[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
        
        
        
        
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Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/, http://docs.house.gov, 

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                         ______
 
              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:]
    
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    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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