By ANYA KAMENETZ • APR 2, 2020
Right now students are out of school in 185 countries. According to UNESCO, that's roughly 9 out of 10 schoolchildren worldwide.
The world has never seen a school shutdown on this scale. And not since Great Britain during World War II has such a long-term, widespread emptying of classrooms come to a rich country.
To get a little perspective on what this all might mean, I spoke with several experts in the field known as "education in emergencies." Some have been part of the response to national, longterm school interruptions caused by war, refugee crises, natural disasters and epidemics like Ebola. Others have studied the breakdown and recovery process. Again, there is no situation that is precisely similar to what schools around the world are going through now, but here are some lessons these experts have learned from other education emergencies.
From New Orleans and Rwanda: It can take years for students to recover the learning they've lost.
Hurricane Katrina closed most public schools in New Orleans for the entire fall term of 2005. Most of those students enrolled in other schools elsewhere, from Baton Rouge to Houston and beyond. In many cases, the schools they enrolled in were of higher quality than the schools they had left — because the schools in New Orleans were extremely low-performing before the storm.
So, you might think that the learning interruption wouldn't be that bad. You'd be wrong.
Doug Harris at Tulane University was part of a research team tracking students as they returned to New Orleans and re-enrolled in newly reorganized schools. He says it took two full school years — from the spring of 2006 to the spring of 2008 — for those returning students to fully recover their lost learning. There's "suggestive evidence," he says, that the negative impact was worse for low income and African American students.
Harris says that what hurt these kids' learning wasn't just the interruption in class time. The economic impact and emotional trauma were probably just as important. So was the dislocation itself: the experience of enrolling in new and unfamiliar schools where Katrina "refugee" students were not always welcomed.
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