Bringing Together the Brightest Minds in Education

December 7, 2020

CEPR Faculty Director, Tom Kane, invited to join Yidan Prize Foundation’s international Council of LuminariesThe COVID-19 pandemic has thrown education systems into chaos, subjecting 90% of students around the world to school closures. While some students made the transition to distance learning and virtual classrooms with relative ease, the experience is far from universal. This is partly because only half of the world’s children have access to the internet. Despite a diversity of creative and agile solutions that included classes provided via radio, mobile and TV networks, at least 48% of students in Africa could not be reached by digital and broadcast technologies. And elsewhere in low-to-middle income countries, 40% were—and continue to be—unable to support learners at risk of exclusion during the pandemic.

The world will, one day, recover. My greatest hope and that of the Yidan Prize Foundation, a global philanthropic education foundation, is that this universal crisis gives us the occasion to reflect on what we have learned about education and on how we can ensure its fair distribution in the future.

Continue reading at wsj.com.

See also: In the News, 2020