Author Description

The book examines the impact of COVID-19 on education three years since the pandemic started. It presents the work of students in a course of comparative education policy analysis we taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the fall of 2022 as they worked with education authorities in various countries. The chapters in this book demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a severe blow to educational opportunities across the world. This was not just because of the shock caused by the health emergency, but also because of the fragility of school systems to sustain educational opportunities and to recover from it. These priorities advanced by the clients to the students who consulted for them to carry out the work presented in this book, are narrowly focused on recovering learning loss in foundational areas. This suggests that the education agenda narrowed from an earlier growing interest in 21st-century skills and in educating the whole child to more basic domains of knowledge and skills. This narrowing of the education agenda is understandable given the fragility that education systems demonstrated to sustain even the most basic forms of educational opportunity. It is also quite possible that in expressing such a sharp focus education authorities are simply reflecting an acute awareness of the limitations of capacity and resources with which they need to face the pandemic aftermath. It is, however, essential to recognize that such fragility of school systems was the reason for the many preexisting cleavages in educational opportunities augmented during the crisis. Therefore, the weak capacity, lack of systemic integration, and lack of coherence that undergird such fragility need to be addressed in order to treat the causes of the problem, and not the symptoms (learning loss), making education systems more resilient. To the extent that the pandemic has narrowed the education agenda and displaced the focus on building systems that can produce