Don A. Klinger Professor

This book provides a critical review of the long-term effectiveness of education and social protection policies enacted by G10 countries in response to the global pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the most significant disruption to education systems since the devastation of World War II. Successive waves and variants of the coronavirus resulted in school closures and spurred a range of policy interventions across national education systems to combat both the cognitive (i.e., achievement in reading, mathematics, and science) and non-cognitive (socioemotional development, mental and physical health) impacts on student achievement and wellbeing. This book aims to evaluate the long-term efficacy of such interventions, drawing on an analysis of a cross-section of nine industrialized countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and Japan. It further offers cross-national insights for policymakers and discusses the critical importance of broader notions of academic resilience in a post-pandemic world. Ultimately, this volume aims to identify national policies that have helped to buffer students from the long-term challenges associated with the aftermath of the pandemic.

A timely and important text, it will be of interest to researchers and policymakers in education policy, pandemic response, impact evaluation, and student mental health.

Academic resilience has taken on renewed significance in the aftermath of the pandemic — a generational event that disrupted the education of more than 1.5 billion students across the globe. Unsurprisingly, cross-national research has adequately documented the profound impact of school closures on traditional cognitive domains such as reading, mathematics, and science achievement. At the same time, COVID-19 has also brought into sharper focus the important role schools play in supporting skills such as academic resilience, among others, that are commonly classified as “non-cognitive” skills, as well as their role in enhancing academic success. Yet academic resilience is often viewed as a narrow construct. Louis Volante and Don A. Klinger analyze how academic resilience has traditionally been conceptualized, along with the nature and scope of policy interventions to support students in the aftermath of the pandemic.

This study expands on our previous research focusing on provincial educational policies to support students’ academic resilience during the pandemic, with the current focus being on the “recovery phase” of the pandemic (January 2022 to December 2023). Our analysis identified 46 provincial documents that addressed one or more of the three dimensions of academic resilience during this recovery period. Similar to our previous findings, a greater emphasis was placed on academic outcomes. There was an increased focus on mental health, while much less attention was paid to physical health and well-being. While we identified examples of provinces that dedicated resources and funding to support these dimensions, we argue the policies implemented during the recovery phase will require more conviction to address the negative long-term impacts of the pandemic, particularly for disadvantaged students, and that such efforts will likely need to continue beyond public schooling.

The promotion and measurement of standards in compulsory education systems has been a prominent feature of Western education systems for centuries. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) have made the limits of current standards-based approaches to assessment more evident. Louis Volante, Don A. Klinger, and Christopher DeLuca discuss the importance of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills for the future success of schools. More authentic assessments, some of which leverage AI, can assess students’ performance in these essential domains.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the learning process of more than 1.5 billion students and youth around the world. The abrupt and unplanned shift to online schooling had a negative impact on student learning and achievement, with the greatest challenges experienced by the most vulnerable learners. Scientific evidence from across the globe is revealing the scale of the learning losses attributable to the school restrictions in response to the pandemic. The literature discussing the efficacy of policy interventions developed to address this generational challenge is very much limited to deliberations about reforming national education systems. Relatively little available research considers this topic from a cross-national perspective. The current volume, The Pandemic, Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Learning Outcomes: Cross-National Impact Analyses of Education Policy Reforms, provides a timely and detailed cross-cultural and comparative analysis of the relationship between pandemic-related school restrictions, learning loss and education policy development. Cases from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary and England provide a close examination of the pressing learning challenges precipitated by COVID-19 and its disproportionate impact on socioeconomically disadvantaged students. The chapters collected in this volume are about the application of counterfactual methods for estimating the learning loss caused by pandemic-related school restrictions. The results reported here go far beyond just monitoring learning outcomes before and after the pandemic; they contribute to our understanding of the differential impacts of pandemic related school restrictions across education systems and offer implications for pandemic-era schooling contexts, making us better prepared for future crises.