Emiliana Vegas, a professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focuses on improving educational opportunity in developing countries. She discusses learning loss caused by Covid-19 in Latin America and what we can do about it, as well as the challenges faced by teachers in a profession with declining prestige. And although it hasn’t caught on yet in Latin America, she takes a look at the innovative technology of micro-credentials and what it might mean for the region.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Welcome to Faculty Voices. Emiliana Vegas is a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research and practice focus on improving educational opportunity in developing countries.
Welcome, Emiliana.
Emiliana Vegas:
Thank you, June.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I was so fascinated reading through the proliferation of the things that you have read and researched and written about concerning the COVID-19 and the disruption to the global education system, about accrediting people through technology, and about the role of teachers. So, I'm going to ask you a little bit about all of that.
Emiliana Vegas:
Okay.
June Carolyn Erlick:
As you said in one of your excellent research articles, COVID-19 caused significant interruption to the global education system, and that early studies suggest significant learning loss in a few countries. But, you pointed out, there are also outliers, countries that managed to limit the amount of loss.
So could you tell us about the extent that COVID-19 led to student learning losses across Latin America and then some examples of best practices that actually worked?
Emiliana Vegas:
Yeah. So we have been sort of trying to document empirically the extent of the impact of the school closures due to the pandemic on student learning opportunities. The more we get data on the learning losses, the more we realize that they have affected primarily the students who were already behind. So within and across countries, those countries that already had sort of low learning levels, tended to also have longer school closures, and their students, on average, are also falling farther and farther behind.
And then within countries, you find that students who were more advantaged by virtue of attending higher quality schools, having better access to internet and digital technologies and devices, although they too suffered learning losses. So we've learned that there's really no perfect substitute for in-person schooling, but we also learned that those who were in the same system and more disadvantaged, suffered even greater losses. So, in the same country.
And in Latin America in particular, we've seen that as a region, it was one of the regions that had the longest periods of school closures in the world. And although we don't have a lot of data from many countries yet, we are seeing in countries like Colombia, like Uruguay, that there have been sort of learning losses, and again, that those have been greater for students coming from low-income households.
You asked also about best practices. We learned a lot about the pandemic, and if we go back to March 2020 when all the schools around the world closed pretty much, we were facing a world where we didn't have a vaccine. We didn't understand how this disease was transmitting, so we were relying a lot on the health experts and what they were learning. And I think as a worldwide community, they did an incredible job, obviously, of learning on the goal and producing vaccines. And so today, we're in a very different state, but I still think that some countries, for example, Finland, Denmark, from their get-go said, "Children have a right to learn. That is sacred and we are going to weigh the benefits and costs of in-person schooling vis-a-vis the cost of students missing out on learning." And for example, some schools were never closed. Schools in these countries that served students from frontline workers who were not going to be able to be at home or students with severe disabilities that weren't able to get access to learning opportunities at home, those remained open with very strict health protocols.
And then also, these systems tended to have shorter periods of when schools were closed. They really prioritized the in-person schooling. They worked very closely with their health authorities. And I would say the third factor that really distinguishes the countries that were able to reopen early versus countries that remained closed is the issue of whether schools should be prioritized was not in question. It was very widely accepted that schools serve a role, not only to provide educational opportunity to students, but also a host of other services that we've now discovered are so important for children to thrive. For example, in a lot of schools in our region as well as around the world, schools are where kids get a lot of services, health services, nutrition, and for the poorest of children, it might be the only place they get a nutritious meal per day.
And so children and youth in our region not just missed out on learning, and we can see that that impact has been great and will have lasting impacts in their lives in the future, but they importantly lost on all sorts of other services that are important for their health and emotional wellbeing. It's too early to see what's going to be the long-term impact of that, but I think there's a consensus that we have to focus on it and really implement programs to try and remediate the damage that has been done and to bring students back and to provide them with catch up learning opportunities as well as the health and social protection services that they need to recover.
June Carolyn Erlick:
One of the studies mentioned Paraguay as an example of how less technologically sophisticated approaches can also help improve learning outcomes, especially when the business-as-usual instruction is of low quality. Could you talk about that?
Emiliana Vegas:
Yes. Well, in Paraguay and in a lot of Latin America, we had a long history of having effective radio instruction, even in the past. It was one way in the '60s and '70s in which governments kind of expanded access to schooling. So it was interesting, as you say, recognizing that households in our region don't have access to internet and devices, the majority of them. The government pivoted to kind of low-cost, but very accessible technology to provide learning opportunities to students through the radio and through providing written materials to households to follow the lessons.
It's early to tell how much this has ameliorated the impact of the learning loss, but we did see incredible efforts across the region from governments, but also from individual teachers who were willing to risk their own health and safety to visit students and provide them with materials when they were unable to access online. For example, materials in Chile. There are many reports of that having happened.
Similarly, there was some reporting of parents just doing incredible efforts to try and keep their kids on track. I recall a newspaper article from Venezuela, for example, where the school had posted the homework on a poster outside the school building and parents going in person to take notes to bring that home to their students or their children. And it's just remarkable, I think, how people use their ingenuity in very low-resourced environments, both from the school side as well as from the family side, to try and continue the effort.
But I think it wouldn't have been so terrible if the schools hadn't been closed as long as they were. I think the fact that it just lasted so long makes these efforts and the possibility of their yielding some fruit very hard to really materialize because they're difficult to sustain, and over time, over almost two years in many countries that schools were closed, and also the other things that were going on that were also affecting families.
June Carolyn Erlick:
What do you mean by, "The other things that were going on that were also affecting families"?
Emiliana Vegas:
Well, for one, the pandemic itself, many people getting sick, many people dying, the socio-emotional as well as the impact that might have on a family in terms of their economic wellbeing, their socio-emotional wellbeing. So we all experienced family members or friends who got ill, and many of us also, who passed away. So I think that's one real toll that families and teachers were also living with while they were trying to provide learning opportunities and some measure of life.
Other things: having to remain at home. For many families who have multi-generational members in a household, that makes it very difficult for students to have even a physical space to be able to engage in the learning opportunities that they may have access to. If we go back to that time, it was just so stressful. We didn't have any sense of when this might end and when we might be able to resume some sort of normalcy life.
So I think all these factors, these stressors, there's a lot of evidence that stress also relates to learning. And so when you added them all up, it was really a picture that makes it very difficult for students to learn, even under the best conditions, as we've seen in sort of high-income countries like the United States, even the students who had access to online learning, who connected, who had devices, who had internet, they too suffered learning losses.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Reading through your studies, it seems to me that there's been a lot of thinking about the role of technology in schools and to what degree it's effective. Going beyond the context of the pandemic, what did you learn?
Emiliana Vegas:
Well, in Latin America, we have experimented a lot with providing devices to students one-to-one. Countries like Uruguay, Uruguay has the longest standing program and probably, I would say, the best deployed. But Peru, lots of countries, Dominican Republic, have implemented these one laptop per child programs.
And I think the distinguishing factor of those that make a difference or move the needle on learning versus those that are just really a total waste of money and do not produce any learning is when they're accompanied by a host of decisions around why you're providing a laptop, including how is it going to change instruction? How are you going to work with teachers so that they can use the devices effectively in classrooms? And then to what extent do you have the support services? Do you have access to internet and electricity in many of the countries? Honduras is a great example where the laptops were deployed, but schools didn't have the infrastructure to keep empowered, for example.
I used to be very, I would say, skeptical of the decisions of governments to provide laptops. I think the pandemic showed us that it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. I think technology has a great promise to transform many aspects of education. It can help teachers be more effective personalizing instruction, and we know that students have different levels of mastery of material, different styles of learning, and that a teacher faced with 30, 40, 50 students, which is sort of the average class size in our countries, no matter how excellent he or she may be, they're just unable to provide the type of individualized instruction that students need to thrive. So technology can really aid in that way.
It can also help both teachers and students access really high-quality information and material and lessons and learn that when students have observed, let's say, a high-quality presentation on a topic and then they come to class prepared to discuss it, and the teacher can guide that discussion, it really can be more productive.
So there is a lot of things that technology can accelerate learning. However, it's not how it's usually being implemented in our region. And so I think it's still to be seen. I hope that the investments in digitalization, connectivity and devices will continue, but accompanied with a real educational strategy around how are we going to transform schooling because the same method of an adult teaching all students the same material at the same pace in the same time, just has not shown to be effective anywhere in the world. And so technology's not the best ally to remediate that or to transform that, but it's been so far used in a very traditional way.
June Carolyn Erlick:
It's so far been used in a very traditional way. I know it's a little bit early to ask this question, but do you know of any examples in Latin America where there has been success along the models that you suggest?
Emiliana Vegas:
I would say why there's been some success with, for example, expanding access to learning English, recognizing that the capacity is not there so that there was no way that, over time, you could, in a reasonable period of time, you could develop the proficient teachers to teach English well in the country. And so in partnership with the British Council, Plan Ceibal, which is their digital education program, and really its system, and the ANEP, the National Administration of Public Education, they developed a way to have a teacher in the classroom who facilitates but have a native English speaker from the Caribbean or from another country, Zoom in, let's say, and be able to provide the instruction for the students to hear. And there is some evidence that has accelerated progress in language proficiency in Uruguay.
So, filling gaps in sort of short terms. In Uruguay also, there's very interesting efforts using the capacity, the fact that now students have access to technology and all schools are connected, to try innovate in building computer science education programs that are more accessible. Uruguayan students have won a number of robotics competition, which is, for a small country in our region, quite impressive worldwide. It's impressive what they've been able to do, but they've been at it for a really long time.
That said, Chile has also had [inaudible 00:15:57] for a long time, a program of connectivity in schools with deployment of devices, not one-to-one but labs. And it wasn't there in terms of the offer online. And I think we always saw technology as a place where students would go in addition to school separate from school. And I think that what we have learned and what kind of best practice suggests is that it's a compliment to school and that we should embrace it and use it strategically to improve the learning opportunities of our children.
June Carolyn Erlick:
We've talked about the loss in learning. I mean, how much of that is due to kids dropping out of school?
Emiliana Vegas:
That's another reality that is terrible, particularly in our region. We already had very high dropout rates in secondary school and between lower secondary and higher secondary. And with the school closures, it's very likely and we're already seeing more of that. It's very hard to attract youth to come back to schools that were already not serving them well after they've been forced out for a year or two.
We are also seeing in the region and in other developing regions, increased adolescent pregnancy rates as a result of the pandemic. So yes, a lot of factors are combining to create even more pressures for students to stay out of school and it's going to be hard to bring them back to school, and we need to act quickly.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You talked about the disparity between poor and underserved communities and those which we're better off in terms of access to technology. I'm curious, are we seeing a gender disparity in these learning losses?
Emiliana Vegas:
We've just concluded an analysis in March of this year, so now two years after the pandemic, looking at all the rigorous research that has been conducted worldwide. I did this with my friend and co-author, Harry Patrinos, from the World Bank, and our research assistant, Rohan Carter. And what we found is no, less gender disparities. Most of the disparities we see are by socioeconomic background of the student. That, in many systems, is correlated to other sort of racial and ethnicity variables, but we haven't really seen that girls or boys have suffered greater learning losses yet.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I guess that's good news.
Emiliana Vegas:
Yes, I suppose. In other regions of the world, you are seeing, like I was mentioning a bigger impact on girls through sort of domestic violence and rape and adolescent pregnancies that are not the result of violence necessarily, but just the fact that girls can, when they're out of school, they just can get into these kinds of situations. In other regions of the world, this is a very salient problem. I hope that that's not the case in our region as much, but I don't think it's been as studied as in other regions of the world too.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's very interesting. And you talk about all these people, all these adolescents who are dropping out of school. But one of the other things that you've written about is this whole issue, and I don't know if I'm using the right term, but these micro accreditations. I'm sure many of our listeners have seen ads from Google about how you can get a certificate or for other companies.
So what does this mean for youth and adults in low-income companies and in marginalized communities within wealthy countries?
Emiliana Vegas:
Well, I started getting interested in this topic when I was at the Inter-American Development Bank. We were very committed to sort of embracing technology for social good. And we were lucky enough that the bank was investing a lot in training its leadership and its staff in what's going on in the digital world, so we were learning about blockchain technology, et cetera. And we were one of the first institutions to start a program in the Caribbean countries to try and develop these blockchain digital-based micro-credentials for youth in the Caribbean. And I think that the argument was that youth in the Caribbean are, particularly males, but all youth live in small island nations for the most part that don't have a lot of economic opportunities. And so even if they access education, accessing the skills they need and then a job would be hard.
When you have a credential that's portable, that is recognized, that certifies that you mastered a certain skill that is sought after by employers, then the world is your labor market.
And so fast-forward to when I was at Brookings, I was very interested in learning more about this and I learned that there were a lot of efforts happening in the United States and in European countries and in some Asian countries around how to improve the ability of different skills to be recognized both by the different education institutions as well as by the employers and for individuals to carry those skills.
So as we all know, if you want to kind of certify that we got a degree, let's say here at Harvard, the degree tells something to the labor market, but the actual skills that we learned are not really explicit. So there's, as economists, we would call it an information of symmetry between what the person really is able and knows what to do, what the employer knows about that, and the employer takes a risk and also the person takes a risk in taking an employment that they may or may not be best suited for.
So the promise of these digital credentials is sort of reducing that asymmetry of information and improving the opportunities that youth, for example, anywhere could learn skills that can provide them jobs both in their own context but also outside using digital credentialing and badging, sometimes it's called. Companies have it, but also, the goal of these consortia of different institutions, both governments, universities and employers, is that eventually we will have a consensus and a set of standards that would mean that if you have a certain credential, that it reflects certain skills that everybody agrees are those skills and therefore you mastered those.
It's still, I would say, although there's been a lot of progress, I think it's a very challenging proposition, particularly in very decentralized systems like the United States where each state has its own ideas of what are the skills and the jobs, university acts differently. But in more, let's say centralized or coordinated systems like the ones in Asia and Europe, it's advancing much quicker.
And I think in our region, one of the reasons I got interested in learning more about this and in pushing the previous institution where I was working to really focus on ensuring that this is not something that continues to be developed only among high-income countries and for companies and individuals in high-income settings, because I'm afraid that the need is greatest in low-income countries where youth have fewer educational opportunities, have fewer labor market opportunities. And this could be a game changer in places like Latin America, but also sub-Saharan Africa.
June Carolyn Erlick:
And is it actually being used in Latin America and the Caribbean?
Emiliana Vegas:
Not to the extent, no. I don't think it's been successful in being widely used. I think there's still some pilots and frankly, I think the pandemic sort of threw a curve ball in anything else other than, "Let's keep things working and try to reopen." So the focus has been in more basic things, but I think that's always the trade-off in our region is that we always have an emergency, an economic crisis. I mean, we've never had sort of a pandemic and an economic crisis all at the same time, so that's new, but we always had it. And so the what's important and long-term always gets kind of left behind from the short-term immediate needs. And my work has focused on trying to revert that, but I can't say I've been super successful.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you see any country or any particular region that shows signs of perhaps, now that we're worming our way out of the pandemic, that shows particular interest?
Emiliana Vegas:
Certainly Asia is very involved, if I can speak of... In our region, I haven't, no. Outside our region, Asia is moving very quickly. Countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore is one of the leaders in this and also the European Union.
June Carolyn Erlick:
But why? I know you're saying that we're always coping with emergencies and that seems to be a really good reason, yet there's been a lot of experiments, say, in areas like Bitcoins. What do you think are the big obstacles to this in Latin America?
Emiliana Vegas:
I think it requires a lot of collaboration and investment in technology that is at the forefront. It also requires connectivity and high-speed connectivity for it to work effectively. So there's some basic infrastructure needs on the technology side that we still are struggling with as a region. And then there's sort of the, I think, political and leadership needed to prioritize it amongst many other issues. And so a lot of the countries are facing issues related to access to higher education. And in our region, in many countries, higher education, people aspire to go to universities and those are very expensive and long-term investments that people make and governments make.
Nevertheless, there are shorter, more cost-effective routes. And that's where I think this idea of digital credentials for skills, not only in the post-secondary education world, but even in secondary education, primary education, if we could develop ways of quickly certifying that a kid has mastered basic literacy, foundational numeracy, then they could move across schools more easily. Similarly, once you've mastered certain skills, if you drop out or if you have to leave school for a period, you return, you're not held back. So it provides a lot of mobility and really efficiency gains for individuals and for systems and economies.
So I'm hoping that we... That was the purpose of our work is really shed light and generate awareness. And we're continuing, my former team at Brookings, is continuing to do this work that I know will be very impactful and I'm hoping to stay engaged. It's different now that I moved here, but I'm very excited about my teaching, but it's taking a lot of time.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's really exciting, this whole idea of the badges, the accreditation, but getting back to end up to something that's really basic is that as you wrote, teachers seem to be losing their respect, their credibility, their position in society. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Emiliana Vegas:
Yes. So this is about a book we published in 2018 called Profession: Professor, so Profession: Professor. And the subtitle is How the Profession Lost Its Prestige and How to Recover It. And we did a study that included several methods, including a review of the history of the profession in the region, looking at archives of newspapers in the late 19th century, early 20th century, as well as looking at how the systems have evolved over time and what are some of the driving causes for this loss of prestige.
And what we found in a nutshell is that there were kind of a couple of main reasons. One had to do with the commitment that our region made, most countries in our region, to expand access very quickly, massively, to all citizens, to all youth and children. And that's something that other regions of the world with our similar level of income had not done.
And I think it's a lot of all that, Latin America decided to democratize education, but that came at a cost in terms of how do you find the numbers of teachers that you needed to staff classrooms? And the countries responded in two ways: by lowering the standards for teachers to enter the profession and to enter teacher education programs, also by keeping salaries relatively low because it's a big expenditure. And the third aspect is we are also a region that instituted double and triple shifts in the same school buildings because we couldn't afford to build the infrastructure and we're still struggling with some of that.
And so we lowered sort of the quality of education in some ways by having anybody pretty much be able to teach, and reducing the time in which students were within school, and by keeping salaries relatively low, although there were some other benefits.
The other thing that happened concurrently was that in the past, teaching was a very attractive career for very talented women who'd had very few other options outside of the teaching profession. So it was rare and not socially acceptable for women to aspire to be medical doctors, lawyers, engineers. But being a teacher was socially acceptable, particularly for single women who were normally secondary school graduates and who didn't necessarily want to get married and we're talented.
So as the opportunities for women, which is another really good thing. So both the root causes are not necessarily negative, but as opportunities of women outside of the teaching profession became more widely available, then also the pool of talented females choosing to enter teaching fell.
And so we have that kind of double whammy effect where we are not attracting... And what I mean by talented is measures of, for example, academic achievement prior to entering the teacher education program. And we have some evidence that teachers who come from high scoring, who are from the top performing students in secondary education, also tend to be better teachers later on. It's not the only explanatory variable. They need to get training, et cetera, but it is a factor. And certainly individuals who haven't mastered the skills that they were supposed to in secondary education are not going to be very great teachers. So that's what we mean by talented teachers.
And to compliment that, then we did a lot of research looking at efforts that different countries in our region have done to try and return or elevate the teaching profession. And that's also very interesting to see because for example, Peru had tried to raise, for example, the requirements to enter teaching, teacher education programs. And when they did that, they saw a tremendous reduction in the pool of applicants into teacher training programs because not many of the historically, previous people who would've entered teaching, were now eligible to enter teacher education programs. And as a result, they had a teacher shortage. So they had to lower again the bar a little bit to try and attract the teachers they need.
So we're always facing this issue of we do need a massive number of teachers because we are, in many countries, the majority still having a lot of young people in our population who need to be schooled. That is changing, so that's promising because that will enable systems to be more selective and who can enter.
And also the other thing is that we noticed in our review of the research is that as the demands for more teachers became wide, the programs that prepared them also increased in number and lowered in quality. And so there were less effort in trying to maintain the quality. It was costly. So there's lots of reasons why this has happened.
There's also promising things, as I was mentioning, happening in Chile with the new reform that recently passed on the teachers statute that gives teachers the opportunity to get evaluated and progress both economically, but in terms of the functions they carry out in schools. And you can continue to teach and become a master teacher and earn a very good salary in Chile if you do well in these evaluations. And that also helps in one of the other factors that we have is normally that the more talented teachers get pulled out to be administrators and school principals. And so kind of differentiating those roles.
So Chile's another example of where there's interesting, and it's too early to tell the impact it's going to have long term, but the efforts they made in the past informed this reform. So we can predict that it's going to also help improve the overall quality, if not a lot of other things change.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I think it's great to end on this note of optimism. Is there anything you else you would like to say about the future of education in Latin America?
Emiliana Vegas:
What I have seen having worked in almost every country in the region is that education improves when it's not just depending on the leadership of the government to do so, but it's really a social demand. And so I think the role that journalists play, for example, in elevating the debate and the quality of the conversations around education, parents, non-governmental organizations is crucial.
One of the things that is disappointing or troubling is that often, parents in the region are satisfied with the school options that their children are receiving. And yet, we know from every measure of performance in international assessments that Latin American students are falling behind and have been stagnating in their learning outcome outcomes for a really long time.
So I guess the last message would be is it's crazy to continue doing what we've been doing because it's not fit for the needs of our students. It's not fit for the needs of our societies in this rapidly changing, super complex world. And we need the leadership, but we need the social commitment and demand from the private sector and from all stakeholders, not just the government because the governments change and we can't depend on them.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you very much. You've been listening to Emiliana Vegas. She's a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research and practice focus on improving educational opportunity in developing countries. Thank you for being on Faculty Voices.
Emiliana Vegas:
Thank you for having me.