educational problem and solution

The global education challenge: Scaling up to tackle the learning crisis

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Alice albright alice albright chief executive officer - global partnership for education.

July 25, 2019

The following is one of eight briefs commissioned for the 16th annual Brookings Blum Roundtable, “2020 and beyond: Maintaining the bipartisan narrative on US global development.”

Addressing today’s massive global education crisis requires some disruption and the development of a new 21st-century aid delivery model built on a strong operational public-private partnership and results-based financing model that rewards political leadership and progress on overcoming priority obstacles to equitable access and learning in least developed countries (LDCs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Success will also require a more efficient and unified global education architecture. More money alone will not fix the problem. Addressing this global challenge requires new champions at the highest level and new approaches.

Key data points

In an era when youth are the fastest-growing segment of the population in many parts of the world, new data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) reveals that an estimated 263 million children and young people are out of school, overwhelmingly in LDCs and LMICs. 1 On current trends, the International Commission on Financing Education Opportunity reported in 2016 that, a far larger number—825 million young people—will not have the basic literacy, numeracy, and digital skills to compete for the jobs of 2030. 2 Absent a significant political and financial investment in their education, beginning with basic education, there is a serious risk that this youth “bulge” will drive instability and constrain economic growth.

Despite progress in gender parity, it will take about 100 years to reach true gender equality at secondary school level in LDCs and LMICs. Lack of education and related employment opportunities in these countries presents national, regional, and global security risks.

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Among global education’s most urgent challenges is a severe lack of trained teachers, particularly female teachers. An additional 9 million trained teachers are needed in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.

Refugees and internally displaced people, now numbering over 70 million, constitute a global crisis. Two-thirds of the people in this group are women and children; host countries, many fragile themselves, struggle to provide access to education to such people.

Highlighted below are actions and reforms that could lead the way toward solving the crisis:

• Leadership to jump-start transformation. The next U.S. administration should convene a high-level White House conference of sovereign donors, developing country leaders, key multilateral organizations, private sector and major philanthropists/foundations, and civil society to jump-start and energize a new, 10-year global response to this challenge. A key goal of this decadelong effort should be to transform education systems in the world’s poorest countries, particularly for girls and women, within a generation. That implies advancing much faster than the 100-plus years required if current programs and commitments remain as is.
• A whole-of-government leadership response. Such transformation of currently weak education systems in scores of countries over a generation will require sustained top-level political leadership, accompanied by substantial new donor and developing country investments. To ensure sustained attention for this initiative over multiple years, the U.S. administration will need to designate senior officials in the State Department, USAID, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and elsewhere to form a whole-of-government leadership response that can energize other governments and actors.
• Teacher training and deployment at scale. A key component of a new global highest-level effort, based on securing progress against the Sustainable Development Goals and the Addis 2030 Framework, should be the training and deployment of 9 million new qualified teachers, particularly female teachers, in sub-Saharan Africa where they are most needed. Over 90 percent of the Global Partnership for Education’s education sector implementation grants have included investments in teacher development and training and 76 percent in the provision of learning materials.
• Foster positive disruption by engaging community level non-state actors who are providing education services in marginal areas where national systems do not reach the population. Related to this, increased financial and technical support to national governments are required to strengthen their non-state actor regulatory frameworks. Such frameworks must ensure that any non-state actors operate without discrimination and prioritize access for the most marginalized. The ideological divide on this issue—featuring a strong resistance by defenders of public education to tap into the capacities and networks of non-state actors—must be resolved if we are to achieve a rapid breakthrough.
• Confirm the appropriate roles for technology in equitably advancing access and quality of education, including in the initial and ongoing training of teachers and administrators, delivery of distance education to marginalized communities and assessment of learning, strengthening of basic systems, and increased efficiency of systems. This is not primarily about how various gadgets can help advance education goals.
• Commodity component. Availability of appropriate learning materials for every child sitting in a classroom—right level, right language, and right subject matter. Lack of books and other learning materials is a persistent problem throughout education systems—from early grades through to teaching colleges. Teachers need books and other materials to do their jobs. Consider how the USAID-hosted Global Book Alliance, working to address costs and supply chain issues, distribution challenges, and more can be strengthened and supported to produce the model(s) that can overcome these challenges.

Annual high-level stock take at the G-7. The next U.S. administration can work with G-7 partners to secure agreement on an annual stocktaking of progress against this new global education agenda at the upcoming G-7 summits. This also will help ensure sustained focus and pressure to deliver especially on equity and inclusion. Global Partnership for Education’s participation at the G-7 Gender Equality Advisory Council is helping ensure that momentum is maintained to mobilize the necessary political leadership and expertise at country level to rapidly step up progress in gender equality, in and through education. 3 Also consider a role for the G-20, given participation by some developing country partners.

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• “263 Million Children and Youth Are Out of School.” UNESCO UIS. July 15, 2016. http://uis.unesco.org/en/news/263-million-children-and-youth-are-out-school.
• “The Learning Generation: Investing in education for a changing world.” The International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. 2016. https://report.educationcommission.org/downloads/.
• “Influencing the most powerful nations to invest in the power of girls.” Global Partnership for Education. March 12, 2019. https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/influencing-most-powerful-nations-invest-power-girls.

Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Christine Apiot Okudi, Atenea Rosado-Viurques, Jennifer L. O’Donoghue

August 23, 2024

Sudha Ghimire

August 22, 2024

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11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

The Education Crisis: Being in School Is Not the Same as Learning

First grade students in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province are learning the alphabet through child-friendly flash cards. Their learning materials help educators teach through interactive and engaging activities and are provided free of charge through a student’s first learning backpack. © World Bank 

THE NAME OF THE DOG IS PUPPY. This seems like a simple sentence. But did you know that in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, three out of four third grade students do not understand it? The world is facing a learning crisis . Worldwide, hundreds of millions of children reach young adulthood without even the most basic skills like calculating the correct change from a transaction, reading a doctor’s instructions, or understanding a bus schedule—let alone building a fulfilling career or educating their children. Education is at the center of building human capital. The latest World Bank research shows that the productivity of 56 percent of the world’s children will be less than half of what it could be if they enjoyed complete education and full health. For individuals, education raises self-esteem and furthers opportunities for employment and earnings. And for a country, it helps strengthen institutions within societies, drives long-term economic growth, reduces poverty, and spurs innovation.

One of the most interesting, large scale educational technology efforts is being led by EkStep , a philanthropic effort in India. EkStep created an open digital infrastructure which provides access to learning opportunities for 200 million children, as well as professional development opportunities for 12 million teachers and 4.5 million school leaders. Both teachers and children are accessing content which ranges from teaching materials, explanatory videos, interactive content, stories, practice worksheets, and formative assessments. By monitoring which content is used most frequently—and most beneficially—informed decisions can be made around future content.

In the Dominican Republic, a World Bank supported pilot study shows how adaptive technologies can generate great interest among 21st century students and present a path to supporting the learning and teaching of future generations. Yudeisy, a sixth grader participating in the study, says that what she likes doing the most during the day is watching videos and tutorials on her computer and cell phone. Taking childhood curiosity as a starting point, the study aimed to channel it towards math learning in a way that interests Yudeisy and her classmates.

Yudeisy, along with her classmates in a public elementary school in Santo Domingo, is part of a four-month pilot to reinforce mathematics using software that adapts to the math level of each student. © World Bank

Adaptive technology was used to evaluate students’ initial learning level to then walk them through math exercises in a dynamic, personalized way, based on artificial intelligence and what the student is ready to learn. After three months, students with the lowest initial performance achieved substantial improvements. This shows the potential of technology to increase learning outcomes, especially among students lagging behind their peers. In a field that is developing at dizzying speeds, innovative solutions to educational challenges are springing up everywhere. Our challenge is to make technology a driver of equity and inclusion and not a source of greater inequality of opportunity. We are working with partners worldwide to support the effective and appropriate use of educational technologies to strengthen learning.

When schools and educations systems are managed well, learning happens

Successful education reforms require good policy design, strong political commitment, and effective implementation capacity . Of course, this is extremely challenging. Many countries struggle to make efficient use of resources and very often increased education spending does not translate into more learning and improved human capital. Overcoming such challenges involves working at all levels of the system.

At the central level, ministries of education need to attract the best experts to design and implement evidence-based and country-specific programs. District or regional offices need the capacity and the tools to monitor learning and support schools. At the school level, principals need to be trained and prepared to manage and lead schools, from planning the use of resources to supervising and nurturing their teachers. However difficult, change is possible. Supported by the World Bank, public schools across Punjab in Pakistan have been part of major reforms over the past few years to address these challenges. Through improved school-level accountability by monitoring and limiting teacher and student absenteeism, and the introduction of a merit-based teacher recruitment system, where only the most talented and motivated teachers were selected, they were able to increase enrollment and retention of students and significantly improve the quality of education. "The government schools have become very good now, even better than private ones," said Mr. Ahmed, a local villager.

The World Bank, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK’s Department for International Development, is developing the Global Education Policy Dashboard . This new initiative will provide governments with a system for monitoring how their education systems are functioning, from learning data to policy plans, so they are better able to make timely and evidence-based decisions.

Education reform: The long game is worth it

In fact, it will take a generation to realize the full benefits of high-quality teachers, the effective use of technology, improved management of education systems, and engaged and prepared learners. However, global experience shows us that countries that have rapidly accelerated development and prosperity all share the common characteristic of taking education seriously and investing appropriately. As we mark the first-ever International Day of Education on January 24, we must do all we can to equip our youth with the skills to keep learning, adapt to changing realities, and thrive in an increasingly competitive global economy and a rapidly changing world of work.

The schools of the future are being built today. These are schools where all teachers have the right competencies and motivation, where technology empowers them to deliver quality learning, and where all students learn fundamental skills, including socio-emotional, and digital skills. These schools are safe and affordable to everyone and are places where children and young people learn with joy, rigor, and purpose. Governments, teachers, parents, and the international community must do their homework to realize the promise of education for all students, in every village, in every city, and in every country. 

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Recognizing and Overcoming Inequity in Education

About the author, sylvia schmelkes.

Sylvia Schmelkes is Provost of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

22 January 2020 Introduction

I nequity is perhaps the most serious problem in education worldwide. It has multiple causes, and its consequences include differences in access to schooling, retention and, more importantly, learning. Globally, these differences correlate with the level of development of various countries and regions. In individual States, access to school is tied to, among other things, students' overall well-being, their social origins and cultural backgrounds, the language their families speak, whether or not they work outside of the home and, in some countries, their sex. Although the world has made progress in both absolute and relative numbers of enrolled students, the differences between the richest and the poorest, as well as those living in rural and urban areas, have not diminished. 1

These correlations do not occur naturally. They are the result of the lack of policies that consider equity in education as a principal vehicle for achieving more just societies. The pandemic has exacerbated these differences mainly due to the fact that technology, which is the means of access to distance schooling, presents one more layer of inequality, among many others.

The dimension of educational inequity

Around the world, 258 million, or 17 per cent of the world’s children, adolescents and youth, are out of school. The proportion is much larger in developing countries: 31 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and 21 per cent in Central Asia, vs. 3 per cent in Europe and North America. 2  Learning, which is the purpose of schooling, fares even worse. For example, it would take 15-year-old Brazilian students 75 years, at their current rate of improvement, to reach wealthier countries’ average scores in math, and more than 260 years in reading. 3 Within countries, learning results, as measured through standardized tests, are almost always much lower for those living in poverty. In Mexico, for example, 80 per cent of indigenous children at the end of primary school don’t achieve basic levels in reading and math, scoring far below the average for primary school students. 4

The causes of educational inequity

There are many explanations for educational inequity. In my view, the most important ones are the following:

• Equity and equality are not the same thing. Equality means providing the same resources to everyone. Equity signifies giving more to those most in need. Countries with greater inequity in education results are also those in which governments distribute resources according to the political pressure they experience in providing education. Such pressures come from families in which the parents attended school, that reside in urban areas, belong to cultural majorities and who have a clear appreciation of the benefits of education. Much less pressure comes from rural areas and indigenous populations, or from impoverished urban areas. In these countries, fewer resources, including infrastructure, equipment, teachers, supervision and funding, are allocated to the disadvantaged, the poor and cultural minorities.
• Teachers are key agents for learning. Their training is crucial.  When insufficient priority is given to either initial or in-service teacher training, or to both, one can expect learning deficits. Teachers in poorer areas tend to have less training and to receive less in-service support.
• Most countries are very diverse. When a curriculum is overloaded and is the same for everyone, some students, generally those from rural areas, cultural minorities or living in poverty find little meaning in what is taught. When the language of instruction is different from their native tongue, students learn much less and drop out of school earlier.
• Disadvantaged students frequently encounter unfriendly or overtly offensive attitudes from both teachers and classmates. Such attitudes are derived from prejudices, stereotypes, outright racism and sexism. Students in hostile environments are affected in their disposition to learn, and many drop out early.

It doesn’t have to be like this

When left to inertial decision-making, education systems seem to be doomed to reproduce social and economic inequity. The commitment of both governments and societies to equity in education is both necessary and possible. There are several examples of more equitable educational systems in the world, and there are many subnational examples of successful policies fostering equity in education.

Why is equity in education important?

Education is a basic human right. More than that, it is an enabling right in the sense that, when respected, allows for the fulfillment of other human rights. Education has proven to affect general well-being, productivity, social capital, responsible citizenship and sustainable behaviour. Its equitable distribution allows for the creation of permeable societies and equity. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. One hundred eighty-four countries are committed to achieving this goal over the next decade. 5  The process of walking this road together has begun and requires impetus to continue, especially now that we must face the devastating consequences of a long-lasting pandemic. Further progress is crucial for humanity.

Notes  1 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , Inclusive Education. All Means All , Global Education Monitoring Report 2020 (Paris, 2020), p.8. Available at https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/report/2020/inclusion . 2 Ibid., p. 4, 7. 3 World Bank Group, World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education's Promise (Washington, DC, 2018), p. 3. Available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018 .  4 Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación, "La educación obligatoria en México", Informe 2018 (Ciudad de México, 2018), p. 72. Available online at https://www.inee.edu.mx/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/P1I243.pdf . 5 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , “Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action for the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4” (2015), p. 23. Available at  https://iite.unesco.org/publications/education-2030-incheon-declaration-framework-action-towards-inclusive-equitable-quality-education-lifelong-learning/   The UN Chronicle  is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.   

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Educational challenges and opportunities of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

Jaime saavedra.

We are living amidst what is potentially one of the greatest threats in our lifetime to global education, a gigantic educational crisis. As of March 28, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing more than 1.6 billion children and youth to be out of school in 161 countries. This is close to 80% of the world’s enrolled students.  We were already experiencing a global leaning crisis, as many students were in school, but were not learning the fundamental skills needed for life. The World Bank’s “ Learning Poverty ” indicator – the % of children who cannot read and understand at age 10 – stood at 53% of children in low- and middle-income countries – before the outbreak started. This pandemic has the potential to worsen these outcomes even more if we do not act fast.

What should we be worried about in this phase of the crisis that might have an immediate impact on children and youth? (1) Losses in learning (2) Increased dropout rates (3) Children missing their most important meal of the day. Moreover, most countries have very unequal education systems, and these negative impacts will be felt disproportionately by poor children. When it rains, it pours for them.    

Learning . Starting the school year late or interrupting it (depending on if they live in the southern or northern hemisphere) completely disrupts the lives of many children, their parents, and teachers. A lot can be done to at least reduce the impact through remote learning strategies. Richer countries are better prepared to move to online learning strategies, although with a lot of effort and challenges for teachers and parents. In middle-income and poorer countries, the situation is very mixed and if we do not act appropriately, the vast inequality of opportunities that exists – egregious and unacceptable to start with – will be amplified. Many children do not have a desk, books, internet connectivity, a laptop at home, or supportive parents. Others do. What we need to avoid – or minimize as much as possible – is for those differences in opportunities to expand and cause the crisis to have an even larger negative effect on poor children’s learning.  

Fortunately, we are seeing a lot of creativity in many countries. Rightly so, many ministries of education are worried that relying exclusively on online strategies will imply reaching only children from better-off families. The appropriate strategy in most countries is to use all possible delivery modes with the infrastructure that exists today. Use online tools to assure that lesson plans, videos, tutorials, and other resources are available for some students and probably, most teachers. But also, podcasts and other resources that require less data usage. Working with telecommunication companies to apply zero-rate policies can also facilitate learning material to be downloaded on a smartphone, which more students are likely to have. 

Radio and TV are also very powerful tools. The advantage we have today, is that through social networks, WhatsApp or SMS, ministries of education can communicate effectively with parents and teachers and provide guidelines, instructions and structure to the learning process, using content delivered by radio or TV. Remote learning is not only about online learning, but about mixed media learning, with the objective of reaching as many students as possible, today.

Staying engaged. Maintaining the engagement of children, particularly young secondary school students is critical. Dropout rates are still very high in many countries, and a long period of disengagement can result in a further increase. Going to school is not only about learning math and science, but also about social relationships and peer-to-peer interactions. It is about learning to be a citizen and developing social skills. That is why it is important to stay connected with the school by any means necessary. For all students, this is also a time to develop socio-emotional skills and learn more about how to contribute to society as a citizen. The role of parents and family, which has always been extremely important, is critical in that task. So, a lot of the help that ministries of education provide, working through mass media, should also go to parents. Radio, TV, SMS messages can all be used to provide tips and advice to them on how to better support their children.

Meals.  In many parts of the world, school feeding programs provide children with their most nutritious meal of the day. They are essential for the cognitive development and well-being. These programs are complex logistical and administrative endeavors. It is not easy, but countries should find the way to provide those meals using the school buildings in an organized fashion, community buildings or networks, or, if needed, distribute directly to the families. If delivering meals or food is not feasible logistically, cash transfer programs should be expanded or implemented to compensate the parents. Planning is needed, but one has to be ready to flexibly adjust plans, as the information we have about the likely paths of the pandemic change day by day, influenced by the uncertainty around which mitigation measures countries are taking. The process of reopening of schools might be gradual, as authorities will want to reduce agglomeration or the possibility of a second wave of the pandemic, which can affect some countries. In that uncertain context, it might be better to make decisions assuming a longer, rather than a shorter scenario. The good news is that many of the improvements, initiatives, and investments that school systems will have to make might have a positive long-lasting effect.

Some countries will be able to increase their teachers’ digital skills. Radio and TV stations will recognize their key role in supporting national education goals – and hopefully, improve the quality of their programming understanding their immense social responsibility. Parents will be more involved in their children’s education process, and ministries of education will have a much clearer understanding of the gaps and challenges (in connectivity, hardware, integration of digital tools in the curriculum, teacher’s readiness) that exist in using technology effectively and act upon that. All of this can strengthen the future education system in a country.

The mission of all education systems is the same. It is to overcome the learning crisis we were already living and respond to the pandemic we are all facing. The challenge today is to reduce as much as possible the negative impact this pandemic will have on learning and schooling and build on this experience to get back on a path of faster improvement in learning. As education systems cope with this crisis, they must also be thinking of how they can recover stronger, with a renewed sense of responsibility of all actors and with a better understanding and sense of urgency of the need to close the gap in opportunities and assuring that all children have the same chances for a quality education.

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What Students Are Saying About How to Improve American Education

An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math. Teenagers told us what’s working and what’s not in the American education system.

By The Learning Network

Earlier this month, the Program for International Student Assessment announced that the performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000 . Other recent studies revealed that two-thirds of American children were not proficient readers , and that the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening.

We asked students to weigh in on these findings and to tell us their suggestions for how they would improve the American education system.

Our prompt received nearly 300 comments. This was clearly a subject that many teenagers were passionate about. They offered a variety of suggestions on how they felt schools could be improved to better teach and prepare students for life after graduation.

While we usually highlight three of our most popular writing prompts in our Current Events Conversation , this week we are only rounding up comments for this one prompt so we can honor the many students who wrote in.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

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Bridget Long, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, addresses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in the field of education.

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Post-pandemic challenges for schools

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Ed School dean says flexibility, more hours key to avoid learning loss

With the closing of schools, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many of the injustices facing schoolchildren across the country, from inadequate internet access to housing instability to food insecurity. The Gazette interviewed Bridget Long, A.M. ’97, Ph.D. ’00, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Saris Professor of Education and Economics, regarding her views on the impact the public health crisis has had on schools, the lessons learned from the pandemic, and the challenges ahead.

Bridget Long

GAZETTE:   The pandemic exposed many inequities that already existed in the education landscape. Which ones concern you the most?

LONG:   Persistent inequities in education have always been a concern, but with the speed and magnitude of the changes brought on by the pandemic, it underscored several major problems. First of all, we often think about education as being solely an academic enterprise, but our schools really do so much more. Immediately, we saw children and families struggling with basic needs, such as access to food and health care, which our schools provide but all of a sudden were removed. We also shifted our focus, once we had to be in lockdown, to the differences in students’ home environments, whether it was lack of access to technology and the other commitments and demands on their time in terms of family situations, space, basic needs, and so forth. The focus had to shift from leveling the playing field within school or within college to instead what are the differences in inequities inside students’ homes and neighborhoods and the differences in the quality and rigor and supports available to students of different backgrounds. All of this was just exacerbated with the pandemic. There are concerns about learning loss and how that will vary across different income groups, communities, and neighborhoods. But there are also concerns about trauma and the mental health strain of the pandemic and how the strain of racial injustice and political turmoil has also been experienced — no doubt differently by different parts of population. And all of that has impacted students’ well-being and academic performance. The inequities we have long seen have become worse this year.

GAZETTE:   Now that those inequities have been exposed, what can leaders in education do to navigate those issues? Are there any specific lessons learned?

LONG:   Something that many educators already understood is that one size does not fit all. This is why education is so complex and why it has been so challenging to bring about improvements because there’s no silver bullet. The solution depends on the individual, the community, and the classroom.

At first, the public health crisis underscored that we needed to meet students where they are. This has been a long-held lesson among experienced education professionals, but it became even more important. In many respects, it butted up against some of our systems, which tried to come up with across-the-board approaches when instead what we needed was a bit of nimbleness depending on the context of the particular school or classroom and the individual needs of students.

Where you have seen some success and progress is where principals and teachers have been proactive and creative in how they can meet the needs of their students. What’s underneath all of this, regardless of whether we’re face-to-face or on technology, is the importance of people and personal connections. Education is a labor-intensive industry. Technology can help us in many respects to supplement or complement what we do, but the key has always been individual personal connection. Some teachers have been able to connect with their students, whether by phone or on Zoom, or schools, where they put concerted effort into doing outreach in the community to check on families to make sure they had basic needs. Some schools were able to understand what challenges their students were facing and were somewhat flexible and proactive to address those challenges, especially if they already had strong parental engagement. That’s where you have continued to see progress and growth.

“In many respects, this crisis forced the entire field to rethink our teaching in a way that I don’t know has happened before.”

GAZETTE:   You spoke about concerns about learning loss. What can we do to avoid a lost year?

LONG:   One of the difficulties is that the experience has differed tremendously. For some students, their parents have been able to supplement or their schools have been able to react. The hope is that they will not lose much learning time, while other students effectively haven’t been in school for almost a year; they have lost quite a bit of ground. As a teacher, you can imagine your students come back to school, and all of a sudden, students of the same chronological age are actually in very different places, depending on their individual family situation and what accommodations were able to be made. I think there’s a great deal we can do to try to address that. First of all, we have to have some understanding of what gains students have made as well as things they haven’t learned yet. That means taking a moment to see where a student is in their learning. The second thing is to make sure we’re capturing the lessons learned from this pandemic by identifying places where teachers and schools used a combination of technology, outreach, personal instruction, and tutors and mentors, and helped students make progress in their learning. We need to share those lessons more broadly so that other districts can see examples that have worked.

As we look ahead, I think it will take extending learning time to close the gaps. Schools will have to decide whether that is after school, weekends, or summer, and whether or not that’s going to involve the teachers themselves, or if it’s going to be using the best tools that are out there, such as videos and technology platforms that students and families use themselves. There has already been talk by some districts of extending the school year into summer or having summer-camp-type programs to give students additional time to work through some of the material.

The other important piece is partnerships. Schools oftentimes work with members of the community or nonprofit organizations, and that’s a really important layer in our system. After-school programs, enrichment programs, tutors, and mentors are essential, and we really want to continue with that expanded sense of capacity and partnership. It’s going to have an impact on all of us if we lose a generation, or if this generation goes backwards in terms of their learning. It certainly is in all of our best interests to try to contribute to the solution.

GAZETTE:   Many parents gained renewed appreciation of the work teachers do. Do you think the pandemic would lead to a reappraisal of the profession?

LONG:   Certainly, in the beginning, there was so much more appreciation for what teachers do. As parents needed to start doing homeschooling, there was a new understanding of just how difficult teaching is. Imagine having a classroom with different personalities, different strengths and assets, and also different weaknesses, and somehow being nimble enough to continue that class moving forward. As time has gone on, I worry a little bit about the level of contentiousness in some communities as schools haven’t reopened. There is the balancing act between caring for children’s learning and the fact that we have to make sure that the adults are safe and supported. You hear stories of teachers trying to teach from home while they are also homeschooling their own children. I would hope that coming out of this would be an appreciation of the amazing things teachers do in the classroom, as well as also some acknowledgement that these are people who are also living through a devastating pandemic with all the stress and strain that every individual is going through.

One other point is that given that we know that teachers do more than just academics, we need to make sure our teachers are trained to be able to provide social emotional support to students. As some of the students come back into the classroom, we need to acknowledge that they may be dealing with devastating losses, or the frustration of being kept inside, or the violence that is happening in their homes and neighborhoods. It’s very hard to learn if you’re first dealing with those kinds of issues. Our teachers already do so much, and we need to support them more and provide even more training to help them address that wide-ranging set of challenges their students may be facing even before they can get to the learning part.

“Something that many educators already understood is that one size does not fit all. This is why education is so complex and why it has been so challenging to bring about improvements because there’s no silver bullet.”

GAZETTE:   Are there any silver linings in education brought on by the pandemic?

LONG:   The first one is when we all needed to pivot last spring, and especially this fall, many educators took a moment to pause and reflect on their learning goals and priorities. There was a great deal of discussion, both in K‒12 and higher education, to think carefully and deliberately about the ways in which we could make sure our teaching was engaging and active and how we could bring in different voices and perspectives. In many respects, this crisis forced the entire field to rethink our teaching in a way that I don’t know has happened before. The second silver lining is the innovation and creativity. Because there wasn’t necessarily one right answer, you saw a lot of experimentation. We have seen an explosion of different approaches to teaching, and many more people got involved in that process, not just some small 10 percent of the teaching force. We’ve identified new ways of engaging with our students, and we’ve also increased the capacity of our educators to be able to deliver new ways of engagement. From this process, my hope is that we’ll walk away with even more tools and approaches to how we engage our students, so that we can then make choices about what to do face-to-face, how to use technology, and what to do in more of an asynchronous sort of way. But key to this is being able to share those lessons learned with others, how you were able to still maintain connection, how you were better able to teach certain material, and perhaps even build better relationships with parents and families during this process. Just the innovation, experimentation, and growth of instructors in many places has been very positive in so many respects.

GAZETTE:   In which ways do you think the education system should be transformed after this year? How should it be rebuilt?

LONG:   First, we’ve all had to understand that education and schools are not a spot on a map. They are actually communities; they have to include families, nonprofit organizations, and community-based organizations. For a university in particular, it’s not just about coming to campus; it’s actually about the people coming together, and how they are involved in learning from each other. It’s great to push on this reconceptualization and to be clear that education is an exchange of information, of perspective, of content, and making connections, regardless of the age of the student. The crisis has also forced us to go back to some of the fundamentals of what do we need students to learn, and how are we going to accomplish those goals. That has been a very important discussion for education. And the third part is realizing that education is not a one-size-fits-all. The best educators use multiple methods and approaches to be able to connect with their students, to be able to present material, and to provide support. That’s always been the case. How do we meet students where they are? That framing is one that I hope will not go away because all students have the potential to learn, and it’s a matter of how to personalize the learning experience to meet their needs, how we notice and provide supports to help learners who are struggling. That really is at the core of education, and I hope that we will take away that lesson as we look ahead.

GAZETTE:   What do you think the role of higher education should be in this new educational landscape?

LONG: Higher education has an incredibly important role, and in particular given the economic recession. Traditionally, this is when many more people go into higher education to learn new skills, given what’s happening in the labor market. We have yet to see what the long-term impact is going to be, but in the short term, one thing we’ve noticed is that college enrollments are down. That’s very alarming and may have to do with how suddenly and how quickly the pandemic affected society. The first thing that higher education is going to have to think about is increasing proactive outreach — how to connect with potential students and how to help them get into programs that are going to give them skills necessary for this changing economy. Unfortunately, they’ll be doing this in a context where students are going to have greater needs, and where it’s not quite clear if funding from state and local governments is going to be declining. That’s the challenge that higher education will have to face. While it’s an amazing instrument in helping individuals further their skills or retool their skills, we need to make investments and make sure individuals can actually access the training available in our colleges and universities.

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GAZETTE:   What are your hopes for the Biden administration in the area of education?

LONG:   Government has a very important role in education, but it has to be balanced with the importance of local control and the fact that the context of every community is slightly different. Certainly, as we’ve been in the middle of a public health crisis, this has been incredibly challenging for schools. Schools had been trying to continue providing food and health care and connect with their students and, all of a sudden, they had to become experts in public health and buildings. This is something that falls under the purview of the federal government. Having access to the best doctors, the best public health officials, and people who think about buildings, and how to make things safe, the government needs to put that information together to give guidance to schools, principals, and teachers. It’s the government that can say, “Here are the risks, and here are the things you can do to mitigate those risks. Here are the conditions that are necessary for buildings. Here is what we know in terms of preventing spread, and here is what we know about the impact on children of different ages, and how we can protect the adults.” That kind of guidance would be incredibly helpful, as you have all of these individual school districts trying to sort through complex information and what the science says and how it applies to their particular context. Guidance is No. 1.

No. 2 is data. It’s very important having some understanding about where we stand in terms of learning loss, what we need to prioritize, and what areas of the country perhaps need more help than others. The other key component is to gauge what lessons have been learned and share the best practices across all school districts. The idea is to use the federal government as a central information bank with proactive outreach to schools. Government also plays a critical role in funding the research that will document the lessons from this pandemic.

It’s going to be incredibly helpful to have a more active federal government. As we have a better sense about where our students are the most vulnerable, and what are the kinds of high-impact practices that would be most beneficial, it’s going to be critical having the funding to support those kinds of investments because they will most certainly pay off. That possibility, I’m much more optimistic about now.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity

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Using an Inquiry Process to Solve Persistent Classroom Problems

Teachers can resolve challenges that come up over and over by using data to keep testing strategies until they find what works.

The start of a new school year is always filled with anticipation. Teachers hope for engaged students who want to attain success. Students set personal goals and often hope that this year will be better than last year. Parents want their children to try hard, do well, and they want their children’s teachers to be supportive and offer a safe learning space. The new school year is often filled with hope.

However, despite all the best intentions, at some point, the teacher will encounter a problem. Many problems can be resolved with the knowledge acquired through a teacher’s experience. Students may forget to bring a pencil to class, so you just keep a jar of sharpened pencils on your desk. Students who are English language learners struggle to read Shakespeare, so you provide them and all the other students with a link to the audio version of the play that they can listen to. These impromptu decisions have the potential to swiftly address the problem, thereby eliminating the need for further investigation.

What is Teacher Inquiry?

But what is a teacher supposed to do if a problem persists over time? Some students are always late to class right after lunch. Some students never raise their hand to participate in a class discussion. Some students don’t effectively edit their work prior to handing it in. How can a teacher work to identify strategies that can solve these persistent classroom problems? This is where teacher inquiry becomes a valuable tool.

As Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle discuss in their book Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation , teacher inquiry is a process of questioning, exploring, and implementing strategies to address persistent classroom challenges. It mirrors the active learning process we encourage in students and can transform recurring problems into opportunities for growth. Most important, it also creates space for students to share their voices and perspectives—allowing them to play a role in guiding the changes that are implemented in the classroom.

How to Start the Inquiry Process

Identify the problem. Begin by clearly defining the issue. For example, if students are frequently late after lunch, consider this as your inquiry focus.

Gather action information. Before rushing to solutions, gather insights from blogs, research, books, or colleagues. For instance, if the problem is tardiness, you might explore strategies like greeting students at the door or starting the class with a high-energy, collaborative activity that is engaging for students .

Frame your inquiry question. Craft a focused question using the format: What impact does X have on Y? Here X is the planned intervention, and Y is the behavior.

• What impact does greeting students at the classroom door have on their punctuality?
• What impact does a sharing circle have on students’ presentation anxiety?

This approach shifts the perspective from seeing students as the problem to exploring solutions to unwanted behaviors. Rather than saying, “Students are always late to class right after lunch,” we can ask, “What impact does an engaging collaborative activity at the start of class have on students’ punctuality?” 

Implementing and Assessing the Strategy

Plan data collection. Before implementing your strategy, decide how you’ll measure its effectiveness. This could involve the following:

Quantitative data: Use attendance records, test scores, or quick surveys—whether digital or paper-based—to track student engagement. For example, monitor the number of students arriving on time before and after you start greeting them. Choose the survey method that best fits your classroom’s needs, whether it’s a digital link or QR code for students with technology, or a paper survey for those without.

Qualitative data: Collect student feedback through informal interviews or reflective journals to understand their experiences.

Mixed methods: You can collect a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to allow for quick, easy-to-read facts (quantitative) with an understanding of the why (qualitative) for the data.

Tip: To avoid overwhelming yourself, use data that you’re already collecting and analyze it with your inquiry question in mind.

Implement the strategy. Start with a small, manageable change. If you’re trying to improve punctuality, greet students at the door for a week and note any changes.

Evaluating the Results

Analyze the data . Review your collected data to see if there’s a noticeable effect. Did more students arrive on time? If you used a survey, what do the results indicate about students’ attitudes?

Reflect on the outcome. If the strategy worked, consider how it can be sustained or adapted for other challenges. If it didn’t, reflect on why. Did the strategy need more time, or should a different approach be tried?

Example: If greeting students didn’t improve punctuality, consider if greeting needs to be combined with another intervention, like a change in seating arrangements or communicating with students’ families to remind them about the importance of punctuality.

What if the Strategy Doesn’t Work?

Not all inquiries lead to success, and that’s OK. If your initial strategy doesn’t yield the desired results, reflect on the process.

• What could be adjusted? Perhaps the data collection method wasn’t effective, or the strategy needs more time to show results.
• What did you learn? Even if the strategy didn’t solve the problem, what insights did you gain that could inform future inquiries?

Adopt the same growth mindset you encourage in your students in order to view setbacks as learning opportunities . Inquiry is a cycle of continuous improvement, not a onetime fix.

Embracing the Inquiry Mindset

Inquiry empowers teachers to approach challenges with curiosity and adaptability. By framing problems as opportunities to learn, gathering and analyzing data, and reflecting on outcomes, teachers model the persistence and growth mindset we aim to instill in our students. Even when results aren’t immediate, the process fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, benefiting teachers and students alike.

Asian Development Blog Straight Talk from Development Experts

Education is in Crisis: How Can Technology be Part of the Solution?

By Paul Vandenberg , Kirsty Newman , Milan Thomas

Digital technologies and EdTech could play a role in addressing the learning crisis underway in Asia and the Pacific.

A learning crisis affects many developing countries in Asia. Millions of children attend school but are not learning enough. They cannot read, write, or do mathematics at their grade level, and yet they pass to the next grade, learning even less because they have not grasped the previous material. The magnitude of the crisis is staggering: in low- and middle-income countries more than half of children are not learning to read by age 10.

At the same time, there is an emerging revolution in learning brought on by digital technologies . These are collectively referred to as educational technology or EdTech . The coincident emergence of a problem in education and a new approach to learning naturally makes us ask how one may be a solution for the other.

Edtech may be one part of the solution – but it should be a means not an end. Our guiding principle should be to first diagnose what is going wrong in a system and then identify which solutions are best suited to solve those problems.

Some causes of the learning crisis are well understood. The poor quality of teaching is a key factor. Teachers often lack subject knowledge and have not had adequate training. There are ways in which technology could address this – and so EdTech may be equally valuable in teaching teachers as it is in teaching students. By offering distance learning, EdTech can provide in-service training or combine online and in-person training (blended learning).

There is also evidence that teachers need better incentives. The idea is that that they can teach well but are not motivated to do so. It is not clear how EdTech can address this problem. Digitized school management systems could better track teacher performance (by tracking their students’ performance) and then linking to pay or other incentives. However, the main need is to design the incentive system; digital applications may only make that system more efficient.    

Computer-assisted learning is the direct means by which EdTech can help students. It can be seen as a partial solution for two fundamental learning crisis problems: addressing students at different learning levels and completing the syllabus. A classroom contains students with a range of baseline learning levels and teachers are often incentivized to teach to the upper stratum, leaving many students behind. Furthermore, teachers are pressured to cover the syllabus by year’s end. They move on to new material even if students have not mastered previous lessons. This also leaves students behind.

The solution to both problems is, of course, more tailored teaching, but a teacher is hard-pressed to provide one-on-one tutoring to 30 or 40 kids. EdTech might help provide one-to-one instruction (e.g., one student to one tablet) so pupils can learn at their own level and pace. The evidence from rigorous assessments (largely in the United States) is that packages that use artificial intelligence to adjust to a student’s level can improve results, especially in math.

However, we need to be cautious. Most of the evidence comes from contexts in which the quality of teaching is already quite good and is much above the average in developing countries. Digital systems can also help increase the efficiency of formative assessment and make it more likely that such assessment will be conducted. Tracking of students’ learning, through data collection and analysis, can help to better monitor a student’s learning level and provide level-appropriate teaching and remediation.     

Computer-assisted learning is the direct means by which EdTech can help students.

Edtech software, introduced in conjunction with other reforms, holds some promise. One notable success is Mindspark in India , which improves math and Hindi learning. It has been evaluated as an after-hours supplement and combined with human teaching assistance. More assessments of programs would be helpful.

There is also evidence that low-tech interventions for “teaching at the right level" can also have large impacts on learning. Careful analysis is needed to determine whether high-tech or low-tech solutions are best, given that low tech is less costly, and finance is a constraint in poor countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given a big push to EdTech. We can learn from these experiences but need to keep them in context. EdTech is being used to overcome the need to social distance. Teachers are teaching by video but not necessarily teaching better than when standing in front of a classroom. Zoom fatigue is a problem. More mass open online courses are being offered and are being taken up – but much of this is not for basic education and therefore does not address the learning crisis. 

Supporting EdTech solutions comes with four caveats. First, new initiatives need to be well-designed to address specific weaknesses. Low-quality teacher training delivered partially online is no better than low-quality in-person training. The same applies to computer-assisted learning.

Second, computer-assisted learning is often used in schools or in after-hours programs at or near schools.  Delivering as distance learning is trickier. It requires hardware and connectivity at home, which is not available to children in low-income households in developing countries and even developed ones.

Third, EdTech programs used outside normal classroom hours adds to the time children spend learning. This is good but it is not always clear whether the benefits are coming from EdTech, per se, or simply more time spent learning. Nonetheless, gamification and other techniques may make children want to spend more time learning. 

Finally, let us keep in mind that good learning outcomes can be achieved without EdTech. Developed countries got results before the advent of EdTech. So too did good schools in developing countries.

To be effective, EdTech must address key causes of the crisis and be part of a larger package of reforms. Those reforms include teacher training, incentives, monitoring, teaching at the right level, remediation for underperforming students, and others. 

Digital technologies have changed our lives in many ways, mostly for the good. EdTech could do the same by playing a role in addressing the learning crisis.

Published: 23 July 2021

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Seven Solutions for Education Inequality

Giving compass' take:.

•  Jermeelah Martin shares seven solutions that can reduce and help to eliminate education inequality in the United States.
• What role are you ready to take on to address education inequality? What does education inequality look like in your community?
• Read about comprehensive strategies for promoting educational equity .

What is Giving Compass?

We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us .

Systemic issues in funding drives education inequality and has detrimental effects primarily on low-income Black and Brown students. These students receive lower quality of education which is reflected through less qualified teachers,not enough books, technologies and special support like counselors and disability services. The lack of access to fair, quality education creates the broader income and wealth gaps in the U.S. Black and brown students face more hurdles to going to college and will be three times more likely to experience poverty as a American with only a highschool degree than an American with a college degree. Income inequality worsens the opportunity for building wealth for Black and Brown families because home and asset ownership will be more difficult to attain.

• Concretely, the first solution would be to reduce class distinctions among students by doing away with the property tax as a primary funding source. This is a significant driver for education inequality because low-income students, by default, will receive less. Instead, the state government should create more significant initiatives and budgets for equitable funding.
• Stop the expansion of charter and private schools as it is not affordable for all students and creates segregation.
• Deprioritize test based funding because it discriminates against disadvantaged students.
• Support teachers financially, as in offering higher salaries and benefits for teachers to improve retention.
• Invest more resources for support in low-income, underfunded schools such as, increased special education specialists and counselors.
• Dismantle the school to prison pipeline for students by adopting more restorative justice efforts and fewer funds for cops in schools. This will create more funds for education justice initiatives and work to end the over policing of minority students.
• More broadly, supporting efforts to dismantle the influence of capitalism in our social sector and supporting an economy that taxes the wealthy at a higher rate will allow for adequate support and funding of public sectors like public education and support for low-income families.

Read the full article about solutions for education inequality  by Jermeelah Martin at United for a Fair Economy.

More Articles

Our education funding system is broken. we can fix it., learning policy institute, nov 21, 2022, the funding gap between charter schools and traditional public schools, may 22, 2019.

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10 of the biggest problems facing education

Children across the UK are heading back to school in the coming weeks. However, 250 million children around the world will be left out of the classroom. Revised for 2024, here are 10 of the biggest problems facing education around the world.

Education can help us end poverty. It gives kids the skills they need to survive and thrive, opening the door to jobs, resources, and everything else that they need to live full, creative lives. In fact, UNESCO reports that if all students in low-income countries had just basic reading skills, an estimated 171 million people could escape the  cycle of poverty . And if all adults completed their secondary education, we could cut the global poverty rate by more than half. 

So why are  250 million children around the world currently out of school? We aren’t at a loss for reasons after the last few years. Here are the top 10 problems facing education in 2024. 

1. Conflict and violence

Conflict is one of the main reasons that kids are kept out of the classroom, with USAID estimating that half of all children not attending school are living in a conflict zone — some 125 million in total. To get a sense of this as a growing issue, in 2013, UNESCO  reported that conflict was keeping 50 million students out of the classroom. Last year alone,  19 million children in Sudan were out of school due to renewed conflict. 

Education is a lifeline during a conflict, protecting children from forced recruitment and potential attacks, while giving them a sense of normalcy in times that are anything but. It’s also a critical element in reducing the chance of future conflicts in certain areas. However, despite international humanitarian law, schools have become targets of attacks in many recent conflicts. Many parents have opted to keep their children at home as a result. However, these are not easy years to make up. According to UNESCO, the first two years of  the Syria crisis erased all the country's educational progress since the start of the 21st century. Recovering these missed years also takes more time and effort, with many Syrian children requiring psychosocial care that hinders a "normal" learning curve. Unfortunately, as conflicts become more protracted, they are also threatening to create multiple lost generations. 

2. Violence and bullying in the classroom

Violence can also carry over into the classroom. One UN study found that, while 102 countries have banned corporal punishment in schools, that ban isn’t always enforced. Many children have faced sexual violence and bullying in the classroom, either from fellow pupils or faculty and staff. 

Children will often drop out of school altogether to avoid these situations. Even when they stay in school, the violence they experience can affect their social skills and self-esteem. It also has a negative impact on their educational achievement. Concern has addressed this head-on in Sierra Leone with our  Safe Learning Model .

3. Climate change

Climate change is another major threat to education. Extreme weather events and related natural disasters destroy schools and other infrastructure key to accessing education (such as roads), and rebuilding damaged classrooms doesn’t happen overnight. 

Climate change also affects children’s health, both physical and emotional, making it hard to keep up with school (and at times making it hard for teachers themselves to focus on delivering a quality education). With climate change linked so tightly to poverty, it also leads families to withdraw their children from school when they can no longer afford the fees or need their children to contribute to the household income. 

4. Harvest seasons and market days

In agricultural communities, the harvest is both a vital source of food and income. During these periods, children are often required to skip school to help their families harvest and sell crops. Sometimes they'll be out of school for weeks at a stretch. Families who make their living from farming may also have to move around if they have herds that graze, or to harvest crops planted in different areas. This is also disruptive for children and their education.

5. Unpaid and underqualified teachers

When governments are dysfunctional, public servants aren’t paid. That includes teachers. In some countries, teachers aren’t paid for months at a time. Many have no choice but to quit their posts to find other sources of income or are moved to other districts. 

As a result, schools often struggle to find qualified teachers to replace those who have left. But, without qualified teachers in the classrooms, children suffer the most. In sub-Saharan Africa, the  World Bank estimates that the percentage of trained teachers fell from 84% in 2000 to 69% in 2019 (with no updates yet as to how the pandemic may have affected these numbers). The World Bank adds that teachers in STEM are especially hard to come by in low-income countries. 

6. The cost of supplies and uniforms

Although many countries provide free primary education, attending school still comes at a cost. Parents and caretakers often pay for mandatory uniforms and other fees. School supplies are also necessary. These costs alone can keep students out of the classroom. 

7. Being an older student

According to UNICEF, adolescents are twice as likely to be out of school compared to younger children. Globally, that means one in five students between the ages of 12 and 15 is out of school. As children get older, they face increased pressure to drop out so that they can work and contribute to their family income. 

One solution we’ve adopted at Concern is to help those who didn't complete their education learn many of the things they missed out on, including financial literacy, business management, and vocational skills. 

8. Being female

In many countries around the world, girls are more likely to be excluded from education than boys. This is despite all the efforts and progress made in recent years to increase the number of girls in school. According to UNESCO, up to 80% of school-aged girls who are currently out of school are unlikely to ever start. For boys, that same figure is just 16%. This rate is highest in emergency situations and fragile contexts.

Many schools have no toilets (let alone separate bathrooms for boys and girls). This usually means more missed days for girls when they get their period. The World Bank estimates that girls around the world miss up to 20% of their school days due to period poverty and stigma.

Girls may also be pressured to drop out of school to help out their family, as we mentioned above with regards to taking a job. However, in many countries where Concern works, they may also be forced out of school to get married. Girls who enter into an early or forced marriage usually leave school to take care of their new families. According to the UN, 33% of girls in low-income countries wed before the age of 18. Just over 11% get married before the age of 15. In most instances, marriage and having children mean the end of a girl’s formal education.

9. Outbreaks and epidemics

We learned this the hard way with COVID-19. Even if the student body is healthy, they may be kept out of school if an epidemic has hit their area. Teachers might get sick, and families with sick parents may need their children to stay home and help out. Quarantines often go into effect. 

The 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak was a severe problem for education in countries like  Liberia and  Sierra Leone . Ebola put the education of 3 million children in these countries on hold. As a response, we worked with the governments of both countries to deliver lessons by radio. We also trained community members to work with small groups of children on basic reading and maths. As schools reopened, we shifted our focus to helping children get back into classrooms safely, but many kids still had a lot of catching up to do. 

10. Language and literacy barriers

Even if a child goes to school in the town where they were born and grew up their entire life, they may face a language barrier in the classroom between their mother tongue and the official lingua franca used in education systems. In Marsabit county,  Kenya , the first language for most children is Borana. Once students start school, they must learn two new languages to understand their teachers: Swahili and English. 

UNESCO estimates that 40% of school-aged children don’t have access to education in a language that they understand. This is especially difficult for students who have migrated to a new country, such as Syrian refugee children being hosted in Türkiye : Not only do they have to switch from Levantine Arabic to Turkish, but they also have to learn an entirely new alphabet. 

This dovetails with literacy, another key issue in education. If a student struggles with reading (even in their mother tongue), it can have a ripple effect on their ability to learn in all other subjects. Many students drop out if they feel like they can’t keep up, either due to the quality of the teaching or to a special accommodation they need for their learning that can’t be made.

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We've brought quality education to villages that are off the grid, engaged local community leaders to find solutions to keep girls in school, and provided mentorship and training for teachers. Last year alone, we reached 1.1 million people with education programmes across 10 countries.

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What are the major problems facing american education today, the top 10 education problems in america and possible solutions.

America’s education system has come under fire from many different angles in recent years. Some say that our students are not being given the opportunities they need to be successful in a globalized world. Others maintain that our teachers are not receiving the proper training and support they need in order to be effective educators.

No matter where you stand on the issue, it is clear that there are many problems with America’s education system.

In this blog post, we will take a closer look at the top 10 education problems in America and explore possible solutions.

Table of Contents

Top 10 Educational Problems and their Solutions

1.    lack of access to quality education.

One of the biggest problems facing America’s education system is the lack of access to quality education. This issue is especially prevalent in low-income and rural areas.

According to a National Center for Education Statistics report, only 60% of low-income students attend schools that offer a full range of academic courses.

This means that many students are not being allowed to take classes in subjects like science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). This lack of access can have a major impact on a student’s ability to succeed in school and in life.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more funding for low-income schools. This would allow these schools to offer a broader range of courses and programs and hire more qualified teachers.

Another solution is to create more online schools. Online high schools have more flexibility in their curriculum . This can provide students with a better education than they would receive at a traditional public school.

2. High Dropout Rates

Another serious problem facing America’s education system is the high dropout rate. According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the dropout rate in the United States was 3.8% in 2017.

This means that nearly one in four students do not finish high school. The dropout rate is even higher for certain groups of students, such as low-income students and students of color.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more support for at-risk students. This could include mentorship programs, tutoring services, and financial assistance.

Another solution is to create alternative schools for students who are not thriving in a traditional school setting. These schools could offer a more flexible curriculum.

3. Lack of Cultural Competency

Another problem facing America’s education system is educators’ lack of cultural competency. This issue is especially prevalent in schools that serve a diverse student body.

Many teachers are not adequately trained to teach students from different cultures and backgrounds. As a result, these students may feel isolated and discouraged in school.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more training for educators on teaching diverse students. This training should include cultural competence, classroom management, and effective teaching strategies.

Another solution is to create more culturally diverse learning environments. This could be done by hiring a more diverse staff, incorporating a multicultural curriculum, and offering bilingual education programs.

4. Standardized Testing

One of the most controversial issues in America’s education system is standardized testing . These tests are used to measure student achievement and compare schools against each other.

However, many critics argue that these tests are not an accurate measure of student learning. They also place undue stress on students and teachers.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to reduce the emphasis on standardized testing. This could be done by eliminating high-stakes tests or using them for diagnostic purposes only.

Another solution is to create alternative assessments that are more authentic and student-centered. These could include portfolios, projects, and presentations.

The other solution is to provide more support for students, teachers, and administrators who are under pressure because of standardized testing. This could include counseling services, professional development opportunities, and stress-reduction programs.

5. Inadequate Teacher Training

Another major problem facing America’s education system is inadequate teacher training. Many teachers are not adequately prepared to teach their subject matter, especially in high-need areas like  math  and science. As a result, students are not receiving the quality education they deserve.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more funding for teacher training. This would allow teachers to receive the proper education and certification they need to be effective educators.

Another solution is to create more incentives for teachers to pursue further education and professional development. This could include financial bonuses or paid time off for attending conferences and workshops.

6. School Funding

One of the most pressing problems facing America’s education system is the unequal distribution of school funding. Property taxes are the primary source of funding for public schools, but this method disproportionately benefits wealthier communities.

As a result, schools in low-income areas often lack the resources they need to provide a quality education for their students.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to increase federal funding for education. This would provide more money for schools in low-income areas.

Another solution is to redistribute funding from wealthy school districts to low-income school districts. This would help to level the playing field and provide all students with the resources they need to succeed.

7. Inequality in Education

Inequality is a big problem in America’s education system. According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, there are significant disparities in educational outcomes between different groups of students.

For example, Hispanic and African American students are more likely to drop out of school than white students. In addition, students from low-income families are more likely to have lower test scores and be less likely to go to college.

This inequality can significantly impact a student’s ability to succeed in school and in life.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more support for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This could include tutoring, mentorship programs, and financial aid.

Another solution is to improve the quality of education in schools that serve these students. This could be done by providing more resources, hiring better teachers, and offering more challenging coursework.

8. Lack of Parental Involvement

One of the biggest problems facing America’s education system is the lack of parental involvement. According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, only about half of parents said they were very involved in their child’s education in 2015.

This can lead to a number of problems, including lower grades and test scores, higher dropout rates, and less engagement in school.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to encourage parents to be more involved in their child’s education. This could be done through various methods, such as parent-teacher conferences, school-wide events, and classroom volunteering.

Another solution is to provide resources and information to parents about how they can help their children succeed in school.

9. Ineffective Teaching Methods

Another big problem facing America’s education system is the use of ineffective teaching methods. In many cases, teachers are not properly trained to teach their students effectively.

As a result, students are often not learning the material as well as they could be. In addition, many schools do not use data-driven instruction, which means that they are not tailoring their teaching methods to the needs of their students. This can have a major impact on student achievement.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to provide more training for teachers. This could include workshops, online courses, and mentorship programs.

Another solution is to use data-driven instruction. This means using data to identify the needs of students and then tailoring instruction to meet those needs. This can help to ensure that all students are receiving the best possible education.

10. Bullying

Bullying is a serious problem in America’s schools. According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, 20.2% of high school students are bullied at school each year. This can lead to feelings of isolation , depression, and anxiety. It can also adversely affect students’ academic performance.

Solution:  One way to solve this problem is to create a more positive school climate. This could be done by implementing anti-bullying policies and providing support for victims of bullying.

Another solution is to educate students about the effects of bullying and how to prevent it. This could be done through classroom lessons, assemblies, and counseling sessions.

Online Learning: The Best Solution to Education Problems in America

Online learning can be the best solution to the problems facing America’s education system.  Online learning offers several advantages over traditional classroom instruction, including the ability to tailor instruction to the needs of individual students, more flexible scheduling, and increased access to resources.

In addition, online learning can help to improve parental involvement and provide more support for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

As the world becomes more globalized, it is crucial for students to receive a quality education that will prepare them for the workforce. Online learning can provide students with the skills they need to succeed in a variety of careers.

Additionally, online learning can help to close the achievement gap by providing all students with equal access to resources and instruction.

Final Thoughts!

Although there are many problems with the American education system, we believe that each problem can be solved. We have outlined 10 of the most pressing issues and possible solutions.

However, this is only a starting point. We need your help to make a change. Contact High School of America today to learn more about how you can get involved in making a difference for future generations.

Together, we can provide every student in America with an excellent education and give them the opportunity to achieve their dreams.

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The 10 Education Issues Everybody Should Be Talking About

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What issues have the potential to define—or re define—education in the year ahead? Is there a next “big thing” that could shift the K-12 experience or conversation?

These were the questions Education Week set out to answer in this second annual “10 Big Ideas in Education” report.

You can read about last year’s ideas here . In 2019, though, things are different.

This year, we asked Education Week reporters to read the tea leaves and analyze what was happening in classrooms, school districts, and legislatures across the country. What insights could reporters offer practitioners for the year ahead?

Some of the ideas here are speculative. Some are warning shots, others more optimistic. But all 10 of them here have one thing in common: They share a sense of urgency.

Accompanied by compelling illustrations and outside perspectives from leading researchers, advocates, and practitioners, this year’s Big Ideas might make you uncomfortable, or seem improbable. The goal was to provoke and empower you as you consider them.

Let us know what you think, and what big ideas matter to your classroom, school, or district. Tweet your comments with #K12BigIdeas .

No. 1: Kids are right. School is boring.

Out-of-school learning is often more meaningful than anything that happens in a classroom, writes Kevin Bushweller, the Executive Editor of EdWeek Market Brief. His essay tackling the relevance gap is accompanied by a Q&A with advice on nurturing, rather than stifling students’ natural curiosity. Read more.

No. 2: Teachers have trust issues. And it’s no wonder why.

Many teachers may have lost faith in the system, says Andrew Ujifusa, but they haven’t lost hope. The Assistant Editor unpacks this year’s outbreak of teacher activism. And read an account from a disaffected educator on how he built a coalition of his own. Read more.

No. 3: Special education is broken.

Forty years since students with disabilities were legally guaranteed a public school education, many still don’t receive the education they deserve, writes Associate Editor Christina A. Samuels. Delve into her argument and hear from a disability civil rights pioneer on how to create an equitable path for students. Read more.

No. 4: Schools are embracing bilingualism, but only for some students.

Staff Writer Corey Mitchell explains the inclusion problem at the heart of bilingual education. His essay includes a perspective from a researcher on dismantling elite bilingualism. Read more.

No. 5: A world without annual testing may be closer than you think.

There’s agreement that we have a dysfunctional standardized-testing system in the United States, Associate Editor Stephen Sawchuk writes. But killing it would come with some serious tradeoffs. Sawchuk’s musing on the alternatives to annual tests is accompanied by an argument for more rigorous classroom assignments by a teacher-practice expert. Read more.

No. 6: There are lessons to be learned from the educational experiences of black students in military families.

Drawing on his personal experience growing up in an Air Force family, Staff Writer Daarel Burnette II highlights emerging research on military-connected students. Learn more about his findings and hear from two researchers on what a new ESSA mandate means for these students. Read more.

No. 7: School segregation is not an intractable American problem.

Racial and economic segregation remains deeply entrenched in American schools. Staff Writer Denisa R. Superville considers the six steps one district is taking to change that. Her analysis is accompanied by an essay from the president of the American Educational Research Association on what is perpetuating education inequality. Read more.

No. 8: Consent doesn’t just belong in sex ed. class. It needs to start a lot earlier.

Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks looked at the research on teaching consent and found schools and families do way too little, way too late. Her report is partnered with a researcher’s practical guide to developmentally appropriate consent education. Read more.

No. 9: Education has an innovation problem.

Are education leaders spending too much time chasing the latest tech trends to maintain what they have? Staff Writer Benjamin Herold explores the innovation trap. Two technologists offer three tips for putting maintenance front and center in school management. Read more.

No. 10: There are two powerful forces changing college admissions.

Some colleges are rewriting the admissions script for potential students. Senior Contributing Writer Catherine Gewertz surveys this changing college admissions landscape. Her insights are accompanied by one teacher’s advice for navigating underserved students through the college application process. Read more.

Wait, there’s more.

Want to know what educators really think about innovation? A new Education Week Research Center survey delves into what’s behind the common buzzword for teachers, principals, and district leaders. Take a look at the survey results.

A version of this article appeared in the January 09, 2019 edition of Education Week as What’s on the Horizon for 2019?

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Top 8 modern education problems and ways to solve them.

| September 15, 2017 | 0 responses

In many ways, today’s system is better than the traditional one. Technology is the biggest change and the greatest advantage at the same time. Various devices, such as computers, projectors, tablets and smartphones, make the process of learning simpler and more fun. The Internet gives both students and teachers access to limitless knowledge.

However, this is not the perfect educational system. It has several problems, so we have to try to improve it.

•  Problem: The Individual Needs of Low-Achievers Are Not Being Addressed

Personalized learning is the most popular trend in education. The educators are doing their best to identify the learning style of each student and provide training that corresponds to their needs.

However, many students are at risk of falling behind, especially children who are learning mathematics and reading. In the USA, in particular, there are large gaps in science achievements by middle school.

Solution: Address the Needs of Low-Achievers

The educators must try harder to reduce the number of students who are getting low results on long-term trajectories. If we identify these students at an early age, we can provide additional training to help them improve the results.

• Problem: Overcrowded Classrooms

In 2016, there were over 17,000 state secondary school children in the UK being taught in classes of 36+ pupils.

Solution: Reduce the Number of Students in the Classroom

Only a smaller class can enable an active role for the student and improve the level of individual attention they get from the teacher.

• Problem: The Teachers Are Expected to Entertain

Today’s generations of students love technology, so the teachers started using technology just to keep them engaged. That imposes a serious issue: education is becoming an entertainment rather than a learning process.

Solution: Set Some Limits

We don’t have to see education as opposed to entertainment. However, we have to make the students aware of the purpose of technology and games in the classroom. It’s all about learning.

• Problem: Not Having Enough Time for Volunteering in University

The students are overwhelmed with projects and assignments. There is absolutely no space for internships and volunteering in college .

Solution: Make Internships and Volunteering Part of Education

When students graduate, a volunteering activity can make a great difference during the hiring process. In addition, these experiences help them develop into complete persons. If the students start getting credits for volunteering and internships, they will be willing to make the effort.

• Problem: The Parents Are Too Involved

Due to the fact that technology became part of the early educational process, it’s necessary for the parents to observe the way their children use the Internet at home. They have to help the students to complete assignments involving technology.

What about those parents who don’t have enough time for that? What if they have time, but want to use it in a different way?

Solution: Stop Expecting Parents to Act Like Teachers at Home

The parent should definitely support their child throughout the schooling process. However, we mustn’t turn this into a mandatory role. The teachers should stop assigning homework that demands parental assistance.

• Problem: Outdated Curriculum

Although we transformed the educational system, many features of the curriculum remained unchanged.

Solution: Eliminate Standardised Exams

This is a radical suggestion. However, standardised exams are a big problem. We want the students to learn at their own pace. We are personalizing the process of education. Then why do we expect them to compete with each other and meet the same standards as everyone else? The teacher should be the one responsible of grading.

• Problem: Not All Teachers Can Meet the Standards of the New Educational System

Can we really expect all teachers to use technology? Some of them are near the end of their teaching careers and they have never used tablets in the lecturing process before.

Solution: Provide Better Training for the Teachers

If we want all students to receive high-quality education based on the standards of the system, we have to prepare the teachers first. They need more training, preparation, and even tests that prove they can teach today’s generations of students.

• Problem: Graduates Are Not Ready for What Follows

A third of the employers in the UK are not happy with the performance of recent graduates. That means the system is not preparing them well for the challenges that follow.

Solution: More Internships, More Realistic Education

Practical education – that’s a challenge we still haven’t met. We have to get more practical.

The evolution of the educational system is an important process. Currently, we have a system that’s more suitable to the needs of generations when compared to the traditional system. However, it’s still not perfect. The evolution never stops.

Author Bio:   Chris Richardson is a journalist, editor, and a blogger. He loves to write, learn new things, and meet new outgoing people. Chris is also fond of traveling, sports, and playing the guitar. Follow him on Facebook and Google+ .

Tags: solutions

More, better feedback please: are learning analytics dashboards (LAD) the solution to a wicked problem?

• Theory Matters
• Open access
• Published: 26 August 2024

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• Simon Kitto   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3223-8123 1 ,
• H. L. Michelle Chiang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6991-751X 1 ,
• Olivia Ng   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7573-3725 1 &
• Jennifer Cleland   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1433-9323 1 , 2  

There is a long-standing lack of learner satisfaction with quality and quantity of feedback in health professions education (HPE) and training. To address this, university and training programmes are increasingly using technological advancements and data analytic tools to provide feedback. One such educational technology is the Learning Analytic Dashboard (LAD), which holds the promise of a comprehensive view of student performance via partial or fully automated feedback delivered to learners in real time. The possibility of displaying performance data visually, on a single platform, so users can access and process feedback efficiently and constantly, and use this to improve their performance, is very attractive to users, educators and institutions. However, the mainstream literature tends to take an atheoretical and instrumentalist view of LADs, a view that uncritically celebrates the promise of LAD’s capacity to provide a ‘technical fix’ to the ‘wicked problem’ of feedback in health professions education. This paper seeks to recast the discussion of LADs as something other than a benign material technology using the lenses of Miller and Rose’s technologies of government and Barry’s theory of Technological Societies, where such technical devices are also inherently agentic and political. An examination of the purpose, design and deployment of LADs from these theoretical perspectives can reveal how these educational devices shape and govern the HPE learner body in different ways, which in turn, may produce a myriad of unintended– and ironic– effects on the feedback process. In this Reflections article we wish to encourage health professions education scholars to examine the practices and consequences thereof of the ever-expanding use of LADs more deeply and with a sense of urgency.

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Introduction

Effective feedback has long been recognised as a fundamental catalyst for effective learning (Butler & Winne, 1995 ; Hattie & Timperley, 2007 ). However, learners in higher and health professions education (HPE) are consistently dissatisfied with feedback and report feedback provision as insufficient, a notion that is consistently disputed by supervisors and that many interventions to improve feedback delivery have not been wholly successful in rectifying (Boud & Molloy, 2013 ; Carless, 2006 ; Deeley et al., 2019 ; Ossenberg et al., 2019 ).

Progress in educational technologies and learning data analytics offer new opportunities to structure and deliver personalised feedback efficiently to learners. Indeed, over the last few decades, the higher education literature has been characterised by critical commentary and research on how educational technologies have the potential to, and are already, reconfiguring relationships between lecturers and students, and altering the learning behaviour of student learning itself (Kitto, 2003 ). In higher and health professions education, the potential of educational technologies such as learning analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is treated with optimistic caution (Kitto et al., 2024 ). But what is largely absent from this literature is a theorization of the nature of such technological tools in terms of their larger role in the organization of social order, and more specifically, in the conduct of health professions education itself.

Our focus in is on one specific learning technology, that of student-facing, technology-mediated, learning analytics dashboards (LADs). As a Reflections contribution, this paper does not adhere to the traditional scientific format of introduction, methods, results and discussion. Rather it represents a summary of many discussions held over time, with reference to a wide literature and the many considerations we have grappled with as part of developing and implementing a LAD locally.

LADs are positioned within the literature as a feedback intervention (Clow, 2013 ), usually presented as: “single displays that aggregated different indicators about learners, learning processes and or learning contexts into one or multiple visualizations”, so the information can be monitored at a glance (Schwendimann et al., 2017 ). At its most basic, a LAD employs descriptive analytics to provide an overview of a learner’s progress whereas a state-of-the-art LAD (at the time of writing this paper) integrates multiple data sources (e.g., assessment, attendance, clinical skills checklists data, etc.) and multiple analytical levels (e.g., (Few, 2007 ); see also (Boscardin et al., 2018 ), and discussed further later).

To illustrate what we mean by a LAD, we have drawn upon a combination of figures and descriptions found in the literature and ‘case study’ examples we created from an amalgam of possible LAD design possibilities (see Fig.  1 for an example of a LAD).

An example Learning analytics dashboard (LAD) in medical education that presents a comprehensive, visual overview of student progress (Boscardin et al., 2018 )

For learners, LADs are posited to facilitate self-reflective learning through visualization, highlighting key performance moments and often comparing individual performance to class averages (Susnjak et al., 2022 ). For instructors, LADs construct insights into learners’ performance and progress, aiding academic advising and study plan development (Gutiérrez et al., 2020 ). Some LADs also employ predictive, machine learning algorithms to detect potentially problematic behaviours indicative of being at-risk and generate academic recommendations, such as remediation suggestions based on identified academic issues. At the institutional level, data gathered from a LAD could aid in the customisation of educational strategies that would meet regulatory or accreditation needs. In short, by integrating multiple data sources and analytical levels about student performance LADs are meant to provide a deeper understanding and better facilitation of students’ learning processes, enhance communication, support decision-making, and improve academic outcomes for both learners and instructors (Bodily & Verbert, 2017 ; Masiello et al., 2024 ). In short, LADs provide, or are purported to provide, high quality feedback.

In general, the LAD literature has been quite limited, focusing on dashboard architecture and components (Bodily et al., 2018 ), design and technical considerations, and the lessons learned in implementation (Durojaiye et al., 2018 ; Herodotou et al., 2019 ); the needs and ways of linking dashboard content and visualization and learning science concepts to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of LAD (Sedrakyan et al., 2019 ; Teasley, 2018 ); and, in health professions education (HPE), the development and implementation of a LAD (Boscardin et al., 2018 ). While there are some recent exceptions in the wider literature (e.g., (Paulsen & Lindsay, 2024 ), taken as a whole, this body of research to date tends to frame the promise of LADs in an instrumental mechanistic manner, as an efficient and rather benign technological approach to feedback (Banihashem et al., 2022 ). There is little to no critical analyses of what role and effects a LAD might have on learner performance and learner relationships with their peers, instructors or the educational institutions in which they are enrolled. Rather the literature has a seductive tone, suggesting LADs can provide all the promises of a ‘technical fix’ (Robins & Webster, 1989 ) underpinned by a belief that ‘wicked’ (Rittel, 1973 ) educational problems like feedback (Deeley et al., 2019 ) can be resolved through the application of a technological artifact (that is, a LAD) without any unintended consequences.

We attempt to address this gap in the literature using the lens of the technological society (Barry, 2001 ). Using Barry’s heuristic framework as a conceptually coherent means by which to explore the relationships between LADs and the governing of medical education, we open discussion as to the role and effects LADs might have, how they might act directly on the student and instructor(s).

First, we outline the concept of the Technological Society and link this to the explicit agenda of encouraging self-governance of medical students through information technology, in this case LADs. We will show how using this conceptual framework can serve to unpack the potential impact of the assumptions behind, design of the functions and deployment of LADs on medical student populations. Specifically, we will consider how a LAD, as a technical device, acts as a political technology (see later) in the shaping of the learning relationship between technology, student and lecturer, and the downstream effects this reshaped relationship may have on student behaviour. Before doing so, we reflect on our interest in this topic.

Our positionality

Positionality “reflects the position that the researcher has chosen to adopt within a given research study” (Savin-Baden & Major, 2013 , p.71). It influences both how research is conducted, its outcomes, and results (Rowe, 2014 ). The study was initially developed from ongoing, local discussions about introducing programmatic assessment (PA) (Schuwirth & Van der Vleuten, 2011 ) into a medical undergraduate degree programme (an MBBS) and presenting the assessment information collected from various sources to learners via a LAD. As part of this process, we accessed a wide range of literature about LADs, and were surprised at its lack of criticality and theorization.

We considered our positions and relationships with this literature and our early stage “on-the-ground” experiences of developing a LAD for local purposes (which at the time of the drafting of this article was yet to be completed and evaluated) continually and critically in view of: our disciplinary backgrounds (psychology but working in medical education [JC], sociology [SK], engineering [ON], English [MC]), levels of knowledge and perspectives on assessment and feedback in health professions education and learning analytics. For example, a large part of ON’s role was to support the development and implementation of LADs locally, so she brought much understanding of the possibilities and limitations of learning analytics and visualisation thereof. JC, MC and SK had less technical expert knowledge and more “etic”, critical views.

Positioning LADs within a technological society

The relationship between information technologies and governing contemporary western societies has been widely explored. More than 30 years ago, inspired by the ideas and works of Michel Foucault on the operations of power in modern society, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (Miller & Rose, 1990 ; Rose & Miller, 1992 ) alluded to the infrastructural nature of information technologies through an exposition of the nature of political rationalities and technologies of government. Political rationalities are the discourses where power is exercised and where moral justifications are made for the exercise of that power (Rose & Miller, 1992 ). When a problematic aspect of governing is identified (e.g., student dissatisfaction with feedback quality and quantity), political rationalities are translated into technologies of government that shape sectors of society into desirable, implementable forms (Miller & Rose, 1990 ). Through these technologies, authority seeks to “shape, normalize and instrumentalize the conduct, thought, decisions and aspirations of others” (Miller & Rose, 1990 , p.8) while reaching their own objectives and desires (e.g., designing the LAD in a certain way to direct how feedback is delivered, how learners interact with the dashboard in order to acquire knowledge and skills to become competent professionals in the workplace).

Andrew Barry’s concept of the Technological Society places information technology at the centre of governing, where citizens must now actively use and interact with technology to maximise their choices and demonstrate mastery and self-responsibility over the conduct of their lives (Barry, 2001 ). Using this lens, a LAD is conceptualised as being inherently political, and functions as a technology of governing in the Foucauldian sense of creating the conditions of possibility in which individuals can conduct themselves (Foucault, 1991 ; Hamann, 2009 ). Positioning an LAD in a technology society highlights its dual nature, it is both:

‘…a technical device, conceived of as a material or immaterial artefact, and a technology, a concept which refers not just to a device in isolation but also to the forms of knowledge, skill, diagrams, charts, calculations and energy which makes its use possible’ (Barry, 2001 , p.9) (see also (Akrich, 1992 ; Deleuze, 1988 )).

This notion of technical devices as instrumental material objects which have technological capacities (governmental) and their mutability when translated into action, has been utilised to study socio-technical configurations of educational delivery, use by faculty, and reception and use by students within the higher education sector. These studies have found unintended effects of technological devices ranging from: purportedly unethical behaviour of students in the learning and assessment process, re-organisation of the relationship between student, faculty and the university, ironic performances of student freedom in association with educational technologies, and at times adverse re-representation of student behaviour and concomitantly the construction of student subjectivity (i.e., ‘good’ or ‘bad’) (Kitto, 2003 ; Kitto & Higgins, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ; Kitto & Saltmarsh, 2007 ). For example, think of the advent of online education within the higher education sector in the late 1990s. Designed to democratise education by overcoming the tyranny of distance and to facilitate lifelong learning amongst adult learners, online education was position as a solution to many changes in society impacting the delivery of higher education: threats of globalization, the increase in use of information technologies to deliver education, emphasis on life-long learning, changes in the demographics, and needs/choices of students. Formerly disenfranchised learners (full-time workers, rural impoverished populations) were now being positioned to access top ranked tertiary education more cost effectively at a distance and in their own time frames (Robins & Webster, 2002 ). However, while such technical devices can enact political programs at a distance, they can also act produce outcomes that act against their intended political objectives (Barry, 2001 ). In the online education sector this took the form of the rise of disreputable ‘digital diploma mills’ (Noble, 1998 ), leading to reputational damage which still plagues the sector on a global scale.

Learning analytics dashboards in health professions education

LADs supposedly offer a holistic view of a learner’s progress, consolidating visualised assessment data points on a one-stop information learners’ hub (Boscardin et al., 2018 ). The claim is that a LAD facilitates learners and educators to better understand individual learner performance by incorporating assessment (summative and formative), attendance, clinical skills checklist data, and so on. Having the ability to visualise connections between competencies and assessment ostensibly also allows for customisation of educational strategies based on accreditation needs (Chan et al., 2018 ). This capacity is made possible through the different levels of learning analytics include descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, each offering unique insights into data patterns and facilitating informed decision-making. We discuss these different levels of learning analytics in turn.

Diagnostic and descriptive analytics: a panoptic technique within a technological society

The most common, and simplest function and form of feedback is descriptive analytics. For example, (Han et al., 2021 ) developed a student dashboard that informed students about their engagement levels and interactions with peers. Diagnostic analytics supposedly adds an extra dimension to descriptive analytics by offering insights into why something occurred, typically by discerning patterns and trends within the data. For example, (Aljohani et al., 2019 ) presented an LAD that utilized log data from a Learning Management System (LMS) to uncover student behavioural patterns and attitudes. It compared each student’s engagement level with that of their peers, offering personalized learning statistics along with comparisons to class averages and top-performing peers, to promote self-awareness and aid in performance assessment.

Applying a technological society lens to these functions highlights the manifestation of three political functions and techniques of government: (1) in a technological society the notion that students, via technological means, are expected to interact in a self-governing way is a core political rationale, (2) through this interaction they are expected to come to know themselves, through technological intermediaries, in order to be able to work on themselves, (3) to do this they must direct that interaction by placing themselves in an extended web of connections with other people, institutions and forms of knowledge (Barry, 2001 ). In this case, the LAD already places them within such a web of connections through the combining of diagnostic and descriptive functions. Supposedly high-fidelity data about a student’s performance is analysed, compiled, (re)represented in visual form to show individual performance and how their progression sits in relation to a class of students (see Fig.  2 ).

In this respect, a LAD contains all the hallmarks of a Foucauldian panopticon, an ‘electronic panopticon’ (Kitto, 2003 ):

It refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another…. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchises in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals. It introduces, through this ‘value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved.. it compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. (Foucault, 1977 , p.182–183).

Individual - Cohort comparison presented in a hypothetical LAD

A LAD could be designed to simultaneously provide this type of a ‘normalising gaze’ to enable representatives of the medical school to work on student interventions when needed, and for the student, to give a picture of their ‘normality’ within their cohort (See Fig.  2 ). The LAD, or more accurately the data presented by the LAD, could act as the starting point for intervention by the school, by the student themselves in isolation, or in partnership with one another to improve the student performance.

This notion of the construction of panoptic techniques in education via technical means to normalise student populations is a well-worn scholarly path (Foucault, 1977 ; Kitto, 2003 ). What is new here is when seen through a Technological society lens, the problematic aspect of the combination of panoptic techniques under the conditions of governing via information communication technologies in a Technological Society becomes apparent. Now, multiple forms of data are connected to provide a ‘diagnosis’ not only of performance in student examinations, but of levels of interactivity within their curricular activities and with the LAD itself. Are the students completing all their activities? Are they interacting with enough frequency with the LAD (made visible by student log data) - as a demonstration of being a good interactive technological student-citizen seeking self-improvement? (see Fig.  3 ).

Student log data and completion rates visualised via a hypothetical LAD

LADs are not simple techniques of a disciplinary society in the Foucauldian sense (you must do this). In a governmental technological society, they are advanced liberal technologies that seek to create self-governing capacities of students (you may do this) through regulated choices. The conditions of possibility for optimal self-governance (Rose, 1993 ), are provided by LADs by managing and moulding learners in specific ways. How the LADs data is used by those who govern is, of course, dependent on the local cultural and structural idiosyncrasies of the medical school itself (predilections of leaders, accreditation pressures etc.). Think for instance, of remediation sessions recommended for ‘recalcitrant’ students for not completing the skills checklist. The threshold for recommending such, and precisely what is recommended, will differ from institution to institution: governing via technical means is always context bound (Barry, 2001 ).

Predictive and prescriptive analytics in LADs

Two more functions - predictive and prescriptive analytics - provide a further layer of complexity, making LADs something more than a simple panoptic technique to shape student population and individual behaviour. They are also saturated with ways of thinking about how to provide the optimal conditions for the student-citizen to self-govern, which these student-citizens must learn to navigate to properly self-govern.

Under advanced liberal government, the ‘free’ citizen ironically, is always bound in time and space within assemblages of governing that set standards to evaluate their performance as well as that of institutions (think medical school accreditation standards and practices). This requires a system of navigation for the individual/institution to properly self-govern, it requires expertise and experts:

Certain, civilised modes of conducting one’s existence are identified as normal, and simultaneously to be bound to those ‘engineers of the human soul’ who will define the norm and tutor individuals as the ways of living that will accomplish normality. (Rose, 1999 , p.76).

With predictive and prescriptive analytics, this relationship becomes quite complex. Predictive analytics uses current or past data to inform future outcomes– often through machine learning algorithms. Rather than simply presenting raw log data, many dashboards process this information using machine learning models or algorithms to provide insights (Afzaal et al., 2021 ; Gutiérrez et al., 2020 ). For example, Herodotou et al. ( 2019 ) used LMS log data to predict student assignment submission and course completion, and to identify those considered “at risk” (see also (Gutiérrez et al., 2020 ; Mavrikis et al., 2019 )) (the last being a constant pre-occupation in advanced liberal societies).

Prescriptive analytics aims to provide solutions for determining what actions should be taken. They tend to utilise predictive analytics to infer potential actions leading to positive outcomes, often in the form of recommendations based on data collected from various sources such as LMS. Examples include real-time recommender-type dashboards introduced by (Bodily et al., 2018 ) and (Sansom et al., 2020 ).

As previously mentioned, a key aspect of advanced liberal ways of rule in technological societies is to enact programmes of government that can create the conditions of possibility for individual active and self-responsiblized comportment (Barry, 2001 ). What is interesting in the above description of the predictive and prescriptive functions of a LAD and its design as a technology of governing is that it seemingly sets up the foundation for a contradictory interplay between two key diagrams of social organisation, that of a panopticon (Foucault, 1977 ) and oligopticon (Latour, 2005 ). As previously outlined, the panopticon is a political technology that serves to individualize and normalize through a system of continual clear surveillance, characterized by classification and judgement. It governs populations by instilling compliance and optimize the capacities of the individual to maximize their social and economic utility (Rose, 1999 ). The panoramic view of the panopticon (and the knowledge of its existence by the observed) is in stark opposition to the oligopticon, which consists of multiple narrow views of a complex and connected landscape that can be made blind by the smallest disruption (Gad & Lauritsen, 2009 ). Inherently fragile, “they see much too little… but what they see, they see it well… sturdy but extremely narrow views of the (connected) whole are made possible—as long as connections hold (Latour, 2005 , p.181). In an information technology context, the success of oligopotic ‘surveillance is the result of situated, cooperative work that involves humans and nonhumans. Effective surveillance is not established by an individual actor but is accompanied by a network’ (Gad & Lauritsen, 2009 , p.53).

The fragility of these connections when the LAD is deployed as a mechanism of feedback is everpresent. Let’s look more closely at the rationale behind the communication channel or feedback mechanism of LADs. The aim is enhancing personalized learning through the full or partial automation and streamlining of feedback processes. Usually, the goal is to institute this longitudinally throughout a programme of learning, such as through a medical degree, with the potential for expansion to the residency level (postgraduate) and the selection process. The idea is that this would provide a representation of one’s medical education journey, aiding students in understanding themselves and their educational needs. This is characteristic of a technology of governing in a Technological society where the political rationality behind the key mechanism of organizing the activities of individual citizens, is self-directed lifelong learning that is supported by “constant forms of feedback” that are technologically mediated (Barry, 2001 ). But like all technologies of governing, it is a ‘congenitally failing operation’ (Miller & Rose, 1990 ) and thus, “different problems of context or locale or knowledge will have to be taken into account” (Barry, 2001 , p.16).

A LAD can visualise connections between competencies and assessment (see Fig.  2 ). While a tantalising proposition for educators, this assumption fails to examine who or what is making the connections that form the visual displays from which students can become ‘experts’ of themselves. The power of the display is made manifest by algorithms interpreting the data and imputing meaning onto the connections which are, through interaction with dashboard, subsequently situated within the body of the student by the student themselves and at times, with assistance by faculty in the form of feedback. This is a complex socio-technical assemblage in that it contains relationships between bodies and machines that can act as multiple translation points in different moments within multiple forms of feedback performances, such as– (1) individual student interacting with the LAD to ‘assess’ their performance and interpret automated feedback (2) clinical instructor interacting with the LAD to ‘assess’ the student’s performance and engage in a further interpretation of the automated feedback (3) student and instructor interacting together with the LAD to construct a shared meaning of the visual displays of ‘assessment’ of performance and automated recommended learning needs.

In socio-material terms the performance of these socio-technical assemblages creates a representation of the student’s bodily performance, but as ‘social agents [students] are never located in bodies and bodies alone’ (Law, 1992 , p.382–384), they are cyborgs, human and non-human hybrids (Harraway, 1991 ) that are stabilized and ‘purified’ (Latour, 1993 ) as human or technical in different points in time and space. Often they are ‘purified before [we] even have the chance to interrogate their hybridity’ (Michael, 1998 , p.134) This directly effects how the translation and interpretation of human practices via databases which are abstractions from actual bodily practices (see (Lyon, 2001 ), are shaped and used in the process of governing populations and the training of individuals within Technological Societies (Barry, 2001 ; Deleuze, 1992 ; Poster, 1990 ). If the student’s performance is an outcome of an array of bodies, representational devices such as databases, textual and visual displays, alongside actual in situ offline performances (which are not accounted for in LADs), then the challenge is about where exactly is the student’s performance located? And who, in the event of failure, is responsible– the machine or the human?

In practice within, for example, a medical school context, we argue that this will likely be resolved in interaction, through configurations of the ‘microphysics of power’ (Foucault, 1977 ) in the performance of the relationship between the student, LAD and instructor. The LAD is deployed to stand in as the medical school’s mediator of judgement, which on occasion is supplemented by an instructor’s interpretation of it. The data displayed is the student. But what of the role of algorithm generating the connections between different forms of data that further construct the student’s performance? Is this a new ‘expert’ Rose ( 1999 ) within advanced liberal Technological Societies? Within the mainstream LAD literature this aspect of LADs seems to be ‘blackboxed’ (Akrich, 1992 ; Callon, 1990 , 1992 ; Callon & Latour, 1982 ; Callon & Law, 1989 ), normalized to the point where it is just a natural part of the ecology of a health professions educational infrastructure that is transfer ready. This is an issue of:

‘…no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count’ (Latour, 1987 , p.3).

In the case of the LAD in health professions education, input is interactivity (the diagram of social organization in technological societies (Barry, 2001 ) of the student, and output is the calculation of their learning performance. As an aside, maybe this kind of input and output is feasible with straightforward events (e.g., attended class) but we are challenged to see how complex, situated and interpretive learning processes such as interprofessional education and professionalism could be ‘flattened’ into quantifiable and comparable measures with any degree of fidelity.

In essence, in instances of the full automation of the feedback function in the LAD the role of ‘expert’ in advanced liberal Technological society is being delegated to the automated feedback functions, to non-human algorithms divorced of interpretation informed by context. The calculation of student performance and its representation in the visual displays coupled with recommendations is a ‘blackbox’ that the student, by themselves, cannot unpack (see example Fig.  4 ). The source and veracity of the learning recommendations cannot be questioned, cannot be negotiated with. In the context of a near future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes central to the interpretation of data displayed on the LADs, the problematic situation of the unquestionable and unnegotiable recommendations of LADs could be compounded by the possibility of AI hallucinations relayed to student and instructor, in the form of questionable learning remediation recommendations.

Hypothetical LAD Feedback Visual Display

From where we stand, full automation of the LAD feedback in medical education could produce three potential outcomes. Firstly, as outlined by Kitto et al. ( 2024 ) depending on the stage of education and training, learners may be more predisposed to LAD types of machine learning guidance (think transitioning into first clerkship years in UGME). Faced with the anxiety and uncertainty around the impossibility of mastery over constantly evolving healthcare knowledge and skills, uncertainty about their own gaps, knowledge, and uncertainties around variations in clinical instructor styles of practice and teaching, students looking for certainty in ways to progress through their degree may rush to uncritically embrace LAD guidance. To combat this tendency, inserting the socio-cultural context of health professions student learning could be a way to strengthen the connection between the LAD learning recommendations and compliance amongst students. The question is how to do this in a high-fidelity way, how can this be built into the LAD as a socio-technical assemblage? Given the ‘hallucination’ concern, teaching students how to account for the possibility of errors in the form of hallucinations and other shortcomings of nascent machine learning tools to avoid erroneous learning behaviour (Kitto, 2024 ) and in this case, avoid complying with mis-informed LAD learning recommendations, is critical. But in the case of the deployment of fully automated LAD learning recommendation algorithms (unmediated by humans), it is an impossibility as the source of guidance generated out of LADs is blackboxed, opaque and immutable.

Secondly, and conversely, there is the possibility of a breakdown in trust within student populations and the possibility of, “critical questioning [being] more likely to happen if the student has been given an underlying reason to be a little distrustful of the classifier” (Kitto et al., 2018 , p.455). We suggest that this more than likely to occur within the learning analytics community which has yet to pursue the question of not only how classification schemas can shape worldviews and order human interactions in some ways, and simultaneously disorder them in others, but also in terms of how imperfect a classifier in and of themselves can be (see (Bowker & Star, 2000 ). In other words, in the case of lived reality of a student’s learning performance being mis-aligned with the calculations made by the LAD, their lived experience may trump LAD judgments and recommendations and lead to mistrust and non-compliant learning behaviours.

Thirdly, when data and analytics are regarded and lauded as neutral, objective and “as evidence of what will happen” (Prinsloo, 2017 ), students learn that there is only one version of reality when what data analytics provide is only one of many representations of reality. This is particularly problematic in health professions education given the weight that has already been allotted to evidence-based decision making in the field of medicine and healthcare. Outside the fields of medicine and healthcare, critics already recognise that transposing evidence-based management to education is limiting:

On the research side, evidence-based education seems to favor a technocratic model in which it is assumed that the only relevant research questions are questions about the effectiveness of educational means and techniques, forgetting, among other things, that what counts as ‘effective’ crucially depends on judgements about what is educationally desirable. On the practice side, evidence-based education seems to limit severely the opportunities for educational practitioners to make such judgements in a way that is sensitive to and relevant for their own contextualized settings (Biesta, 2007 , p.5).

A health professions education facilitated by a technocratic approach to learning could exacerbate the positivist tendency inherent in evidence-based medicine and possibly reduce the student’s horizon of critical inquiry. Instead of relying on data and metrics to produce an ‘objective’ representation of reality (also referred to as a representationalist view), we could look to “a transactional view of evidence, data and analytics [which] acknowledges the incompleteness, the limitations and the possibility that the insights generated from analytics are, at best, provisional” (Prinsloo, 2019 ).

Looking forward

So, drawing on our knowledge of the literature and the reflections presented to this point, what are we to make of this type of analytics-driven feedback? Whether automated or partially automated, LADs must be understood by all stakeholders as inherently imperfect and, as such, all stakeholders, especially students, should be empowered to engage productively with data-driven feedback rather than just being passive recipients (Kitto et al., 2018 ). The question then is: how are the conditions of this student ‘empowerment’ in relation to LADs to be constructed? Any contemplation of questions such as these must be addressed with the knowledge that, ‘technology both creates systems which close off other options and generates novel, unpredictable and indeed unthinkable, options (Callon, 1992 ).

These caveats should drive us toward doing more thoughtful empirical research in this topic area. Clearly, the situated performances of different LADs will produce different representations and content, different pedagogical and infrastructural conditions, and constraints. These nuances do matter: our point is that design, context and performance of a LAD will have predictable and unpredicable (un)intended effects. Therefore, there is a pressing need for empirical and critical analyses of the role and effects a LAD might have on learner performance and learner relationships with their peers, instructors or the educational institutions in which they are enrolled, and the implications of particular manifestations of a LAD thereon.

We have put forward one way to map out the educational effects through an explicit recognition of the LAD as situated within a Technological Society, a society that is information technology dense and highly political. When designing an LAD for health professions education, one must think beyond the technical and instrumental and consider one’s role in the designing of people, in this case healthcare professionals. These are now technological citizens, expected to be lifelong learners capable of operating in information technology dense healthcare systems, able to receive constant feedback and adapt. Grappling with the precariousness of the use of technical means to produce feedback systems that create an interactive type of citizen is, and will continue to be, a ‘wicked’ problem requiring constant reflection.

In conclusion, we finish with a final argument that the core and ongoing question concerning feedback does not concern the creation of a ‘technical fix’ to the problem of more feedback (which students and educators often mistakenly cry out for), rather our attention should be focused on the nature, timing and deployment of appropriate feedback to the learner and their learning situation. Even more crucially, the creation of feedback content and systems must be designed in a way that is cognisant of their potential myriad unintended learning consequences, in order to be able to try and delimit them when and where possible. We suggest that looking through the lens of a Technological Society can help us this agenda whereby artefacts such as LADs can be more critically and deliberately engaged technically and politically in the construction of future healthcare professionals.

Data availability

No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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JC conceived the work and developed the preliminary idea through discussions with SK. MC and ON made substantial contributions to the design of the work with ON providing technical expertise on the functions of a LAD. JC and SK led paper drafting with MC and ON contributing to drafts as these progressed and critically reviewing drafts. All authors approved the final version and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

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Kitto, S., Chiang, H.L.M., Ng, O. et al. More, better feedback please: are learning analytics dashboards (LAD) the solution to a wicked problem?. Adv in Health Sci Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-024-10358-8

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A college degree in Texas for those who have to put their education on pause

West texas a&m is offering embedded associate degrees starting this fall.

1:30 AM on Aug 28, 2024 CDT

College debt is suffocating. Students take on lifelong commitments too burdensome for degrees that may not have substantial value. That, in turn, diminishes the integrity and worth of the higher education enterprise in the eyes of students, their families, and the general public.

This is unacceptable.

Contributing to the problem is the overall dropout rate, which studies suggest is up to 40% among students who take on debt , according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s at four-year universities. In community colleges, fewer than 1 in 5 community college students graduate in three years with a two-year degree, according to Forbes.

Traditionally, the expectation for higher education has been “in at 18, out at 22.” That’s increasingly less common as demographics and aspirations change, but too often, elected officials, bankers and university leadership still cling to that model.

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At West Texas A&M University, we know that model must be more flexible. Life is never predictable, and sometimes, our students aren’t able to finish their bachelor’s degree while following that four-year plan. That’s why this fall, we will begin offering associate degrees to students who complete 60 hours — 42 hours of core curriculum and 18 hours of courses within their major.

West Texas A&M is the first university in Texas to offer what we call the “embedded” associate degrees. The first embedded associate degree in mathematics will be mailed before Christmas. Seven other embedded associate degrees will be awarded in May 2025.

The university-conferred associate degrees are certifications of progress. There are no graduation ceremonies planned; the degree is simply mailed to every student when they meet the requirements of 60 credit hours, the halfway mark of the baccalaureate degree. Importantly, these are not intended as terminal degrees. They are intended for people who aspired to attain a bachelor’s degree but were forced to put a pause on their education. At West Texas A&M, we are working to address real student needs.

The embedded associate degree will not compete with community colleges. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, the opposite is true. Tuition and fees at two-year institutions are one-third the cost of those at four-year institutions, and this plan does not change that. The embedded associate degree is a bonus, not the endgame.

Do university-conferred associate degrees provide benefits? Certainly. They offer a clearly defined point to pause their education when, as they say, life gets in the way. Students with an associate degree earn $938 a week, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , while those who have only some college credits earn $877 per week. And if they then return to school and complete a bachelor’s degree, they can expect to earn $1,305 per week. These are clear emotional and economic benefits.

This approach has already been tested in Colorado, where 2021′s Higher Education Student Success legislation offered senior universities the ability to confer associate degrees to students with 70 credits. Students who have paused their education have an associate degree that both benefits them in the workforce and encourages them to persist until they attain their bachelor’s degree.

Higher education is almost always a value proposition. At West Texas A&M, our leadership seeks new ways to address the challenges of educational debt, changing student demographics, increased life pressures on students and lack of degree completion. Our school’s goal is to enrich human satisfaction, instill a sense of accomplishment, and impact economic development for our region and, indeed, for the state of Texas.

This embedded associate degree program is a crucial step in that direction and a way of redefining excellence in higher education.

Walter V. Wendler is president of West Texas A&M University.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here . If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at [email protected]

Walter V. Wendler