COVID-19 CAUSES ONE OF HISTORY’S GREATEST DISRUPTIONS TO EDUCATION
MARISOL G. MENESES
Researchers warned that school-aged students lost more than a third of a year’s worth of learning early on in the pandemic and have still not caught up. It poses a real problem for the students of this generation. Study shows that 95 percent of students worldwide were affected by school closures, and online teaching becoming far more common, hence, Covid-19 has caused one of history’s greatest disruptions to education.To find out how much this upheaval affected students, researchers found that children aged between five and 18 had lost the equivalent of 35 percent of a normal year's worth of education. Researchers said that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were disproportionately affected, as were those in poorer countries. They even emphasized that the Learning crisis is an equality crisis as they found larger learning deficits for mathematics than for reading. The reason here, they said, is that may be due to parents being better able to help their children with reading compared to mathematics exercises. They disclosed that most of the learning deficits came during school closures at the start of the pandemic. The study also stressed that efforts by children, parents, schools, and governments since may have prevented further losses but have not made up for the lost ground. A researcher even explained that education is one of – if not the -key predictor for children's school-to-work transition, their success in the labor market, and their success in building up their own livelihoods. For this generation, this is potentially going to be a real problem as they experienced the pandemic in school. Relative to this, the researchers have urged the governments to take up policy initiatives to help this generation of learners recover from their losses. They also recommend that more research is highly needed to comprehend the scale of the problem going forward, particularly in less developed countries as they called on policymakers to stay focused on the issue. They further emphasized that it is important to remember that these learning deficits are still there.