A cross-national examination of the continuing teaching and learning during COVID-19: policy analysis in the U.S., India, and Brazil

• In Event: Covidd-19 Transitions in Schooling

Proposal

The World Bank reported in April 2020 that the COVID-19 pandemic had created the largest disruption of education systems for over 1.6 billion learners in the world, constituting 94 percent of the world’s student population. The pandemic has worsened the teaching and learning crisis, which many countries already experienced before the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, all OECD and partner countries decided to use online platforms for education, as guided by the central or local governments to alleviate the negative impacts of the pandemic on education. Some countries succeeded in promoting “sustainable home-based and school-based parental involvement”, whereas others lagged far behind in supporting students from low-income and working-class backgrounds who struggled with obstacles in transitioning to online learning. This study offered a global overview of the pandemic impacts on continuous teaching and learning and responses in three countries that were most affected by COVID-19 in 2020.

The severity of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on education was widely discussed in numerous articles, reports, and documents. The existing literature focused primarily on how education was suffered from COVID-19 locally. Nevertheless, because the pandemic is still ongoing, empirical studies in relevant education policy are rare, particularly the studies on global and comparative education. It is unclear about the commonalities and differences of education policies and their effectiveness across countries. Evidence on the shift and responsiveness of education policies were patchy, and the analytic collections of policies across countries were scarce. There is, therefore, a need for a better understanding of how education in countries reacts to COVID-19. More specifically, the following research question needs to be examined: what policies did various countries implement, and how similarly and differently did they address challenges and mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on continuing teaching and learning?

The objective of this empirical study was to contribute to the gap in the descriptive literature on education during the pandemic. It used a qualitative method to analyze the content of policy documents in the studied countries and provided a nuanced understanding of how countries initiated and shaped their education policies under specific pandemic and sociocultural contexts. This study drew on cross-national data to portray analytic policy evidence, and the finding of this study could contribute to policy dialogues across countries. Countries could also remake and reimagine both structures of education in the pandemic era and ways in which they connect and cooperate for the common goods of education in the future.

By connecting the policy analysis to policy implications, this study compared the implications of all policies across countries. It conducted a comparative analysis of educational responses in three specific countries, which served as concrete examples of countries by different income levels. The three chosen countries were the United States, India, and Brazil because the total number of COVID-19 cases in those countries ranked the highest worldwide. All collected policy documents from the countries served as the data of this study. It drew data from international organizations, the central or local governments, the ministries of education, etc. which covered signed letters, executive orders, policy briefs, etc. Out of a total of 249 collected documents (97 U.S., 87 Brazil, 65 India). All data of this study were dated from March 2020, the onset of the pandemic worldwide, to January 2021. The study used a data-driven approach to analyze cross-case policies thematically. It used a manually qualitative coding approach, specifically, the color-coding approach to analyze the data. It derived codes from the patterns and trends of several major documents, and the open coding process confirmed the previously found patterns in the literature. Then, it used the major derived topics as axial coding to look into the relationships between each identified theme and develop the relationship across different levels of codes as policy responses to COVID-19. Finally, it conducted a selective coding process that derived all representative and important quotes to demonstrate each major code.

The finding of the study showed that all three studied countries exhibited efforts to develop teaching and learning strategies to continue education during the pandemic. The data demonstrated four major aspects of educational responses: 1) adjusting students’ admission and enrollment, 2) supporting students’ remote learning, 3) facilitating teachers’ remote teaching, and 4) developing technological tools for remote learning. All the studied countries focused primarily on the stakeholders’ safety and health and offered opportunities to all students to take their exams flexibly. The three countries presented efforts to evaluate students’ learning outcomes and support students’ learning as best as they could. They made an immediate implementation of remote learning for all students as soon as the pandemic hit to allow students to have access to education and continue their learning while they were at home. The three countries allocated funds to support the purchase of internet connectivity and technical devices and developed guidelines or lists of recommended online resources for students’ remote learning. To ensure the quality of remote teaching, resources and support were available in the three countries for teachers to access technologies and structure their courses. The school administrators, teachers, staff, and parents also received training on school safety protocols and practices regarding the school reopening.

This study went beyond the four topics and further explained the interwoven relationships across the themes. The main goal of the study was to present different countries’ policy formulation and implementation--how were they similar and different from each other. The study found that the pandemic offered the three countries an opportunity to redesign and reimagine their education system in the past, the present, and the future. While they reflected on their reactions towards the emergency, they realized the constraints of their existing education systems that embedded many inherent problems that they did not pay attention to before. The pandemic greatly amplified these issues and allowed the three countries to develop creative, adaptive, and sustainable solutions to improve or even reinvent their education systems. Policymakers in many countries needed to address the intrinsic education challenges in the long term and fundamentally restructure the education systems.

Author

• Yue Liu, Harvard University