As Covid-19threatenedthe health and economic survival of millions of people around the world, the pharmaceutical industry,academia,andthe public sector rallied to make quick and decisive investmentsthat haveled to better treatments and vaccines that could soonturn the cornerin the fight against thedisease.
If that was the reaction the health crisis demanded, however, the global response to the deep and severeeducation crisis triggered by the pandemic hasfaltered.There have been many valiant effortsbyteachers, schools, and governments. Butbillions of childrenremain athomedue to school closures andcontinue to lackaccess to structured education.Manyof thesechildren,mainly from poor families,willfallsignificantly behind intheir studies and somewilldrop out of school altogether.
This amounts to a significantfailure by governments, academia,andthe technology industry. It is a failure due to a lack of resources, as well asweak incentives for innovation andthe implementationofnewteaching methods andtechnologies. Itmust be rectified if we are to do better for our children.
Providing Education Innovation for Schools
When you visit the doctor, you expect her to choose from the best available practices to cure your condition.The doctortries to find the right match between the illness andhermedical toolkit. Shedoes nottry toinnovatebut adoptsbest practicesthat werecreated elsewhere. The same is trueinschools.
Principals and teachersneed innovationtoimprove education,but they are notnecessarilythe onesthatshouldbe innovating(or at least that is not every principal’s and teacher’s job).Governments saythey are involved in research and development (R&D).The truth is that most of their resources go to cover current expenses such as salaries. Companies, universities, think tanks,and NGOs, meanwhile,have generatednewpracticesyielding positive results, though these haveoftenonly been triedon asmall scale.
Many would arguethat the problem is that most education is public or heavily regulated by the state,and that this stiflesinnovation.Military defense, however,is also provided by the state and there have been great innovations that have come out of the military industry.The Internet, for example,emerged from a program funded by theUnited StatesDepartment of Defense.
Four Basic Conditions for Improving Innovation
The problem is rather that we have not implemented four basic conditions necessary tostimulate therequiredwave of innovation in our schools.
First,we needmore resources.The most successful companies spend between 2%and 20%of their turnover onR&D. The most successful OECD countries spend an average of more than 2.5 percent oftheirGDP onR&D.
In LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, about 6% of GDP is spent on education. Of this, athirdgoes to primary education. If we were to allocate 5%of primary education spendingtowardsinnovation,that would amount to $6billion a year(taking the GDP of 2018 as benchmark).By comparison, theUSgovernmentdedicated more than$9 billion tofund thedevelopmentand manufactureofCovid-19vaccines.
Second, as in the pharmaceutical industry,we must attract the most innovative minds.The standard modelisto create incentivesthrough patents that allow companiesand universitiesto recover what they have invested inR&Dand continueto invest.The problem withthis model is thatpatents may slow down diffusion and, in some cases, it may be hard to avoid costless adoption/copying. An alternative would be to setup a generous system ofawards forsuccessful innovators.
Third, just as in thepharmaceutical industry,we need infrastructure that allows us to assess whether innovations are effective. You would not accepta vaccine forCovid-19 that hadn\'t been properly evaluated and certified. Why expose our children to practices that weare not sure work?
In the United States, the Department of Education fundsWhat Works Clearinghouse,acollection of educational practices and policiesthat havebeen rigorously evaluated. Thematerial is presented inawaythat is usefulfor school administrators and educational authorities infindingsolutions to the problems that arise every day.The databasecurrentlycontains more than 10,000 studies.
Of course, not every countryneeds(or can afford) to havesuch a database. Regional initiatives canalsobe established.
Finally,schools andeducational authoritiesneedincentives to adopt effective practices. In the United States, for example, 75%of the money the federal government spends on home visiting programs must be onthosethat have been rigorously evaluated. The remaining 25%can bespent onpromising programsundergoing rigorous evaluation.
The Urgency of a Global Solution
TheCovid-19 crisis presented a unique opportunity toachieve large-scalesolutionsfor teachingliteracy and mathematics to children around the world. Wehave not been up to the challenge. Not because we didnot want to improve learning for our children but because the conditionswerenot ripeforthe massivewave of innovationrequired.It is time for governments, civil society,academia,and multilateral organizations to work towards aglobalsolution to the learning crisisby establishing thefoundationfor R&D in education.