[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
LEARNING LOSS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: BUILDING BETTER
EDUCATION SYSTEMS IN THE WAKE OF THE PANDEMIC
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
WESTERN HEMISPHERE, CIVILIAN SECURITY,
MIGRATION AND INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
__________
Serial No. 117-129
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/, http://docs.house.gov,
or http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
48-500 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York, Chairman
BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas, Ranking
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey Member
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
KAREN BASS, California SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania
WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts DARRELL ISSA, California
DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island ADAM KINZINGER, Illinois
AMI BERA, California LEE ZELDIN, New York
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas ANN WAGNER, Missouri
DINA TITUS, Nevada BRIAN MAST, Florida
TED LIEU, California BRIAN FITZPATRICK, Pennsylvania
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania KEN BUCK, Colorado
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee
ILHAN OMAR, Minnesota MARK GREEN, Tennessee
COLIN ALLRED, Texas ANDY BARR, Kentucky
ANDY LEVIN, Michigan GREG STEUBE, Florida
ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, Virginia DAN MEUSER, Pennsylvania
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania AUGUST PFLUGER, Texas
TOM MALINOWSKI, New Jersey PETER MEIJER, Michigan
ANDY KIM, New Jersey NICOLE MALLIOTAKIS, New York
SARA JACOBS, California RONNY JACKSON, Texas
KATHY MANNING, North Carolina YOUNG KIM, California
JIM COSTA, California MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR, Florida
JUAN VARGAS, California JOE WILSON, South Carolina
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas
BRAD SCHNEIDER, Illinois
Sophia Lafargue, Staff Director
Brendan Shields, Republican Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Civilian Security, Migration and
International Economic Policy
ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey, Chairman
JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas MARK GREEN, Tennessee, Ranking
ANDY LEVIN, Michigan Member
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas AUGUST PFLUGER, Texas
JUAN VARGAS, California MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR, Florida
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
WITNESSES
LEANDRO FOLGAR, PRESIDENT OF PLAN CEIBAL, ORIENTAL REPUBLIC OF
7; FERNANDO REIMERS, ED.D., FORD FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE
IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION;
41AND GABRIEL SANCHEZ ZINNY, DIRECTOR, BLUE STAR STRATEGIES
57
APPENDIX
Hearing Notice................................................... 65
Hearing Minutes.................................................. 66
Hearing Attendance............................................... 67
RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
Responses to questions submitted for the record.................. 68
LEARNING LOSS IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: BUILDING BETTER
EDUCATION SYSTEMS IN THE WAKE OF THE PANDEMIC
Thursday, September 15, 2022
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Civilian
Security, Migration, and International Economic
Policy,
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:48 p.m., in
room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Albio Sires
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. Sires. Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
This hearing, entitled ``Learning Loss in Latin America and
the Caribbean: Building Better Education Systems in the Wake of
the Pandemic,'' will come to order.
Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the committee at any point, and all members will have
5 days to submit statements, extraneous material, and questions
for the record, subject to the length limitation in the rules.
To insert something into the record, please have your staff
email the previously mentioned address and contact the
subcommittee staff.
As a reminder to members joining remotely, please keep your
video function on at all times, even when you are not
recognized by the chair.
Members are responsible for muting and unmuting themselves,
and please remember to mute yourself after you are finished
speaking. Consistent with H.R. 8 and the accompanying
regulations, staff will only mute members and witnesses as
appropriate, when they are not under recognition, to limit
background noise.
I see that we have a quorum, and I now recognize myself for
opening remarks.
Good afternoon, and thank you to our witnesses for coming
and testifying before our committee today.
A defining feature of the COVID-19 pandemic was its ability
to worsen social issues that predated it. Latin America and the
Caribbean nations have struggled against a legacy of
educational scarcity, stagnation, and inequality. While some
countries have made significant strides toward universal access
to education, literacy and dropout rates in the region were
trending in the wrong direction before the first case of COVID-
19 was detected there.
The pandemic brought about an unprecedented disruption of
the region's academic institutions, interrupting the education
of nearly 200 million students. Latin America and the Caribbean
had longer school closures than any other region in the world,
due in large part to limited resources and inadequate capacity
to adapt.
Students who were lucky enough to access virtual education
still lost out on critical face-to-face services, such as
school meals and access to social support and mentorship. Those
who reside in rural areas, live with disability, or face
economic adversity are now at a heightened risk of falling out
of the system entirely.
The long-term impact of this could be devastating.
According to the World Bank, pandemic-related school closures
in Latin America and the Caribbean could have nearly two out of
every three students incapable of reading and writing at grade
level, and nearly 80 percent are already falling behind on
basic foundational skills.
In the absence of interventions to make up for lost
instruction, this generation of students will not be prepared
to participate in the modern economy. A recent study estimates
that current students in the region could lose out on $1.7
trillion in future earnings.
Without the prospect of economic mobility, more young
people will turn to gang affiliation, informal employment, and
migration to our southern borders. Further, they will be
increasingly susceptible to online disinformation and political
radicalization.
Long before I was elected to Congress, I taught teenagers
at Memorial High School in West New York. Over half of my
students were free-lunch-eligible; a third spoke English as a
second language, including myself, by the way; and many of them
had endured financial hardships from an early age.
As a teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that a student's
environment has on their ability to learn. I can only imagine
how difficult it is to navigate these challenges in isolation
or to attempt to reach students through a screen.
The immediate, sweeping effect of the pandemic on education
in Latin America and the Caribbean is a wake-up call for many
who are focused on the region. However, the repercussions of
this crisis can be mitigated with a recognition of the problems
that were present before the pandemic as well as an
acknowledgement of our past failures to provide equal access to
quality education in the region.
It will take a coordinated international effort, with
support of the United States, to move beyond confronting the
damage done by the pandemic and take on the challenge of
building better education systems in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
We are lucky to have the opportunity to learn from experts
who can illustrate the scale of the problem and provide us with
recommendations for supporting student achievement across the
Western Hemisphere.
I will now recognize Ranking Member Green for his opening
remarks.
Congressman Green?
Mr. Green. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you,
Chairman Sires, and to all of our witnesses for being here
today.
Two years following the initial outbreak of COVID, the
facts about the coronavirus and its implications are well-known
to each of us by now. Unfortunately, though, instead of
following the science, as was the quasi-religious motto over
the last year, it is a sad fact that, both in the United States
and Latin America, schoolchildren are paying the price for
radical policies. This is despite new guidance from the CDC
that disputes the narratives many people took as gospel truth
since March 2020.
Many were so determined on silencing any and all dissent
that even data-driven arguments from physicians like myself
urging schools to reopen were summarily silenced. What is even
more absurd is, as the performance numbers of our children have
fallen and with FOIA evidence that the CDC worked with the
liberal teachers' unions to keep schools closed, the liberal
media is trying to flip the narrative and say that it was
Republicans that closed the schools. Americans are not buying
that lie.
As I know everyone on the subcommittee and the full
committee would agree, our most valuable resources are young
children, the future generations. One of the most tragic ways
in which this mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic has
continued to hurt America and her allies is the mass closure of
schools and institutions of higher learning.
In fact, according to the United Nations, after only 2
years of the pandemic, 7 of 33 Latin American nations are
operating at full and in-person capacity. We shouldn't be
surprised, then, that school completion rates in Latin America
have plummeted, from 56 percent to 42 percent. This is a
tragedy for the next generation and comes after billions of
dollars of U.S. spending in development aid and vaccine
assistance worldwide.
The storyis the same here at home, though. American schools
saw a disastrous 12-percent decline in middle-school reading
comprehension. Likewise, math and science comprehension reached
an all-time low. In my home State of Tennessee, there has been
a shocking 50-percent decrease in proficiency rates for reading
and a projected 65-percent decrease in math. A report from
Vanderbilt University found that student chronic absenteeism
significantly increased, with nearly one in four students
classified as chronically absent.
Even this crisis, though, pales in comparison to the
mental-health crisis facing our children. As reported by the
U.S. Surgeon General, suicide attempts by teenage girls rose by
a shocking 51 percent during the closed schools. A quarter of
all young people in our Nation have recently experienced
symptoms of depression, and a fifth have symptoms of anxiety.
Despite these shocking metrics, Democrat dogma has
continued to impose lockdowns and performance efforts like
masking that have zero effect on public health in that
population.
The problems are endless, and our adversaries know this.
The Chinese Communist Party is taking full advantage of the
virus that it unleashed on the world to influence institutions
of learning, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Since 2006, CCP-sponsored Confucius Institutes have developed a
substantial presence in 23 Latin American and Caribbean nations
and continue this expansion at an alarming rate.
There is an extremely troubling trend that, as more
Confucius Institutes emerge in the Western Hemisphere partner
nations, the CCP gains an ever-larger footprint and influence
on our partners' and allies' economic and foreign policies.
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru each have
a strong Confucius Institute presence and are becoming
increasingly economically dependent on China. Clearly, the CCP
doesn't let a tragedy go to waste.
I am glad that my majority colleagues have a concern for
students in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a concern
that I share wholeheartedly.
As we have discussed in this committee countless times, a
free and prosperous Latin America and Caribbean is clearly and
transparently in the interests of the United States. As
Chairman Sires and I have Stated together before as we were
unveiling our Western Hemisphere nearshoring bill, preserving
and building upon the prosperity of our neighbors to the south
is a key first step in solving the migrant crisis at our
southern border.
It is an extension of this very same effort to improve the
education outcomes for Latin American and Caribbean students
and an absolute imperative for this subcommittee. I look
forward to hearing the testimony of our witnesses today on how
we can rebuild these education systems and overcome the
setbacks of the past few years.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Sires. Thank you very much, Ranking Member Green.
I will now introduce our witnesses.
Mr. Leandro Folgar is the president of Ceibal, Uruguay's
education, technology, and innovation agency. He leads the ed-
tech national strategy and faced major challenges with the
COVID-19 crisis.
He earned a B.A. In education from Universidad Catolica del
Uruguay and a master's degree in technology, innovation, and
education from Harvard University.
A former Fulbright student, entrepreneur, and business
consultant, he began his career in education as a teacher and
has more than 13 years of experience in different school
positions. He is passionate about technology, the evolution of
education, and its influence on the future of our global
society.
Mr. Folgar, we welcome you to the hearing.
And I ask the witnesses to please limit your testimony to 5
minutes, and, without objection, your prepared written
statements will be made part of the record.
Mr. Folgar, you are recognized for your testimony. Did I
pronounce that correctly?
STATEMENT OF LEANDRO FOLGAR, PRESIDENT OF PLAN CEIBAL, ORIENTAL
REPUBLIC OF URUGUAY
Mr. Folgar. Yes. Thank you, Chair Sires, Ranking Member
Green, and distinguished members of this committee, for the
invitation to make a statement as a witness in this session.
Building better education systems in the wake of the
pandemic has been a goal for Uruguay and Ceibal besides the
topic of this hearing today. Ceibal's most recent claim is
``learning from the future,'' because it is part of our DNA to
innovate and ensure that educational technology is equitably
distributed in our country and education system. The
organization's commitment, as Uruguay's educational innovation
and technology agency, to provide an access to connectivity and
technology, plus meaningful pedagogical approaches during the
pandemic, has been total.
These facts generated that the regional community in the
Southern Cone of the Americas and the Caribbean reached out to
us to complement their education efforts during the pandemic.
Furthermore, the international community and multilateral
development organizations have recognized the good results in
Uruguay, despite the unprecedented negative situation generated
by the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures.
Ceibal's experience in Uruguay allows us to observe the
capacity that public policies can have when it comes to
reducing the digital gap, boosting the quality of learning, and
promoting educational continuity.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ceibal's technological
solutions allowed schools to implement distance/blended
emergency teaching/learning models with flexible dynamics and
adaptable to various contexts. In 2020, its virtual teaching
platform reached 88 percent of the students and was positioned
as the fifth site with the highest number of visitors in the
country.
However, the participation of students in this period had
differences. Some gaps became more profound, and new ones
emerged. This reality was even worse in other countries of
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ceibal's team's experience with innovation and practice
trying to solve complex problems with imperfect technologies
for more than 13 years was one of the many reasons why Uruguay
was able to offer learning continuity during school the
closures, and it was also the main reason why the organization
experienced one of the best cycles of internal innovation in
its history.
Ceibal created new software for learning, adapted its
infrastructure to help Uruguay become the only country in Latin
America with a public education system both online and offline,
and provided the real-time data that informed the early
reopening of schools when it was safe. Ceibal made the
Uruguayan educational system more resilient.
So how to build sustainable, resilient education systems in
the region is a challenging, complex question that has taken on
considerable significance since the outbreak of COVID-19.
Having flexible educational systems that can be remodeled at a
pace consistent with the changes we are experiencing and can
withstand the different disturbances that may occur is a
current challenge in which technology plays a key role.
Technology is not the solution for education, but there is
no future in education without technology. Providing education
systems aided by technology with quality infrastructure and
solutions means providing more students with an education that
is more accessible, sustainable, and less prone to
interruptions. The pandemic has shown that those who
purposefully use available technology for education do better
than those who don't.
It is essential to contextualize solutions and understand
how countries make technology available and what type of
technology is used locally. Promoting technological
infrastructure to enhance learning will depend on each
country's possibilities, reality, cultural relationship with
the technologies, and available talent. It is an ongoing
process that calls for a systematic investment strategy and
improvement of technological capabilities.
Ceibal created the Ceibal Foundation, which seeks to
strengthen digital education policies in the region as part of
its mission, promoting research, innovation, and the
dissemination of projects on technology and learning in
collaboration with the national and international academic
education community.
The foundation coordinates the Alliance for the
Digitalization of Education in Latin America, implementing the
Rural and Inclusive Digital Education Project in Honduras and
other countries of the Caribbean. Both initiatives are funded
by international cooperation funds and collaborate with UNESCO
in their effort to monitor the education goals for sustainable
development related to the proper use of technology.
Ceibal is open to collaborating with the international
community, and this is why this hearing becomes so relevant for
us.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Folgar follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Sires. Thank you very much. Very impressive, what you
were able to accomplish during these difficult times.
Mr. Folgar. Thank you.
Mr. Sires. There is a lot to be said for a stable country.
I will now introduce Dr. Fernando Reimers.
Is that correct? OK.
Dr. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of Practice of
International Education and director of the Global Education
Innovation Initiative at Harvard University. An expert in the
field of global education, his research and teaching focus on
understanding how to educate children and youth so they can
thrive in the 21st century.
He was a member of UNESCO's Commission on the Future of
Education. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the U.N.
Education Summit. He has also developed curriculum aligned with
the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals used in many
schools throughout the world. During the COVID pandemic, he led
numerous comparative studies examining the education
consequences of the pandemic.
He has served on the Harvard faculty since 1998. Previous
to that, he worked at Universidad Central de Venezuela, the
Harvard Institute of International Development, and the World
Bank.
Dr. Reimers, we welcome you to the hearing.
I ask the witness to please limit your testimony to 5
minutes. And, without objection, your prepared statement will
be made part of the record.
Dr. Reimers, you are recognized for your testimony.
STATEMENT OF FERNANDO REIMERS, ED.D., FORD FOUNDATION PROFESSOR
OF THE PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION, HARVARD GRADUATE
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Mr. Reimers. Chairman Sires, Ranking Member Green, and
members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I appreciate
the invitation to testify before you at this hearing on the
educational impact of COVID-19 on education in Latin America.
I will summarize from my written testimony and structure it
in five sections, about a minute each: the effects of the
pandemic on education, preexisting educational efforts prior to
the pandemic, the impact of COVID-19, the education silver
linings of the pandemic, and the bumpy road ahead and
opportunities for reform.
In Latin America, the education effects of the pandemic
were particularly harsh, given the long duration of school
closures and the deficiency of the alternative means that were
used to teach remotely, especially to reach all children, the
children of the poor, and also because the economic and health
effects of the pandemic increased the vulnerability of
disadvantaged students and their families.
As a result, the pandemic undermined much of the
educational progress achieved at great cost in Latin America
over the prior decade in improving access to school to the most
marginalized and in supporting their learning, and it
undermines the future economic prospects of large segments of
the population, aggravating preexisting social and political
challenges.
Students in Latin America experienced the brunt of six
mutually reinforcing challenges: the longest school closures,
the lowest levels of resources and institutional capacity to
mitigate learning loss, lower levels of access to vaccines, the
greatest increases in poverty, lowest effectiveness of
alternative modalities to education, and the greatest
preexisting levels of social and educational inequality.
The recently released Human Development Report shows
declining measures of life expectancy, education, and income
per capita since 2020, wiping out gains made between 2016 and
2019, and shows that those declines were the greatest in Latin
America.
It is important to recognize, however, that, prior to the
pandemic, education had come to be seen as a path to increase
the opportunity of the children of the poor, to reduce
inequality in what are the most unequal societies in the world.
Education gave hope to those less privileged that the lives of
their children could be better than their own.
Over the last quarter-century, a number of countries in
Latin America had increased the priority given education, and,
as a result, preceding the pandemic, Latin America was
investing more on education as a share of government spending
and as a share of GDP than any other world region. And
education spending had increased over time.
Not only had Latin America increased the level of education
spending, but it had also increased spending on poorer students
through a variety of innovative targeting mechanisms. As part
of the societal commitment to education, many governments in
the region undertook reforms aimed at elevating education
standards, increasing the years of mandatory instruction and
increasing the levels of the curriculum, improving teacher
preparation, increasing school autonomy, and improving
educational management and accountability.
Efforts to achieve those goals included not only those of
governments at the Federal, State, and municipal level but also
efforts of many different actors of civil society. For example,
ambitious efforts to overhaul the curriculum in recent years
include reforms in Chile, Brazil, and Mexico.
As a result of these efforts, mandatory instruction in
Latin America now covers 9 to 10 years of schooling, including
primary education, which is compulsory in all countries in the
region, and lower secondary education, which is compulsory in
all countries except Nicaragua. Upper secondary education is
compulsory in 12 of the 19 countries in Latin America. And
these changes increased the levels of educational attainment of
the population.
Latin America has achieved almost universal attendance to
elementary and lower secondary school, while the number of
children out of school declined from 15 million in 2000 to 12
million in 2018. The greatest levels of exclusion are in upper
secondary school.
Now comes COVID. And when COVID was recognized as a
pandemic, governments in Latin America ordered the suspension
of in-person instruction as part of the efforts to contain the
spread of the virus.
I will skip this part of my testimony because I think
Chairman Sires has synthesized it very well. We completely
agree on the facts.
And so let's talk about the silver linings of the pandemic.
It shouldn't be surprising that the pandemic produced an
educational calamity, arguably the worse crisis in the history
of public education. After all, shocks of varied sorts, such as
natural disasters or conflict, typically interrupt the
functioning of schools and the lives of students, negatively
impacting their learning.
What should really surprise us is that during a global
crisis of such magnitude there would be so much interest and
effort to sustain educational opportunity. In particular,
international development organizations and civil society
demonstrated extraordinary leadership, maintaining attention on
the importance of sustained education during a crisis--a
reminder of the important role of international cooperation to
advance progress and peace, especially in challenging times.
The United States Agency for International Development, for
example, piloted some existing education programs and created
new programming to support education in priority countries in
Latin America, focusing on the educational opportunities of the
most vulnerable students. Such responses have relied on
multisectoral partnerships bringing together government,
universities, and civil society.
Similarly, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development
Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF have demonstrated exemplary leadership
advancing the importance of maintaining the priority for
education and providing policy guidance to governments and
providing financing and technical assistance. All of these
generated an innovation dividend, which we must study and which
we must leverage to address the road ahead.
So, during the period of between April 2020 and June 2021,
my colleagues and I in the Global Education Initiative have
been studying those innovations through three studies which are
described in greater detail in my statement. And so I will skip
ahead to talk about some of these innovations.
In spite of the variation in the region, most of these
innovations recognize the importance of addressing the
education of students beyond foundational literacies. We
learned in the pandemic that nobody learns very much when they
are in fear and that we must address the emotional needs of
students so they are prepared to learn.
For example, Fundacion Sumate in Chile, a network of
second-chance schools for school dropouts managed by Hogar de
Cristo, prioritized and developed very effective programs using
WhatsApp to support the emotional well-being of students.
In Colombia, the Alianza Educativa, a network that works
with 12 high-poverty schools in partnership with universities,
developed printed materials to support distance education
during school closures. Ensena for Colombia, part of a network
operating in 70 countries, akin to Teach for America, also
showed the power of a network of schools.
Mr. Sires. We are going to go----
Mr. Reimers. May I just move to the conclusions and just
say one paragraph in the concluding statement?
So let me just talk about the bumpy road ahead.
The pandemic created an education crisis in Latin America
which robbed many students of the opportunities to learn what
they were expected to learn and caused them to lose skills they
had already gained. It also pushed some students out of school.
Those losses affected primarily the most vulnerable students.
This is going to complicate other societal challenges which
predated the pandemic, such as the challenge of increasing
productivity, reducing poverty and inequality, increasing civic
cohesion and trust in institutions and democratic governance,
and addressing issues such as climate change and intra-and
interState violence.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Reimers follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Sires. Thank you.
I will now introduce Gabriel Sanchez Zinny.
Mr. Zinny is the managing director of Blue Star Strategies,
LLC. He is also a senior advisor to the CSIS Project on
Prosperity and Development and a member of the Inter-American
Dialogue's Working Group on Innovation and Technology in
Education.
He served as a Minister of Education of the Province of
Buenos Aires. He held the position of executive director of the
Assessment Unit of Education Quality of the city of Buenos
Aires and the executive director of the National Institute of
Technological Education.
He co-founded two social impact initiatives, Edunexo and
Kuepa, working on the introduction of technologies in the
education system. He graduated as an economist from the
University of San Andres and completed a master's degree in
public policy from Georgetown University.
Mr. Zinny, we welcome you to the hearing.
I ask the witnesses to please limit their testimony to 5
minutes, and, without objection, your prepared written
statements will be made part of the record.
STATEMENT OF GABRIEL SANCHEZ ZINNY, DIRECTOR, BLUE STAR
STRATEGIES
Mr. Zinny. As an Argentinian, it is an honor to be here
today in front of you and this House of Representatives.
As you know, education in Latin America and the Caribbean
was already in crisis.
The pandemic made it worse. The region suffers the greatest
inequality in the world, beginning with inequality of
opportunity to access a good education. Fifty percent of our
students do not finish high school in a timely manner, and the
region ranks last when measured against international tests
like PISA or TIMSS. The pandemic aggravated this, resulting in
3 million students dropping out of school, according to the
World Bank, and never returning to the classroom.
Poor educational assessment results were surely due to the
length of time schools were closed and the lack of
connectivity, particularly in the most vulnerable communities.
In addition, it has become clear that online learning is not a
sound replacement for in-person education.
This dynamic appears to be widespread, as the latest
National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that U.S.
students' performance have also suffered for the same
aforementioned reasons.
This tragedy seems to be getting worse, but it should also
bring about opportunity to overcome ongoing challenges in
education.
First, we have an opportunity to give visibility to the
educational crisis and to understand, from a foreign policy
perspective, that education in the region is key for the U.S.,
not only because education increases the odds of socioeconomic
success and a more stable citizenry, but also because a
prosperous Latin America and the Caribbean means more trade,
less forced immigration, and the economic consolidation of the
continent vis-a-vis the growing presence of China.
There are so many issues that we include in foreign policy
discussions, such as geopolitics, trade, transparency, and
institutions, but we must also include human capital. We must
give it the necessary relevance and include it in all
multilateral and bilateral conversations. We must focus on the
skills and abilities necessary for a thriving democracy and
boost economic development.
The accreditation of university and postgraduate degrees
between and among countries and the mobility of talent in the
hemisphere need to be key foreign policy issues moving forward,
keeping in mind that remote work and the possibility of
exporting education has generated enormous changes and
opportunities in the education sector.
Second, we have an opportunity to dare to advance with more
audacity and a sense of urgency around necessary reforms in the
region, including improving teaching careers and measuring
performance more effectively, evaluating schools and teachers
in modern ways, generating precise information systems, and
building a better transition from high school to the working
world.
Third, we have an opportunity to build on lessons learned
regarding online education. While technology cannot replace
face-to-face schooling, it is true that the pandemic has
familiarized the entire educational system with this powerful
tool to strengthen learning, especially for the most vulnerable
students, who generally do not have access to the best
educational content and teaching methods in person.
But to harness online learning to help students make
genuine improvements, governments and the private sector must
work together to invest in the connectivity of our schools and
families.
The experience of the pandemic has shown even more clearly
that we all learn in different ways, at different rates, and
with different interests. Along these lines, it would be
helpful if the governments in the region institutionalized
changes that give more freedom to educational offerings, from
homeschooling to secondary schools with elective subjects and
credits.
Educational offerings continue to be very rigid in Latin
America and the Caribbean, ill-suited to individual learning
needs and disconnected from the profound changes that the
pandemic has exacerbated in the labor markets.
Simultaneously, the prolongation of the closure of schools
has led to greater participation of families and more active
social demands from them when it comes to their children's
education. This is a positive phenomenon for the region, where
governments and trade union organizations typically dominate
conversations around education.
We must continue promoting the participation of parents,
making quality of learning a priority among the demands of
citizens who want politicians to invest in education more
seriously. We should also encourage citizens to demand that
governments provide more information on how schools are
progressing and how students are performing, while making it
easier for parents to understand a school's curricular content.
Finally, we have seen another positive trend toward greater
autonomy and empowerment of schools, which, due to either
government action or lack thereof, have been able to make more
and different kinds of decisions around student learning and
have been encouraged to innovate and experiment with new ways
of reaching their students.
This positive trend could be replicated and cemented as the
norm if governments better define institutional frameworks with
more freedom for schools and teachers, who can do what they
know best--to teach--with less rigidity and fewer regulations
from the central ministries of education.
In conclusion, while the pandemic has revealed and
sometimes worsened educational challenges in Latin America that
have existed for years, it has also widened the possibility for
changes that will benefit students, families, teachers,
communities, and societies.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Zinny follows:]
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Mr. Sires. Thank you very much.
We will now turn to questions. I will recognize myself for
5 minutes for questions.
Mr. Folgar, this goes to you. I listened to your statements
very attentively, and it is obvious to me that Uruguay made
preexisting investment in remote education before the pandemic.
So how much did that help? And did you have enough money to
do this? Which, it always comes down to money.
Mr. Folgar. Thank you, Mr. Sires.
Yes, actually, Uruguay has been making a sustained
investment in technology and infrastructure for 15 years now,
with the creation of Ceibal's organization.
And, no, it is never enough money invested in this
infrastructure, because it is a perpetual challenge to make
technological infrastructure available for every student--high-
quality technological infrastructure for every student. We know
that technology is evolving at a very, very high pace, and
trying to make this technology available for every student in
the country is a big challenge in terms of investment as well.
Right now, Uruguay has invested around $700 million in the
creation of this infrastructure during these 15 years. And it
is true that this infrastructure was of paramount importance to
have the results that we had, but it was not only the money,
but the way in which the investment was made, to make it
sustainable in a country with the GDP that we have. It is not
the same financing matrix that more developed countries can
use.
And that is the interesting thing about Uruguay. We found a
model in which we can make cheaper technology work for us in a
good way for our educational system to be online as well.
Mr. Sires. Great. Terrific.
Dr. Reimers, this is for you. One of the concerns that I
have with students spending so much time on the screen: How
susceptible are they to political extremism? How susceptible
are they to be influenced, obviously, by what is going on out
there in the world?
Mr. Reimers. It is a very important question, because, as
you know well, by all indicators, democracy is under siege
everywhere, including in some of the oldest democracies. And it
is under siege by extremist groups of various sorts that
essentially prey on the ignorance of the population.
And so I think we should be very concerned about education
taking a back seat in the wake of this pandemic and
disinvesting in the development of the capacities of people to
discern facts from fiction.
I do think that there are two things that make people
susceptible to become hijacked by extremist ideologies of any
kind: One is ignorance, is a lack of opportunity to be
educated. And the second one is, of course, spending a lot of
unsupervised time on various online environments.
So I think it is very important to learn the lessons of
history. The Federal Reserve produced a very good report on the
consequence of the pandemic of 1918 in Germany, which, through
mechanisms that had to do with the reduction of municipal
spending in education and health, threw a lot of people into
despair and made them very susceptible and prey of individuals
like Adolf Hitler, who were totally marginal individuals at
that time and who 15 years later became elected chancellors of
Germany.
I think it is very important that we continue to prioritize
education and an education that cultivates human reasoning. I
just spent a little time on the Library of Congress visiting
Jefferson's Library, and it is so clear that the Founding
Fathers understood that democracy is a twin institution with
public education and with public research universities. And I
hope we don't forget those lessons.
So I am so gradual to see a former teacher such as yourself
calling attention to the importance of education at this time,
not only to advance human well-being and the capacity of
individuals to become architects of their own lives, but to
retain the capacities that make it possible for them to
collaborate with others in a world where we are all
fundamentally equal in democratic societies.
Mr. Sires. So I assume from what you are telling me that we
should be really focusing on more policing on what is going on
on some of these screens, to see the content that is there.
Mr. Reimers. I certainly think we should be developing
media literacy of students and developing their capacity for
rational thinking, their capacity to understand the difference
between fact and fiction. And I think that our teachers, both
in the United States and in other countries, do a very good job
when they have access to the students teaching them digital
literacy, which is an essential foundational skill in the 21st
century. I think that should be the priority.
We also should be paying attention to what goes on online.
And I think dialog with technology companies is essential, to
make sure that they all behave responsibly, understand that
they have a public trust that they should sustain. They have a
public trust in creating these modern cyberspheres that bring
people together and that can be used for good and for bad, as
we know, sadly.
In the old days, when people met in the physical public
square, there were always some individuals that were a little
bit odd and crazy, but they were isolated. But these people now
can find each other, and they can create a virtual universe
where they can spread their lies and misinformation and hijack
others.
And whether those individuals are extremists like al-Qaeda
and similar groups or the groups that are trying to undermine
American democracy, it is all of the same ilk. These are people
who are challenging the very idea that we are all equal and
that we are all capable of collaborating with each other to
build a society where we recognize the basic equality of
individuals.
I think those are very serious risks for American democracy
and for other democracies around the world.
Mr. Sires. Would you like to add something to that?
Mr. Zinny. I agree that critical thinking is key and an
ability that we should be speaking of in a dialog with the
private sector. Technology companies have an important
responsibility, as well, to continue dialog with the
government.
Mr. Sires. In Uruguay, do you keep an eye on what is going
on?
Mr. Folgar. Yes, we do. We have a whole department in
Ceibal that is working within digital citizenship and global
citizenship skills.
It is on the ranks that Fernando Reimers was sharing. We
believe that the students, their families, and the teachers
need to have tools to actually curate the content and use it
proactively in ways that they can, let's say, apply all the
possibilities of their digital citizenship skills and make them
an extension of their citizenship in general and the rights.
Mr. Sires. You know, obviously, this pandemic has had a
profound effect on learning and disengagement and student
dropout and teacher burnout. How should policymakers continue
to work to mitigate these effects that the pandemic has left us
with?
All three of you can answer that if you would like.
Mr. Zinny. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And there is a lot of research on this that governments can
work to eventually recover that loss. Many governments
extending the calendar year, in terms of adding more days to
the calendar year, so students can recover classes, especially
the most vulnerable students that lost more education and more
learning because they didn't have access or didn't have
connectivity. Some governments are adding some hours during the
week or are bringing some after-school programs to try to catch
up.
But I think that the key here is to understand that we need
to recover that loss, especially for the most vulnerable
communities in Latin America. They will never recover, and they
might be losing 1 year or 2 years of schooling. So we need to
work on that. And governments should work on recovering that
and not only improve quality of education for the future.
Mr. Reimers. I think we need to understand that public
education is undergoing the most serious crisis in its history
since public schools were invented and that solving this crisis
is going to require a whole-of-society effort.
Now, I think that we have good experience to draw on. In
the United States, for example, in the 1990's, I remember a
bipartisan initiative--I believe it was under the Presidency of
George Bush--that involved the Department of Labor, the
Department of Education, our two main teacher unions, and our
main technology companies, where they understood that
technology was going to fundamentally transform the opportunity
to participate economically and civically.
And the result of that effort was something called the
Partnership for 21st Century Skills, an unprecedented effort. I
saw its impact in my State, in Massachusetts, helping our
States to understand that we had to broaden our view of the
competencies that students needed to develop.
I think that examples like that tell us what the road
forward is. The road forward is to come together for the future
of the Nation and of democracy itself, in a bipartisan way,
understanding that this is going to require not only a whole-
of-government effort, but is going to require the private
sector, is going to require civil society, is going to require
our teacher unions--an exercise, what is known as collective
leadership, for the interest of the children.
Right now, as we speak, as the United Nations meet on the
77th General Assembly, the Secretary-General of the U.N. has
convened a Global Summit on Education. And this summit, which
will begin this weekend, is precisely designed to place
education at the center of the agenda of societies, not just of
governments but of societies, recognizing that the enormous
challenges that we are facing--the challenges of democratic
backsliding, the challenge of social fragmentation, the
challenge of increasing conflict within nations and across
nations, the challenge of growing poverty, inequality, and of
climate change--none of those challenges can be addressed
without education as a bedrock and the cornerstone of building
those.
So I think the answer to your very good question, Mr.
Chairman, is: The way in which policymakers can lead is
facilitating a coalition, a multistakeholder coalition, of all
the forces of society to come together to support children and
youth in their learning. Because nothing less than the further
of societies as we know them is at stake.
Mr. Sires. Thank you.
Mr. Folgar. I would agree with the last part of what Mr.
Reimers was saying, but I would like to add that we have to
take into consideration that the importance of education should
be addressed in a team way.
We cannot put--you referred to the burnout problem teachers
are having. I have been following the reality here in the
United States where teachers are actually dropping from the
profession, and in the States there is a teacher shortage
because of this. And I think that that is because we put all of
the pressure in education and none of the teamwork in
education.
Teachers are responsible for this very important
relationship between the student and the school, but they are
also people who need to be seen as part of a team. And if
policymakers don't create regulations and laws that foster that
ecosystem of teamwork between families, schools, the State, and
the private sector, making education a social issue, an
everyday social issue, we are not going to have good results in
the near future.
And I think that that is the point in what Fernando was
saying about this coalition should be not about policing and
controlling but about teamwork and a virtual circle of better
education for everyone.
Mr. Sires. Thank you.
I am going to ask you this question on behalf of the
chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He asked me to ask
you this question.
How has the pandemic impacted learning loss in marginalized
communities, particularly indigenous, Afro-descendent, students
with disabilities? How can we address this gap?
Mr. Reimers. That is the question of the hour. The pandemic
has most significantly affected the most marginalized students,
because they experience not only the impact of deficient
arrangements of their schools to reach them, but they also
experience the greatest impact--health impact, economic
impact--of the pandemic.
So, in Latin America, as is the case in other places, the
pandemic has increased inequality. In one study that we
conducted of the Global Initiative, looking comparatively at
how the pandemic had impacted students in 20 countries, the
single conclusion is that the most important factors that
mediated the impact of the pandemic on education were
nationality and social class.
Nationality because the choices governments made made a
huge difference. If you carry a Finnish passport, a Portuguese
passport, or a Singaporean passport, you were impacted
significantly less than if you carry an American passport, a
Brazilian passport, a Mexican passport. Because, in those
countries, the choices that governments made actually did not
protect, in particular, the education of the most vulnerable
students.
And the second factor is social class, because, as the
pandemic moved the responsibility for education to the home,
the enormous differences in the home circumstances of teachers
played an even greater role than they normally do.
So I think that is the priority of the moment, is to
concentrate our efforts in those students who are most
vulnerable, who are today further behind than they used to be
from their peers.
Mr. Sires. Well, I am very interested in this topic. My
wife spent 37 years in education. So did I.
Unfortunately--and I want to thank you for being flexible
with the time today. And the reason we did that is because we
have, obviously, votes and things that are going. And you have
been very kind to be flexible and not abandoning me, so I thank
you. I thank you very much.
I will now proceed to closing the hearing. Votes are going
to be called in a while. So I thank you.
Obviously, this is a topic that needs a lot of looking
into. I think we are going to be impacted because of what COVID
did to education in the next decade or more. And we have to
keep an eye on how our students are progressing that have
fallen behind, not only here but, obviously, in the rest of the
world, because COVID impacted just about everybody.
So I thank you, and I now move to close the hearing. Thank
you.
[Whereupon, at 1:39 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
APPENDIX
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RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
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