One of the first measures to address the health emergency and control the spread of the COVID-19 disease was the closure of schools and the suspension of face-to-face education processes. On average, Latin America and the Caribbean was the region that kept its schools fully or partially closed the longest: 70 school weeks between February 2020 and March 2022, significantly longer than the global average of 41 weeks.
The closure of educational centers has led to the implementation of various distance education strategies to give continuity to the teaching and learning processes. In this context, important inequalities and unmet needs emerged, which manifested themselves in the different possibilities that students in the region had to maintain autonomous learning processes at home and use new technologies efficiently.
Unequal impact of the pandemic
In particular, the pandemic has revealed the profound inequalities in access to effective connectivity (quality Internet connection and devices for its use); the digital and socio-emotional skills needed for autonomous learning; material conditions, such as adequate study spaces in the home; the availability of support to facilitate learning processes by parents and caregivers; and in the training offer, in particular, the preparation that some teachers have had to adapt their pedagogical methods to the virtual environment.
In this way, the pandemic has widened inequality gaps in Latin American societies: the greater the availability of resources and capabilities, the better the response to the process of change. During the reopening process, the impacts of the pandemic on the socio-emotional well-being of students and teachers, deepening learning gaps and increased risks of dropping out of school have already started to show.
Latin America and the Caribbean (15 countries): connected and unconnected households by geographical area, latest available year (percentages of total households in each area)
Public policy recommendations
Among the immediate measures to ensure the recovery of learning without leaving anyone behind, ECLAC recommends:
- Support the socio-emotional well-being of students, teachers and the entire educational community.
- Evaluating and retrieving learning, imparting teaching processes at the appropriate level.
- Implement strategies that focus on students at highest risk of disengagement and early school leaving.
Likewise, there is an urgent need for the region to implement actions to address educational inequalities. This implies, among other measures,
- Reorganize institutional conditions to universalize access to pre-primary and secondary education.
- Greater articulation of education with other sectors of public policy to guarantee the material conditions necessary for schooling.
- Directly address gender inequalities in their education systems.
Finally, the transformation of the region’s education systems implies:
- Promote spaces for flexibility and innovation at all levels of education systems.
- Promote the role of teachers as agents of change.
- Promote the development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills.
- Strengthen learning and teaching processes and management information systems with digital media.
All of this, without a doubt, requires greater educational investment hand in hand with strengthened institutions and a new social contract for education that manages to ensure the financial sustainability of educational efforts. Read more in our new publication Education in times of pandemic.
