles Wallace Fellow. She serves as a President Association of Business, Professional & Agriculture Women; Executive Director Development Agent for Change (DAC)- a non for profit philanthropic organization- and is the President Fulbright Alumni Association KP.

Like most countries in the world, Pakistan closed its schools and universities to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus and sought ways to address the resulting loss of learning. Even without a pandemic, however, a large population of children and youth are unable to access school in many parts of Pakistan. In the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where I work, official statistics estimate that one million children are out of school. Among the many initiatives seeking to enroll these children in schools, two free primary schools named Ujala (or “light”) have been established in Peshawar by our non-profit charitable organization, Association of Business, Professional and Agricultural Women, KP.

 

These schools run according to two different models, which draw on the work of comparative education scholars, background papers for EFA GMR, policy frameworks, local community needs and supply and demand-side factors. In the first model, popularly known as double-shift school, afternoon school, or half-day school, students are taught for three hours in the afternoon by one paid female teacher and two volunteer members.  The second model involves collaboration between the charitable organization and a low-cost private school.

COVID: A complex crisis that has magnified existing vulnerabilities in Nepal

By Priyadarshani Joshi, GEM Report

The current situation is one of a combined health, economic and political emergency

In Nepal, a country where hundreds of thousands receive higher education abroad, the first two confirmed COVID cases were linked to higher education related movements – the first case was a student travelling back from Wuhan (in January); and the second case was a student returning home from France (March 23). Nepal has been in a country wide, fairly strict lockdown since March 24. As of the time of this blog publication, the country is in the midst of an upwards swing – there have been 6211 confirmed cases, and nineteen deaths.

Given its strong reliance on internal and international migrant remittances, the economic crisis has been and will be far-reaching. The Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that GDP growth will drop substantially from 7.1% in 2018/19. There have been several fiscal policy responses – the government has declared that health spending and informal sector workers compensation will be prioritized. There has already been a large external financial response – including $214 million from the IMF rapid credit facility and a $29 million package from the World Bank.

As in neighbouring India, the COVID crisis has laid bare societal inequality and fractures, and the difficulties particularly experienced by internal migrants. There has been an increase in tensions and the porous border has also been blamed for the increase in COVID cases.

Vilma Saloj: Providing a successful model of empowerment in rural Guatemala

English / Español

Vilma is one of many champions being highlighted by the GEM Report in the run up to the launch of its 2020 publication on inclusion and education: All means all, due out 23 June. In their own way, and in multiple countries around the world, these champions are fighting for learner diversity to be celebrated, rather than ignored.

Vilma is the principal at MAIA‘s Impact School, an inclusive school that provides quality education at no cost to students from usually underserved areas and promotes inclusion through local empowerment: all staff members at the school are from the area where the students come from.

Coming from a large family in a community trapped for generations in cycles of poverty, where parents are not accustomed to sending their female children to school, the likelihood of Vilma becoming a successful professional was not high. However, her father had confidence in her and her sisters, so, with the help of scholarships, Vilma moved to an urban area to complete high school and college. Vilma wanted to have a positive impact on society and decided to study to become a teacher, a career traditionally accessible to those with limited opportunities.

COVID-19 pandemic and indigenous and non-indigenous students in Mexico

By Enrique Valencia López

Throughout the pandemic, indigenous communities have emphasised that remote learning strategies should not solely rely on online access to provide educational services. Otherwise, existing inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous students may exacerbate as many indigenous households are in rural areas with limited internet connectivity. Access to effective remote distance learning platforms is not the only concern; countries with strong cultural diversity, as in Mexico, should also aim for these services to be culturally and linguistically pertinent.

Image: Matthew Powell

Indigenous peoples have limited access and inadequate infrastructure for distance learning

Since the arrival of COVID-19, Mexico’s Ministry of Education (SEP) has launched a comprehensive remote learning platform that integrates TV, radio, internet, and mobile applications—Aprende en Casa. While Aprende en Casa has reached many children and teenagers during the lockdown period, indigenous students may fail to fully benefit from it.

First, there is the question of access. Data from the 2018 National Household Survey (ENIGH) shows that there is a considerable digital divide between indigenous and non-indigenous children, with one in five indigenous children aged 3 to 17 years lacking either access to electricity, television, or internet at home.