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.

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.

The editors of this volume provide the reader with an interesting and timely analysis of the relationship between international testing and educational policy formulation across 10 EU Member States. The resulting national profiles and findings come at a sensitive time in our collective history, when education systems across Europe, and around the world, are grappling with the significant challenges presented by COVID-19.

This book examines socioeconomic inequality and student outcomes across various Western industrialized nations and the varying success they have had in addressing achievement gaps in lower socioeconomic status student populations. It presents the national profiles of countries with notable achievement gaps within the respective school-aged student populations, explains the trajectory of achievement results in relation to both national and international large-scale assessment measures, and discusses how relevant education policies have evolved within their national contexts. Most importantly, the national profiles investigate the effectiveness of policy responses that have been adopted to close the achievement gap in lower socioeconomic status student populations. This book provides a cross-national analysis of policy approaches designed to address socioeconomic inequality.

This book provides perspectives and insights across the educational system for how we might move toward living out this wish in all schools. The chapters provide perspectives on fundamental questions that have been guiding recent research on wellbeing in schools: How do school communities flourish together? How does supporting educator wellbeing connect to teaching, learning, leading in schools? What characteristics, qualities and strategies support the wellbeing of the whole school community? This book is unique in that it answers these questions from the perspectives of teachers, students, administrators in K-12 schools, as well as from university and the wider community. Importantly, these chapters provide a repertoire of varied answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How can we leverage what works well to grow more, to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute? These chapters serve as examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts ways they can grow wellbeing through a focused attention on building appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and leading in all schools.

This book examines immigrant student achievement and education policy across a range of Western nations. It is divided into 3 sections: Part 1 introduces the topic of immigrant student achievement and the performance disadvantage that is consistently reported across a range of international jurisdictions. Part 2 then presents national profiles from scholars in ten countries (England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). These educational jurisdictions were selected because they represent a range of Western nations engaged in large-scale reform efforts geared towards enhancing their immigrant students’ achievement. Each of the national profiles provides a brief overview of the evolution of the cultural composition of their respective school-aged student population; explains the trajectory of achievement results in non-immigrant and immigrant student groups in relation to both national and international large-scale assessment measures; and discusses the effectiveness of policy responses that have been adopted to close the achievement gap between non-immigrant and immigrant student populations. It also examines the relationships between education policies and immigrant student achievement and discusses how education policies have evolved across various cultural contexts. In conclusion, Part 3 analyzes cross-cultural approaches designed to address the performance disadvantage of immigrant students and proposes future areas of inquiry stemming from the national profiles.  The book offers insights into a diverse cross-section of nations and policy approaches to addressing the performance disadvantage.  .