Girls from poor localities wait their turn to show school work to teacher, at a makeshift school in a city park in Islamabad, Pakistan, Nov. 13, 2018 (AP photo by B.K. Bangash).
The Transforming Education Summit is fast approaching. Many in the education community and at the United Nations, as well as impassioned young activists around the world, have begun to mobilize for the event, which is scheduled to coincide with the U.N. General Assembly in September. And according to the world body’s deputy secretary-general, Amina Mohammed, the summit aims at nothing less than “averting a generational disaster” by “rethinking education systems.” However, little attention is being paid to this summit outside of those circles. In many ways, this isn’t surprising: Conferences and summits are an almost daily fixture on the international calendar, and [...]
Pupils attend class at Kitante Primary School on the first day of classes after a 22-month pandemic closure, Kampala, Uganda, Jan. 10, 2022 (AP photo by Hajarah Nalwadda).
In March 2020, before the first COVID-19 case was even recorded in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni went on national television to announce a country-wide closure of schools. Calling schools the “perfect grounds for new infections,” he said he was making the “move early to avoid the stampede.” Most of the country’s classrooms would remain closed for 22 months, one of the longest COVID-related shutdowns in the world. They finally reopened in January, and educators are still assessing the fallout. First-year primary school classrooms are overflowing with three-years’ worth of pupils, while secondary school campuses have been drained of students who found jobs or got [...]
Students protest outside the National Assembly to demand a larger budget for university education, Quito, Ecuador, Sept. 9, 2021 (AP photo by Dolores Ochoa).
On Oct. 27, Rishi Sunak, the U.K.’s chancellor of the exchequer, announced the government’s education budget, including additional spending earmarked to help students overcome the disruptions introduced by the coronavirus pandemic. Though billed as a boost to education expenditures, as Sunak himself admitted, the government’s current plans would only return per pupil spending—which was cut drastically as part of broader budgetary austerity imposed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis—to 2010 levels by 2024. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson told the Financial Times, Sunak’s spending plan reflects the “remarkable lack of priority” given to education [...]
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