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Original research article, resilience, reorientation, and reinvention: school leadership during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic.

• 1 Leadership for Educational Organizations, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, United States
• 2 Cherry Creek School District, Greenwood Village, CO, United States

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the globe, many schools struggled to react both quickly and adequately. Schools were one of the most important societal institutions to be affected by the pandemic. However, most school leaders have little to no training in crisis leadership, nor have they dealt with a crisis of this scale and this scope for this long. This article presents our findings from interviews of 43 school organizations around the globe about their responses during the early months of the pandemic. Primary themes from the interviews included an emphasis on vision and values; communication and family community engagement; staff care, instructional leadership, and organizational capacity-building; equity-oriented leadership practices; and recognition of potential future opportunities. These findings resonate with the larger research literature on crisis leadership and have important implications for school leaders’ future mindsets, behaviors, and support structures during crisis incidents.

The news headlines became increasingly alarmist in the early months of 2020. In late January the New York Times asked, “Is the world ready for the coronavirus?” ( Editorial Board, 2020 ). A month later the Los Angeles Times headline read, “Coronavirus spread in United States is inevitable, CDC warns” ( Shalby, 2020 ). As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, schools were forced to take notice. In a front-page article, the writers at Education Week noted that school districts were “likely to be on the front lines in efforts to limit [the virus’] impact” ( Superville, 2020 , p. 1).

By mid-March it was clear that the virus was going global. School systems across the planet began to close and the Washington Post headline read, “Coronavirus now a global pandemic as United States world scramble to control outbreak” ( Zezima et al., 2020 ). Early outbreaks in China and Italy led to drastic societal lockdowns in Southeast Asia and Europe. The rest of the world soon followed.

Most school systems were caught flatfooted, despite the fact that many locations had several months warning. School boards and administrators dithered about what to do. Government support for schools and families was ambiguous. Uncertainty reigned everywhere. The global pandemic spread rapidly and most schools struggled to react both quickly and adequately. Schools in the United States began to close in early March whether they were ready or not ( Lieberman, 2020 ) and several weeks later America faced “a school shutdown of historic proportions” ( Sawchuk, 2020 , p. 12). Today COVID-19 continues to spread across the planet, with many countries–including the United States–facing their worst rates of infection and death to date ( Schnirring, 2020 ). While some schools are fully open, others have closed again or have moved to remote instruction for nearly all of their students ( Gewertz and Sawchuk, 2020 ).

By now it is evident that the global pandemic has created an unprecedented challenge for school leaders. Although principals and superintendents are used to handling smaller crises such as fights in the hallway, a leaky boiler, irate parents, disagreements over budgetary choices, or even a scandal concerning a local educator, most school leaders have never dealt with a crisis of this scale and this scope for this long. Even the immediacy of larger crises that often force school closures–such as a large snowstorm, a hurricane, or a school shooting–typically expires after a few days or weeks. Like no other crisis before, the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the deficiencies of our educational systems and the lack of administrator preparation regarding crisis leadership. As the pandemic continues to stretch the outer limits of our individual and institutional resiliency, this article is an attempt to understand the responses of P-12 school leaders around the world during those first few critical months.

Review of the Literature

The literature base on crisis leadership has been broadly consistent for decades. Often drawn from the government, military, business, or health sectors, several key themes and leadership behaviors regularly emerge from the scholarly research. In the sections below, we briefly describe what we seem to know about leadership during crisis situations, both in education and across other societal sectors.

What Is Crisis Leadership?

Since crises occur regularly in the lives of organizations, several researchers have attempted to create conceptual models and sense-making frameworks to help leaders and institutions think about effective leadership during crisis events. Boin et al. (2013) created one of the most comprehensive crisis leadership frameworks. Noting that crisis episodes bring out instant “winners” and “losers” when it comes to leadership, they articulated ten key executive tasks that accompany successful crisis management. Initial tasks include early recognition of the crisis, sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, and making critical decisions. Other tasks include vertical and horizontal coordination within the organization and across organizations, as well as coupling and decoupling systems as necessary. Other critical tasks include robust communication, helping others engage in meaning-making for others, and, finally, reflecting on and learning from the crisis and rendering accountability regarding what worked and what did not. The authors noted that the overall goal of a leader should be to increase organizational resilience before, during, and after a crisis (pp. 82–87). Each of these executive tasks has been unpacked in further detail in the scholarly literature and most of the elements in the framework from Boin, Kuipers, and Overdijk occur frequently in others’ conceptual models (see, e.g., Smith and Riley, 2012 ; Dückers et al., 2017 ).

As noted by Boin et al. (2013) , one of the most consistent elements of crisis leadership appears to be sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty. During a crisis, challenges arise quickly and both information and known solutions may be scarce. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the key challenges for school leaders were the unique nature of the crisis (i.e., most school organizations have not experienced a pandemic), the rapid timeline, and the accompanying uncertainty that hindered effective responses. Leaders’ experience mattered little when the COVID crisis had few “knowable components” ( Flin, 1996 ; Kahneman and Klein, 2009 ; Klein, 2009 ). Boin and Renaud (2013) articulated that joint sensemaking is “particularly important to effective crisis management: if decision makers do not have a shared and accurate picture of the situation, they cannot make informed decisions and communicate effectively with partners, politicians, and the public” (p. 41). Unfortunately for many school leaders during the first months of the pandemic, policymakers–and often the administrators above those leaders in the organizational hierarchy–often lacked an accurate picture of what was occurring, nor did they share what they knew with others in ways that enabled effective leadership responses and partnerships. Anecdotal stories abound of front-line educators and administrators struggling to get information and guidance during the pandemic’s first few months from those above them in the school system or from their local, state, and federal politicians.

Another consistent element of crisis leadership is effective communication, and numerous scholars have emphasized the leader’s role in communicating with both internal and external audiences. Marsen (2020) noted that crisis communication must deal with both issue management during the crisis and reputation management after the crisis. In their handbook on crisis communication, Heath and O’Hair (2020) emphasized that good communication is critically important because of the social nature of a leader’s work and because crisis management is inherently a collective activity. Effective communication builds trust and helps to create shared understandings and commitments across stakeholders ( Lucero et al., 2009 ). During times of crisis, effective leaders engage in holding , which means that they are containing and interpreting what is happening during a time of uncertainty. As Petriglieri (2020) noted:

Containing refers to the ability to soothe distress and interpreting to the ability to help others make sense of a confusing predicament… [Leaders] think clearly, offer reassurance, orient people, and help them stick together. That work is as important as inspiring others. In fact, it is a precondition for doing so.

Another important finding regarding crisis leadership is that what constitutes effective leadership often changes over the time span of the crisis ( Hannah et al., 2009 ). As conditions shift and new needs emerge, leaders must be flexible and adaptive ( Smith and Riley, 2012 ). During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, most school leaders progressed through several key response phases ( McLeod, 2020b ). Phase 1 represented a focus on basic needs and included feeding children and families, ensuring student access to computing devices and the Internet, and checking in on families’ wellbeing. During Phase 2, administrators reoriented their schools to deliver instruction remotely. This work included training teachers in new pedagogies and technologies, as well as establishing instructional routines and digital platforms to facilitate online learning. Once schools began to settle into new routines, leaders then could begin paying attention to richer, deeper learning opportunities for students (Phase 3) and look ahead to future opportunities and help their organizations be better prepared for future dislocations of schooling (Phase 4). This latter phase is what many scholars have identified as a reconstruction ( Boin and Hart, 2003 ) or adaptive Prewitt et al., 2011 ) stage of crisis leadership (see also Coombs, 2000 ; Heath, 2004 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ).

Finally, some researchers have noted the importance of leaders’ attention to social and emotional concerns during a crisis (see, e.g., Meisler et al., 2013 ). After finding that “the psychosocial dimension of crises has received little attention in crisis management literature” (p. 95), Dückers et al. (2017) created a conceptual model of psychosocial crisis management that emphasized such leadership and organizational tasks as “providing information and basic aid” and “promoting a sense of safety, calming, self- and community efficacy, connectedness to others, and hope” (p. 101). The authors noted that effective crisis leadership involves more than effective communication and response coordination and also must attend to the general wellbeing and health of employees and other stakeholders.

Crisis Leadership in Schools

The literature cited here from other contexts also is applicable to school systems. During a crisis, school leaders–like their counterparts in other institutions–must engage in effective communication, facilitate sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, be flexible and adaptive, and pay attention to the emotional wellbeing and health of employees. The executive tasks described by Boin et al. (2013) are relevant for school organizations and their leaders, just as they are in other societal sectors. In addition to the more generalized research base, some crisis leadership research has been conducted on school settings specifically. For instance, Smith and Riley (2012) recognized that school administrators’ crisis leadership is very different from that necessary to be successful in a more “normal” school environment. They also noted that critical attributes of effective crisis leadership in schools include:

The ability to cope with–and thrive on–ambiguity; a strong capacity to think laterally; a willingness to question events in new and insightful ways; a preparedness to respond flexibly and quickly, and to change direction rapidly if required; an ability to work with and through people to achieve critical outcomes; the tenacity to persevere when all seems to be lost; and a willingness to take necessary risks and to “break the rules” when necessary (p. 65).

In a study of school principals’ actions after the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mutch (2015b) articulated a three-factor conceptual model of school crisis leadership. The first factor was dispositional and included school leaders’ values, belief systems, personality traits, skills, and areas of expertise. The second factor was relational and included leaders’ visioning work as well as fostering collaboration, building trust, enabling empowerment, and building a sense of community. The final factor was situational , which included understanding both the past and immediate contexts, adapting to changing needs, thinking creatively, and providing direction for the organization. In her case studies of four elementary schools, Mutch identified specific leadership actions that fell under each of these factors. In a separate article that same year, Mutch (2015a) noted that schools with an inclusive culture and with strong relationships beforehand are better situated to manage crises that may occur.

Many researchers have noted the importance of maintaining trust during a crisis (see, e.g., Mutch, 2015a ; Dückers et al., 2017 ). Sutherland (2017) examined leadership behaviors in light of a school crisis caused by the accidental deaths of two students on a service-learning trip. Utilizing Tschannen-Moran and Hoy’s (2000) model of trust in schools, Sutherland found that closely held, non-consultative decision-making by top executives eroded the school’s ability to communicate effectively and thus hindered trust in the larger school community. He also found that subsequent implementation of new communication structures fostered better collaboration and rebuilt trust with educators and families. Sutherland’s findings are relevant for school leaders who have struggled to balance often-conflicting parent and educator expectations during the pandemic and thus have seen community trust erode as a result.

Mahfouz et al. (2019) studied Lebanese principals and schools as they responded to the international Syrian refugee crisis. They noted that “instead of focusing on leadership and academic performance, principals [faced with a large influx of Syrian refugee families spent] most of their time “putting out fires,” resolving urgent issues, and attending to basic needs that typically are taken for granted in other schools” (p. 24). Those challenges resemble the lived experiences of many principals and superintendents during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crisis Leadership in Schools During the Pandemic

Some very recent publications have attempted to apply principles of crisis leadership to the COVID-19 pandemic in non-educational sectors. For instance, Pearce et al. (2021) employed leadership concepts from the military to the global pandemic, identifying some “key components of mission command” as unity of effort, freedom of action, trust, and rapid decision making (pp. 1–2). These leadership concepts are similar to a list identified for public health officials several years ago, which also emphasized trust, decisiveness with flexibility, and the ability to coordinate diverse stakeholders ( Deitchman, 2013 ).

Contemporary research on leadership in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to emerge as well. Although it is still relatively early to make sense of schools’ responses to the pandemic, scholars are beginning to try to understand the early phases of the crisis. Much of this work has been theoretical or conceptual, however, rather than empirical. For instance, Bagwell (2020) noted that the pandemic “is rapidly redefining schooling and leadership” (p. 31) and advocated for leaders to lead adaptively, build organizational and individual resilience, and create distributed leadership structures for optimal institutional response. Likewise, Netolicky (2020) noted many of the tensions that school leaders are facing during the pandemic. These tensions range from the need to lead both fast and slow, to balancing equity with excellence and accountability, to considering both human needs and organizational outcomes.

During the pandemic, Fernandez and Shaw (2020) recommended that academic leaders focus on best practices, try to see opportunities in the crisis, communicate clearly, connect with others, and distribute leadership within the organization. Harris and Jones (2020) offered seven propositions for consideration and potential research attention, including the ideas that “most school leadership preparation and training programs… are likely to be out of step with the challenges facing school leaders today” and that “self-care and consideration must be the main priority and prime concerns for all school leaders” (p. 245). They also recognized that “crisis and change management are now essential skills of a school leader… [that] require more than routine problem solving or occasional firefighting” (p. 246).

In one of the few empirical studies to emerge so far on pandemic-era school leadership, Rigby et al. (2020) identified three promising practices for P-12 school systems: treating families as equal partners in learning, continuing to provide high-quality learning opportunities for students, and decision-making that is coordinated, coherent, and inclusive. Through their interviews of thirteen central office leaders in the Puget Sound area of Washington, they also made three recommendations, which were for school districts to focus on “building on” not “learning loss,” to prioritize relationships, and to create anti-racist, systemic coherence (p. 6). Regarding their first recommendation, they noted that “this is an opportunity to design systems to understand and build on what children learned (and continue to learn) at home” (p. 6).

As the pandemic progresses, there is a clear need for more empirical research on the effects of COVID-19 on schools and other institutions. Educational scholars and school leaders need evidence from the field to inform the theoretical and conceptual approaches that have dominated during the first months of the global crisis.

The exploratory research in this study involved interviews with school leaders from across the United States and in nine other countries. The interview series was not originally conceived as a research study. Instead, it originated as a series of informal recorded conversations that were dubbed the Coronavirus Chronicles and posted on the blog of one of the authors ( McLeod, 2020a ). Participants gave consent prior to their interviews to make their conversations public in this manner. A YouTube channel was created to host the videos. The interviews also were posted as audio recordings on several podcast hosting services, including Apple, Spotify, and SoundCloud. All interviews were publicized through the blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels. The goal was to make the interviews accessible to other school leaders who might find them informative and to make the interview series subscribable for those who wished to receive regular updates. As the number of interviews grew, we began to receive requests to identify larger themes that cut across the conversations and to delineate specific leadership behaviors that seemed to be useful during the crisis. We agreed that might be helpful to others and received permission from the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board to begin thinking about these interviews as a qualitative research study.

Because of the organic evolution of this project, the participants for this study were selected through convenience sampling. Convenience sampling is “a type of non-probability sampling in which people are sampled simply because they are “convenient” sources of data for researchers” ( Lavrakas, 2008 ). Convenience sampling was employed in this study for several reasons. Because the global pandemic was a particularly stressful event for schools and their administrators, the earliest interviewees were chosen based on personal connections and school leaders’ resultant willingness to make time for a conversation. As visibility of the Coronavirus Chronicles interview series grew, we also began to receive requests from others to participate. The blog posts that accompanied each new interview solicited viewers and listeners to participate in the series if they were interested and multiple school leaders took us up on that offer. At times we purposefully extended invitations to certain schools. For instance, we invited a series of international schools in order to get a spread of perspectives across multiple continents. We also invited several project- and inquiry-based learning schools to share their experiences, which we thought might be different from more traditional school systems. Accordingly, the results of this study may not be generalizable to other schools or school leaders, and care should be taken when interpreting our participants’ responses. Nonetheless, we believe that the information provided by the school leaders who participated in this interview series has value for other educational administrators, particularly as they consider their own leadership behaviors and support structures during this worldwide crisis.

We interviewed a total of 55 educators from 43 school organizations. Eleven of those institutions were international schools and the other 32 schools, districts, and educational programs were based in the United States. Three different schools in China were selected because the COVID-19 virus appeared to originate there, schools in that country were the first in the world to close down, and we thought that their early responses would be informative to schools in other countries for whom the virus was just starting to influence decision-making. We made some attempt to loosely sample a cross section of America, and we eventually talked with school leaders in 21 different states. Most of our interviewees were principals, superintendents, or central office administrators. A few were teachers or instructional coaches.

All interviews were conducted using the Zoom videoconferencing software platform and were scheduled at times convenient for all participants. The intent of the interviews was to gain an understanding of how interviewees’ school organizations were responding during the early months of the global pandemic. As Kvale (1996) noted, personal interviews are a particularly powerful method for “studying people’s understanding of the meaning in their lived world” (p. 105). We were particularly interested in hearing about what learning and teaching looked like in participants’ schools as they shifted into remote instructional modalities. We also asked these school leaders to describe the decisions made by their leadership teams that seemed to work well during this difficult time, and they told us about some of the challenges and opportunities that they foresaw in the months to come. Additionally, many of the interviewees shared with us their immediate personal and institutional responses in the earliest days and weeks surrounding the closure of their schools.

We utilized a semi-structured approach for the qualitative interviews in this study ( Yin, 2011 ). First, the relationships between ourselves and our interviewees were not strictly scripted. The interviews had a few standard questions but the wording of the questions, the wording of the follow-up questions, and the order in which the questions were asked varied according to the flow of each discussion. Second, the interviews were conducted informally rather than in a scripted style, allowing each interview to be personalized and to provide a more casual dialogue between subject and interviewer. Third, we primarily asked open-ended questions so that participants would offer more rich detail in their responses. Interviews lasted from 9 to 20 min and were intentionally kept short so that episodes might fit more easily within participants’, viewers’, and listeners’ busy work lives.

All interviews were transcribed using NoNotes, a secure third-party transcription service. Corrections were made to the transcriptions as necessary. We determined an initial set of codes through ongoing, open, inductive coding. We then engaged in selective coding to validate the relationships between themes against the data. Through this process, the initial set of codes and subcodes were refined and expanded based on the data set. Coding was conducted both jointly and individually. However, we reviewed each others’ coding and collaborated on the coding scheme until consensus was reached.

Although there were a few common, open-ended questions to spark discussion, conversations with our 55 participants ranged widely. In the sections below, we describe the main themes that emerged from our coding and analysis of the 43 Coronavirus Chronicles interviews. Our participants shared with us that centering their crisis leadership work around the school’s vision, leaning on individual and institutional values, and deploying robust communication and family engagement strategies were all critically important. Our interviewees also were deeply engaged in attempts to care for staff and build their capacity through instructional leadership and professional learning activities. The schools leaders who we interviewed approached their work during the early months of the pandemic with a strong equity lens, and many of them saw the potential emergence of future organizational opportunities despite their present challenges and struggles.

Vision and Values

When faced with a true crisis, a strong organizational vision founded on clear values enables school leaders to respond in intentional and highly effective ways. The critical importance of these foundational structures cannot be overstated. Successful outcomes of responsive decisions made during critical moments of a crisis depend on the strength and clarity of a school organization’s underlying values and vision. As noted in the research literature on crisis leadership, leading from a strong organizational vision and institutional values facilitates administrators’ sensemaking in conditions of uncertainty, guides critical decisions, enables coherent communication, and helps school leaders engage others in shared meaning-making ( Boin et al., 2013 ).

For example, the school district administrators that we interviewed from Bismarck, North Dakota told us that they knew they needed to approach their response to the COVID-19 crisis with careful and intentional planning, citing “the old African proverb if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go slow and go together.” These administrators and their teams took time to identify a “coherent, long-term plan of how [they] would like to approach the work for distance learning.” Organizational decision-making frameworks based on their values guided district- and school-level leadership teams as they moved forward with their response plans.

Tanna, a director of technology innovation, stated that time and identification of core values were critical as she identified the importance of relationships:

[R]eally taking some time to think about what are the core principles and different pieces of this? What are the… frames that we run decisions through? So that’s been tremendously helpful as you get more and more variables and other decisions that you’re making just to be calibrated on what do we really care about? And so, I think we… really tapped into what the Chinese schools… had been doing… being very vulnerable and being willing to share… I’ve been so grateful for the sharing and the generosity of educators around the world sharing things, and people have been very open and asking questions.

As educators around the world empathized with one another, there also was universal adherence to the value of empathy for students and families. Empathy drove immediate action focused on basic student and family needs such as providing food pickup and delivery. Gerald, a middle school principal, captured the breadth of his school’s empathetic approach: “We did take some time in the beginning to recognize that we care about relationships. That’s staff relationships and student and family relationships.”

Other core values surfaced early in the crisis response process for many schools. In addition to identifying the importance of relationships as they framed their planning and decision-making processes, our participants identified connectivity, collective wisdom, collaboration, empathy, adaptation, and risk-taking as values that drove their responses to the pandemic.

The importance of maintaining and strengthening relationships and connectivity between students and teachers, administrators and teachers, and administrators, teachers and families, became a clear first priority for many educational institutions. Relationships and connectivity resonate throughout educational settings because these values form the foundation of strong school communities and student success. As stated succinctly by Mary Beth, a director of educational technology, “we know those relationships are key to students feeling connected and successful.” Moreover, by identifying these values, the door to reimagining education in a remote setting opened up a little. Shannon, an English teacher in Amsterdam, shared her excitement about the evolution of this process:

We’ve talked a lot about community building and how to build a community in this virtual world and stay connected, and then I think in terms of teachers… really thinking that we can’t teach in the same way. So how are we going to reimagine our teaching practice? So I think a lot of us that wanted to do like a flipped classroom, but never found the time or wanted to set up Google Groups or Meets or whatever, well, we have time now, we have to do that… and I keep thinking that even though this has been really stressful time for educators and students and parents, there’s some really nice things that have come out of this… to reimagine the way we do things.

While establishing a clear focus on relationships and community connection came quickly to many organizations, the inextricably linked values of collective wisdom and collaboration also brought directional clarity into view. Ben, an assistant superintendent, recognized early on in the crisis that “there is a lot of collective wisdom not only across [the] district, but through everyone’s personal learning network.” Aaron, a head of school, echoed the important contributions of the broader educational community when he acknowledged that his institution “benefited from having a strong network of schools, locally and nationally, that we could bounce ideas off of, [and] like any good teacher, steal ideas [from] and make them our own.”

Accessing the collective wisdom of the educational community also permeated the international community. International schools in particular benefited from their global network. John, an international school deputy principal, approached the international educational community with vulnerability and deep gratitude:

We have a very rich, professional learning network amongst the international schools. [I]t’s about being patient, being kind to others and to yourself, and recognizing that in this chaos there’s a lot of really good things that can happen and we have to keep our most vulnerable a hundred percent in the forefront of our minds. If there’s any way we can take this and put more resources and more support for our most vulnerable learners, then the results are going to be good and that has to be our priority.

Ultimately, all of the values-based crisis responses could only occur if leaders modeled and encouraged adaptive practices and risk-taking solutions. Jori, a dean of students, explained:

I think what we’re finding is we’re learning something new every day and that it’s okay. Just like we tell our students that we’re looking for growth over time and it’s not always just about the end product, it’s growth over time for us and we are trying new things. Daily, I get emails from teachers or a phone call, “Hey, I found this, I’m going to try it with my students.” The answer is always, “Yes, please. Try something new.” Take risks, which are another thing that we’re asking our kids to do, we’re asking our staff to do, too.

The power of a values-driven approach to crisis management clearly resonated with our participants. This approach resulted in actionable responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that were founded on the values of relationship, connectivity, collective wisdom, collaboration, empathy, and adaptive risk-taking.

Communication and Family Community Engagement

The need for all educational organizations to communicate effectively with their stakeholders became paramount as the global pandemic forced every institution into remote learning. As expected from the research literature (see, e.g., Lucero et al., 2009 ; Boin et al., 2013 ; Heath and O’Hair, 2020 ), the leaders who we interviewed recognized instantly that communication in all forms was a critical component of navigating the rapidly changing uncertainty that they faced.

In the initial stages of the COVID-19 crisis response, educational leaders identified the need for frequent, often daily communication with teachers, students and parents. Communication came from every level of educational organizations immediately. Cory, a superintendent, wrote an update for his entire district every day and even led a parade through every community in the district to launch his communication efforts:

I write a daily memo to our entire district every day. And about three quarters of it is positivity. I highlight things our kids are doing that teachers put in and say, “Hey, these kids handed all their work, and I put that on the memo.” And I highlight positive emails parents send us. We have been flooded with positivity from them. We’ve had to approach a couple things differently… We held a parade. And because we basically serve eight communities, I’m afraid it was 75 miles long and four and a half hours long, and we drove in every community.

Many school leaders also created daily lines of communication with teachers, students, and parents. Danny, an international middle school principal, ensured connection across the entire community by communicating with everyone on a daily basis:

The other key piece that we do is we communicate with the parents. Every single day a letter from me. It’s actually an Adobe Spark note with a short opening from me and then it has pictures of student work they submit during the day. We have our school spirit theme weeks. So every single day something goes home to all the parents, all the students, [and] all the teachers that is a message from me: here’s how we’re doing, here’s where we are, here’s where we’re going, and then it celebrates student work, it celebrates the teacher’s work, there are video clips, and it just connects everyone back to school and parents and kids.

Phone calls became one of the most important initial methods of reaching out to students and families. The personal nature of voice-to-voice connection became an essential component of the difficult transition to remote learning. Gerald, a middle school principal, emphasized “that all communications with home had to be through the home room teacher” to maintain close connections between students and teachers. That investment in maintaining those connections paid “huge dividends” as remote learning began, although it took quite a toll on teachers due to initial phone calls often lasting for hours as teachers comforted and reassured frightened parents and families.

Structures and systems of communication that existed prior to the pandemic were relied upon heavily to ensure that meaningful connections were maintained. Office hours, regular class meetings, and daily or weekly student check-ins became the official norm for many schools. As clearly stated by Jeff, a department chair, the “number one priority going forward to the end of the school year [is] getting a hold of every student we can and then making sure that we’re regularly staying in contact.”

The importance of feedback in a school’s communication strategy was recognized as a critical component of managing the challenges of remote learning. Mary Beth, a director of educational technology, shared that “we’re listening regularly to our parents, we’re listening to our teachers, and we’re listening to our students.” Feedback in the form of parent and student surveys were important to Cory, a superintendent:

You let people share. You connect with them relationship-wise… we survey our parents and kids every other week. Every teacher surveys them. We grab that information and then we look at it. We make small adjustments. Our educators have been fantastic about really meeting the needs of parents… [and] kids.”

Communication at all levels and between all stakeholders was enhanced by the use of technological tools. Tanna, a director of technology innovation, relayed the early discussions about the tools necessary for supporting clear communication and learning:

So from a technology standpoint, we spent most of the first week that we knew about this [pandemic] really promoting and talking about the communication and the connectivity tools that we have… in a digital environment. And to and from us and families, and setting that up. and helping people practice with those tools. Because without that, we can’t really advance the distance learning pieces.

These communication tools included district learning management systems such as Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas; collaboration tools such as Seesaw, Microsoft Teams, and Google Apps for Education; videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet; social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok; and many others. While a plethora of digital tools were available to almost everyone, the majority of schools chose to focus on using tools that were familiar to staff in order to, as Shameka, a high school principal said, reduce family confusion and make it “so much easier for us to communicate.”

The importance of clear, constant, and effective communication was universally recognized by all school leaders as an essential component to a successful transition to remote learning. Establishing and maintaining clear channels of communication became a universal goal of the educational leaders whom we interviewed.

Staff Care, Instructional Leadership, and Organizational Capacity-Building

As the pandemic crisis manifested, educational leaders around the globe quickly identified the importance of taking care of the needs of their staff. Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, spoke for many when he stated, “our first and foremost priority was making sure our own people [were] okay.” Knowing that building capacity would come later, many school leaders approached their staff with an eye for compassion and grace rather than compliance. Glenn, a superintendent, said that his district’s primary ask of staff members was, “What can we do for you?” These leadership approaches align tightly with the research that underscores the importance of leaders’ attention to social and emotional concerns during a crisis (see, e.g., Meisler et al., 2013 ; Dückers et al., 2017 ).

As people in organizations began to come together, the need for connection among staff members became paramount. Virtual time for connection through general staff meetings where celebrations and challenges were shared became commonplace. In addition, creative virtual social activities began to emerge as a stand-in for informal, face-to-face interactions and a way to maintain relationships and connection. Humor was highly valued, as demonstrated by the staff challenge at Shameka’s high school. The competition was fierce around which educators had the most toilet paper in their homes (in light of a national, never-understood panic run on the commodity). Shameka’s school also hosted open discussion hours for staff, which often diverged into lighthearted but energetic conversations about topics such as “What is the best flavor of ramen noodles?” These staff bonding events solidified the ties between educators and created strong foundations upon which instructional capacity could be built.

Attention to mindset, fluid roles and expectations, responsive professional development, and efficiency and prioritization of structures and systems all formed the basis of our participants’ efforts to build, sustain, and strengthen capacity across their organizations. Setting the stage for capacity building began with clarifying and embracing a mindset of acceptance and support. Dan, a director of learning innovation, described this important component:

[G]race and flexibility, and I think that goes all the way around. Teachers toward their students, students toward their teachers, parents toward the school community, and… our administrators… they’ll come back to that grace and flexibility as far as what happens with kids, and teachers in their new virtual environments, knowing that it’s not going to be perfect. And we always, in the tech world, we always talk about risk, right? We take these risks, and now people are being forced to do that. Because some type of people didn’t maybe necessarily before, now you’re being forced to do that and be okay with it. Reflect, change what happens tomorrow if it didn’t work out right. If it worked out, great, do it again, right? So, grace and flexibility.

After recognizing the importance of infusing capacity-building with grace and flexibility, leaders began creating specific supports for teachers, including an “all hands on deck approach” to staffing and responsive professional development. Tanna, a director of technology innovation, summed up this part of the process when she stated, “It’s about helping all teachers be able to feel comfortable and be vulnerable as learners.”

At many of our interviewees’ schools, all non-teaching staff members were leveraged to help create supports for students, thereby increasing teachers’ capacity to focus on instructional practices. Bus drivers, cafeteria managers, and librarians were among the many who joined forces to create support structures. During a planned meal pickup event, Andrea, a superintendent, said that her librarians found a creative way to support students:

Yesterday at our meal pickup we had our librarians, two librarians, who had pulled a bunch of books out of their libraries that students could check out on the curb. I would say the creativity is just fantastic.

With staff and student supports in place, professional development became a key strategic component for building teacher capacity. Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, recognized the unique opportunity presented by the crisis, noting that, “we have some time now that internal staff could do some learning that maybe we’ve been wanting to do all year long and just never have that extra time.”

Training on technological tools dominated professional learning early in the pandemic. For example, one school district in Colorado offered 25 training sessions on Google Classroom the day before the district went live with remote learning. The critical importance of this type of training, especially for teachers without these skills, became obvious. As Dan, a director of learning and innovation, shared:

We do have a… we’ll call it an opt-in sort of PD model for most things, technology being one of those. And there are a handful of teachers who are struggling right now because they [had previously] opted out. They are more traditional teachers… we’ve had our beginner Google Classroom sessions where we’re full of those people… but not as many from some friends I have in other districts who say they’ve never used Google Classroom.

Over time, professional learning at many of our interviewees’ institutions expanded from an almost-pure technology focus to include mental health, trauma, social-emotional learning, and–as time went on and teacher capacity grew–virtual instructional strategies. Jeff, a high school principal, summed up the experience of staff learning:

This is the best real life, real-time professional development… there is a constant feedback loop. This is what we’re trying and is this going to work or is that going to work? We’re getting a lot of information. At some point when the world stops spinning we’ll have to sit down and take everything we’ve learned and think about how we’re moving forward.

Maximizing efficiency of prioritized structures and systems was another area of focus for instructional capacity building. Simplicity and familiarity were embraced when it came to selecting learning management systems, and this paid off for many organizations. As Dave, a director of technology integration, noted:

What’s working well is that we’re trying to keep everything really super simple and keep tools that are familiar. So we’ve started with strengths, started with what the students are familiar with, so, getting a simple learning management system, making sure that it’s either Google Classroom or Seesaw. So, things that teachers are familiar with and they can support each other…

At many schools, schedules also were simplified in an effort to “stave off distance-learning fatigue,” as Danny, an international middle school principal, said. Staggered schedules with built-in flexibility allowed students and teachers to connect when needed during synchronous time. Options during asynchronous time allowed for necessities like individual or small group check-ins and work delivery times, as well as opportunities for students to reconnect with teachers as needed. Blair, an international secondary school principal, expressed his satisfaction by stating, “I think that we ended the year really well with a solid structure that allowed for both flexibility as well as enough structure to support students well.”

Many of our participants’ school systems also made decisions to increase instructional capacity by prioritizing essential standards. Mike, a director of curriculum and technology, astutely pointed out the issues that had to be addressed, noting that, “we are not going to be able to do everything. so what are the most important things for our learners?” As Melissa, a high school principal shared with us, prioritization of standards fostered new learning opportunities for students, robust staff conversations, and collaborative efforts about how to best garner available resources, including curriculum, to meet targeted learning goals.

Educators at one of our participating international schools created online “learning grids” to effectively accomplish this task. Don, an assistant head of school, explained that these grids were “user-friendly formats that really scripted what we needed kids to do and then what we’re requiring teachers to do.” This creative solution increased school capacity and facilitated easier school-to-home connections:

So it was a new way of collaborating for our teachers who… in a normal school… have a little bit more say in how they approach each of the learning standards that… they’re trying to reach. So that was a bit of learning as well to figure out how that collaboration would work. But it’s worked out really well and it certainly has simplified life, I think, for teachers as well. And it has freed them up to do more things… so that we could be sure that the basic resources are being shared and the standards are all being met through these learning grids.

Finally, as Sean, a digital specialist, described, attention could turn from emergency responsiveness to aspirational responsiveness as teacher capacity was built:

I think we have our aspirational goals and then we have the reality of the pandemic and the emergency happening. We’re starting to see some of those aspirational pieces take off as far as how content is designed and delivered. Our teachers are becoming a lot more confident in their ability to do this online, beginning to understand the routines that are useful for them as teachers and then routines for the students, and there’s a lot of feedback from our teachers going on about that.

The power of teacher collaboration, coupled with the familiarity of emerging routines and recognizable successes, empowered teachers at many of our participating schools. Best practices in brick-and-mortar settings often proved to be best practices in the virtual classroom. Small group and individualized instruction was critical, student-led project-based learning correlated with high engagement, and greater student agency equated with greater student success. This was particularly true in some of the schools that we interviewed which had project- and inquiry-based learning structures in place.

Ultimately, leaders who built capacity through attention to mindset, embraced fluid roles and expectations, facilitated responsive professional development, and prioritized efficient structures and systems were able to create environments for teachers to reach students in meaningful ways and increase engagement in virtual settings. As the initial crisis moved into a sustained “new normal,” organizations began finding ways to move from their initial state of emergency to a state of best practices.

Equity-Oriented Leadership

Across the globe, issues of educational access and digital equity were thrust into the forefront as schools scrambled to provide access to remote education platforms. Equity requires that every student be supported with the resources necessary to successfully access what is needed to learn and thrive in an educational setting. As the pandemic took hold, it became clear that access to food and mental health supports initially needed to take priority over access to instruction. Our school leaders’ emphasis on–and quick investments in–basic needs, social-emotional health, and technological access are underscored by the research literature’s recognition of these stabilizing aspects of crisis leadership (see, e.g., Smith and Riley, 2012 ; Mutch, 2015b ; Dückers et al., 2017 ; Mahfouz et al., 2019 ; McLeod, 2020b ).

Since access to at-school free meal programs was severed, feeding students in the community became paramount for many of our school leaders. Jim, a chief executive officer of a charter school, described the situation faced by so many schools:

We have about 98% of our kids on free and reduced-price lunch programs. So, you know, when we first got the information around the closure, our first instincts were to make sure we were feeding our kids–the most basic fundamental expectation of survival. And we were able to launch that in about 2 weeks. We started with the daily drive-thru, and then we’ve been able to move that to once a week, so we can supply 7 days worth of food to all of our families. We have a pre-heated meal system with distribution of food and gallons of milk every week. It’s going really well. We have about a 100% participation rate, almost everyone participates. We accept anyone under the age of 18 to come to our drive thru and pick up food, so it doesn’t even matter if they’re part of our school system or not.

Meeting families’ primary needs required school communities to adapt quickly and often. Glenn, a superintendent, shared:

As far as food services, we provide food twice a week, our communities are roughly about 45% free and reduced lunch. So, one of the biggest things that we are focusing on is the health and well-being of those families as well. So we constantly put out phone calls saying, “Hey, if you recently lost your job and or you think you’re now eligible, please sign up,” and we can go through that paperwork with them.

Mental health supports also were considered as the overall health and wellbeing of students and families was prioritized. Kristina, a principal, noted that “we really need to focus on the heart, on overall well-being and mental healthiness and physical healthiness.” Looking to the future, Kristina also expressed her grave concerns “about everyone’s mental health as this continues.”

After addressing students’ basic health needs, issues of instructional equity quickly came into focus. Nancy, a principal of an elementary International Baccalaureate school, summed up the issues faced by so many:

We had a lot of problems in the beginning getting kids on [the Internet]. The Internet wasn’t working correctly. They didn’t understand [how to use a] hotspot. Their iPad locked up, they couldn’t remember their password… We did a lot with our interpreters getting kids and families logged on… We called them. I was going to kid’s houses: “Why can’t you get on, let me help you?” You bring food, you bring whatever, because a lot of them were really scared when I came by. They [thought] because they weren’t online, [that I was there for] attendance but, no, I was there to help them.

Even for schools that had heavily invested in technology before the pandemic, issues of digital equity and data privilege quickly became a pressing concern. Shameka, a high school principal, explained:

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the concerns around digital equity because we still have to champion that. Just because a kid has access they don’t necessarily always have the digital capital necessary to engage in a way that is authentic… just because the kid has a phone doesn’t mean that they live in a place of data privilege. I have not had [a fixed set of] minutes on my phone or had to worry about data in years. I’m on an unlimited plan but when thinking about kids submitting assignments and families who share data… we live in a place of data privilege. And we have to recognize in that vein of digital equity [that] access is one thing, but not really… You don’t have access for real.

Again and again, school leaders discussed Internet access as one of the biggest hurdles students faced after moving to remote learning. Because access could not be assumed even when students had or were provided with devices, innovative and practical, equitable solutions were required. Aaron, a middle school assistant principal, discussed the need to use paper packets when it was understood that families, “had too many kids in the house, so that even if they had pretty decent Internet coverage, if three kids are connected at once, it certainly couldn’t stand up to that.” Dave, a director of technology integration, concurred by stating, “We’re learning about families who may not have the access that we thought they did.” In addition to the Internet access hurdles faced by so many students, the ability of schools to continue to support devices also quickly surfaced. Dave noted, “I think the challenges now are helping to manage and support those devices virtually, making sure that we know that everybody has what they need, [and] finding out where those gaps exist.”

Unsurprisingly, issues of equity persisted during the global pandemic crisis. Even if basic student needs for food were met, mental health supports and digital resources often were woefully inadequate. Many schools still have not been able to ensure that students’ overall well-being is adequately supported. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of students still cannot access instruction remotely. Educational access and equity issues that existed beforehand often seemed insurmountable during the early months of the pandemic. Educational equity for all students has never been a reality and now has slipped even further away for millions of students. Despite the enormity of the challenges, the school leaders we interviewed continued to strive to support students to the greatest extent possible.

Silver Linings and Future Opportunities

Despite the enormity of the challenges that COVID-19 has thrust upon P-12 educational systems, many of our interviewees felt that some “silver linings,” or unexpected positive outcomes, had begun to emerge, even during the first few months, that would lead to future opportunities for students and staff. These possibilities for change spurred excitement, even during this challenging time period for schools. Jeremy, a superintendent, acknowledged the call to action for all educational communities:

I think if we come out of this experience and fall back on traditional ways of doing things, shame on us. We cannot unlearn what we are learning right now. If anything, the silver lining here is that… that is pretty exciting to think about what could be. I know our teachers and students, and families are living that alongside us. That is probably one of the highlights we have seen.

Jeff, the chief administrator for a regional educational service agency, noted that the global pandemic and the concurrent changes in school structures and activities have given everyone the permission to “think about the future of education,” and to question the status quo . Changes in almost every area of education are being considered, including new commitments to the collective wisdom of the educational community, new structures of family engagement, expansive integration of technology, the creation of new resources, and, most importantly, a new appreciation and recognition of student voice and self-directed agency. Past research indicates that organizational reorientations are common as crises begin to settle down and leaders have the opportunity to reflect on the future of their institutions (see, e.g., Coombs, 2000 ; Boin and Hart, 2003 ; Heath, 2004 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ).

The school leaders that we interviewed had a renewed recognition of–and appreciation for–the importance of the collective wisdom of the educational community. Mike, a director of curriculum and technology, described his experience:

I think there are some really good positives that have come from this experience… there is a lot of sharing going on and reconnecting with our personal learning networks has been fantastic… People are talking and sharing at a rapid pace so that there is a lot of crowdsourcing around that information. I think that has been really helpful.

The importance of connections between educators, and the opportunities created by those connections, cannot be overstated. Kristina, a principal, summed it up when she said, “If this [pandemic] has done nothing else, [it has shown us that] we need to work together in a connected world and leverage our shared brilliance, our shared experience.”

Another silver lining from the pandemic appears to have been the explosion of better technology integration across educational systems. Aaron, a middle school assistant principal, recognized that educational communities have been thrust into a non-negotiable “technological immersion course”:

I think it has just upped our technology. You hear it all the time where, hey, if you want to learn a foreign language, go to that country and live there for 6 weeks. Well, if you want to learn online education… I wouldn’t want a pandemic. But certainly getting dropped into a situation where you have to do it for X number of weeks has just raised everyone’s level astronomically, and it forces you to ask questions. You come up against that reality. You have to troubleshoot things… And I think those things can carry forward…

Many of our interviewees said that they planned on carrying forward the creation of virtual resources for students and staff. While the availability of these resources is not new, the broad-based implementation and long-overdue recognition of the availability and potential benefits of these resources is a significant change for many educators.

The most-widely recognized silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic is arguably the collective recognition of the power of community and the accompanying importance of valuing the voices of all community members, especially parents and students. Learning has become more visible to everyone. This increased transparency and visibility has the potential to change the face of education going forward. Mark, a director of an international school, said:

I think that the learning for all of our community members was so much more visible. Parents were part of the learning experience. Students were definitely advocates and agents in their own learning. And teachers, in order to deliver experiences, they had to be able to communicate much more actively with different groups… And I think the more that we can make our experiences visible and include the community members in those experiences, I think that that’s something that we can bring back to the on-campus instruction and try and support through a continued partnership to support our students.

Cory, a superintendent, noted that parents are seeing and experiencing more of “what their kids are doing in school than ever before” and, in turn, as educators have committed themselves to a new level of family engagement, they are seeing sides of their students previously unrecognized. He went on to state that remote learning has given students more voice and agency as they have been provided with opportunities to show their learning in new ways.

Students at many of the schools we interviewed are doing more than just showing their learning in new ways. Remote learning is changing students in ways that will benefit them in all areas of their lives. Danny, an international middle school principal, looked forward to these changes with excitement:

[O]ur students are certainly learning a lot of independent skills and making a lot of choices on their own right now and they’re pursuing a lot of their own interests because they have time to do it because they’re not on a regular school time schedule. So, when they come back to school, it will be very, very fun to capitalize on this new independence and this new confidence and this new self-assuredness of “Oh, yeah, I can do that.”

The school leaders we interviewed were able to see some “silver linings” and potential benefits that might emerge from a harrowing pandemic. Opportunities they identified included time to reimagine school, chances to test new ideas and take risks, and the ability to welcome back students who have embraced a new version of themselves.

Discussion and Implications

The primary themes that emerged from our interviews with the Coronavirus Chronicles participants echoed many of the broad ideas from the scholarly literature. Research is clear, for example, that a strong emphasis on organizational vision and institutional values facilitates leaders’ sensemaking and guides critical decisions during conditions of uncertainty (see, e.g., Prewitt et al., 2011 ; Boin et al., 2013 ). Similarly, the school leaders who we interviewed utilized a variety of focused but far-reaching communication strategies (see, e.g., Heath and O’Hair, 2020 ) to maintain some semblance of instructional and organizational coherence and to support educators and families. This coordination often involved outside entities. For instance, Glenn, a superintendent, shared with us:

Two weeks before this all really started coming down to southern New Jersey,… we put together a giant group of team meetings and we brought in our chiefs of police, fire, public works. We had our mayor in contact. We had our city manager, board of education, our administrators, and our food services. And we sat together as one big team and put all of our egos aside and said, “What do we need to do to work together as the months go on?” And we [continue to regularly] work together, hand-in-hand.

Care for others was another dominant theme that we heard from our interview participants, underscoring the importance of leaders’ attention to educators’ and families’ social, emotional, and mental health concerns (see, e.g., Dückers et al., 2017 ). Often that care focused on resolving fundamental inequities, particularly regarding food insecurity, counseling, social services, or technological access (see, e.g., Dückers et al., 2017 ; Mahfouz et al., 2019 ; McLeod, 2020b ).

A few other leadership observations emerged from our interviews that we think are worth noting here at the end of this article. First, our school leaders repeatedly recognized their reliance on the collective wisdom that exists across organizations and geographic boundaries. Schools that intentionally looked to what was happening elsewhere were able to be more proactive. These schools tapped into their collective networks and connected with colleagues in parts of the world that were among the first affected by the pandemic, thus allowing their organizations more time for conversation, planning, and response.

Second, schools that previously had made certain investments reaped the benefits during the pandemic ( Stern, 2013 ). One obvious example would be the schools that already had implemented 1:1 computing initiatives. These technology-rich systems were able to pivot to remote instruction more easily because most students already had computing devices and home Internet access. A second example would be the middle school that already had competency-based student progressions in place and thus was less concerned than other schools about student “learning loss.” Another example would be the project- and inquiry-based learning schools that we interviewed. Students in those schools already were comfortable with greater self-agency and directing their own work, a useful skill set for learning at home during the pandemic. Other examples include the international schools that had certain processes in place due to previous pandemics such as SARS or MERS or the schools in Alabama that had experience with quick shifts to online learning after hurricanes.

Third, we heard regularly about the ongoing importance of relationships. Sometimes these relationships were simply about coordination of organizational functions, similar to the meetings described above in Glenn’s New Jersey community. More often, however, they represented love, empathy, and care of both the school and the larger community. The educators who we interviewed did heroic work during the first few months of the pandemic to combat food insecurity, care for the people around them, and ensure that learning still occurred for children.

Fourth, many of our participants shared that their clear visions and values, whether individual or institutional, allowed them to maintain operational focus instead of simply being reactive to the ongoing, smaller, day-to-day crises that regularly occurred. Organizational responses that had greater consistency and coherency created fewer stresses on educators and families.

Fifth, schools continue to reflect the contexts of our larger society. For many of our participants, the equity concerns that existed pre-pandemic were magnified during the first few months of the crisis. Food and housing insecurity, digital inequity, and lack of access to mental health supports were all amplified after the pandemic closed down schools. There is a great need for equity-oriented leadership in both schools and their larger communities and political contexts. We need better investments, support systems, and policy approaches to offset the inequities that erode institutional and societal vitality.

Sixth, we were impressed with the resilience and courage that we witnessed from many of our participating educators. Even while struggling personally with the impacts of the pandemic, they still leaned into the immense challenges before them. They were brave enough to try new approaches and create new structures, even when they weren’t sure what would work. We heard numerous examples of individual and organizational risk-taking. Many of those new ideas, support systems, and skill sets will persist after the pandemic. For instance, teachers’ newly acquired technology skills won’t just disappear. Similarly, the increased participation rates that many schools witnessed once parent-teacher conferences went virtual are probably worth preserving.

Finally, some of our participants expressed optimism that the pandemic may radically reshape certain elements of their school systems once they have time to reflect back on what has happened. This reflection on organizational possibilities and institutional futures is common during the “reconstruction” phase ( Boin and Hart, 2003 ) of a crisis (see also Coombs, 2000 ; Heath, 2004 ; Boin et al., 2005 ; Jaques, 2009 ; Smith and Riley, 2012 ). Time will tell if these “silver linings” actually occur. Although many scholars have noted the revolutionary potential of major crises (see, e.g., Prewitt et al., 2011 ; Harris, 2020 ), Boin and Hart (2003) stated that there are inherent tensions between crisis management and reform-oriented leadership. During a crisis, leaders often try to “minimize the damage, alleviate the pain, and restore order” (p. 549), which conflicts with attempts to disrupt the organization and move it in a new direction. If some of these longer-term changes do indeed occur when the pandemic recedes, many of our interviewees will be ready to reap the promises of a newly reimagined world of education.

Crisis leadership matters, primarily because “it is often the handling of a crisis that leads to more damage than the crisis event itself. Learning from a crisis is the best hope we have of preventing repeat occurrences.” ( James and Wooten, 2011 , p. 61). When it comes to education however, Smawfield (2013) stated that “one of the most under-represented areas within the literature. is the capture of knowledge on how schools have been able to respond to real-life disasters” (p. 9). He noted that we have much still to learn about the leadership and institutional challenges that accompany crises, the roles that educators are required to play, and the structures and behaviors that seem to be successful.

Although this study examined school leaders’ responses during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mutch (2015b) noted that “12–24 months after the onset of [a crisis seems] to be a useful time to start to review what has happened” (p. 187). Much of what we will learn about effective school crisis leadership during this pandemic remains unknown and it will take years to reveal the longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on schools and their leaders. Harris and Jones (2020) stated that, “a new chapter is being written about school leadership in disruptive times that will possibly overtake and overshadow all that was written before on the topic” (p. 246). That chapter–and the overall story of pandemic-era schooling–continues to be written. For many of the schools that we interviewed, their reorientations and reinventions may well be underway.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Author Contributions

SM conducted all of the interviews. Both authors contributed equally to the coding, analysis, and writing of this manuscript. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : crisis leadership, school leadership, pandemic leadership, crisis management, COVID-19, schools, administrators, leadership

Citation: McLeod S and Dulsky S (2021) Resilience, Reorientation, and Reinvention: School Leadership During the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front. Educ. 6:637075. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.637075

Received: 02 December 2020; Accepted: 22 February 2021; Published: 12 March 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 McLeod and Dulsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Scott McLeod, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Education Leadership and the COVID-19 Crisis

Mission: Recovering Education in 2021

THE CONTEXT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused abrupt and profound changes around the world.  This is the worst shock to education systems in decades, with the longest school closures combined with looming recession.  It will set back progress made on global development goals, particularly those focused on education. The economic crises within countries and globally will likely lead to fiscal austerity, increases in poverty, and fewer resources available for investments in public services from both domestic expenditure and development aid. All of this will lead to a crisis in human development that continues long after disease transmission has ended.

Disruptions to education systems over the past year have already driven substantial losses and inequalities in learning. All the efforts to provide remote instruction are laudable, but this has been a very poor substitute for in-person learning.  Even more concerning, many children, particularly girls, may not return to school even when schools reopen. School closures and the resulting disruptions to school participation and learning are projected to amount to losses valued at $10 trillion in terms of affected children’s future earnings.  Schools also play a critical role around the world in ensuring the delivery of essential health services and nutritious meals, protection, and psycho-social support. Thus, school closures have also imperilled children’s overall wellbeing and development, not just their learning.   

It’s not enough for schools to simply reopen their doors after COVID-19. Students will need tailored and sustained support to help them readjust and catch-up after the pandemic. We must help schools prepare to provide that support and meet the enormous challenges of the months ahead. The time to act is now; the future of an entire generation is at stake.

THE MISSION

Mission objective:  To enable all children to return to school and to a supportive learning environment, which also addresses their health and psychosocial well-being and other needs.

Timeframe : By end 2021.

Scope : All countries should reopen schools for complete or partial in-person instruction and keep them open. The Partners - UNESCO , UNICEF , and the World Bank - will join forces to support countries to take all actions possible to plan, prioritize, and ensure that all learners are back in school; that schools take all measures to reopen safely; that students receive effective remedial learning and comprehensive services to help recover learning losses and improve overall welfare; and their teachers are prepared and supported to meet their learning needs. 

Three priorities:

1.    All children and youth are back in school and receive the tailored services needed to meet their learning, health, psychosocial wellbeing, and other needs. 

Challenges : School closures have put children’s learning, nutrition, mental health, and overall development at risk. Closed schools also make screening and delivery for child protection services more difficult. Some students, particularly girls, are at risk of never returning to school. 

Areas of action : The Partners will support the design and implementation of school reopening strategies that include comprehensive services to support children’s education, health, psycho-social wellbeing, and other needs. 

Targets and indicators

2.    All children receive support to catch up on lost learning.

Challenges : Most children have lost substantial instructional time and may not be ready for curricula that were age- and grade- appropriate prior to the pandemic. They will require remedial instruction to get back on track. The pandemic also revealed a stark digital divide that schools can play a role in addressing by ensuring children have digital skills and access.

Areas of action : The Partners will (i) support the design and implementation of large-scale remedial learning at different levels of education, (ii) launch an open-access, adaptable learning assessment tool that measures learning losses and identifies learners’ needs, and (iii) support the design and implementation of digital transformation plans that include components on both infrastructure and ways to use digital technology to accelerate the development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Incorporating digital technologies to teach foundational skills could complement teachers’ efforts in the classroom and better prepare children for future digital instruction.   

While incorporating remedial education, social-emotional learning, and digital technology into curricula by the end of 2021 will be a challenge for most countries, the Partners agree that these are aspirational targets that they should be supporting countries to achieve this year and beyond as education systems start to recover from the current crisis.

3.   All teachers are prepared and supported to address learning losses among their students and to incorporate  digital technology into their teaching.

Challenges : Teachers are in an unprecedented situation in which they must make up for substantial loss of instructional time from the previous school year and teach the current year’s curriculum. They must also protect their own health in school. Teachers will need training, coaching, and other means of support to get this done. They will also need to be prioritized for the COVID-19 vaccination, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations.  School closures also demonstrated that in addition to digital skills, teachers may also need support to adapt their pedagogy to deliver instruction remotely. 

Areas of action : The Partners will advocate for teachers to be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations, and provide capacity-development on pedagogies for remedial learning and digital and blended teaching approaches. 

Country level actions and global support

UNESCO, UNICEF, and World Bank are joining forces to support countries to achieve the Mission, leveraging their expertise and actions on the ground to support national efforts and domestic funding.

Country Level Action

1.  Mobilize team to support countries in achieving the three priorities

The Partners will collaborate and act at the country level to support governments in accelerating actions to advance the three priorities.

2.  Advocacy to mobilize domestic resources for the three priorities

The Partners will engage with governments and decision-makers to prioritize education financing and mobilize additional domestic resources.

Global level action

1.  Leverage data to inform decision-making

The Partners will join forces to   conduct surveys; collect data; and set-up a global, regional, and national real-time data-warehouse.  The Partners will collect timely data and analytics that provide access to information on school re-openings, learning losses, drop-outs, and transition from school to work, and will make data available to support decision-making and peer-learning.

2.  Promote knowledge sharing and peer-learning in strengthening education recovery

The Partners will join forces in sharing the breadth of international experience and scaling innovations through structured policy dialogue, knowledge sharing, and peer learning actions.

The time to act on these priorities is now. UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank are partnering to help drive that action.

Last Updated: Mar 30, 2021

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NASP: The National Association of School Psychologists

Responding to COVID-19: Brief Action Steps for School Crisis Response Teams

In this section.

• Natural Disasters: Brief Facts and Tips
• Resources to Assist States/Territories Recovering from Natural Disasters
• Large-Scale Natural Disasters: Helping Children Cope
• Helping Children After a Wildfire: Tips for Caregivers and Teachers
• Relocating to a New School: Tips for Families
• Natural Disasters and Relocated Students With Special Needs

Schools should be prepared for local and community-wide infectious disease outbreaks. While it is difficult to predict when (or even if) COVID-19 will rise to the level of a pandemic, there are actions schools can take to be ready for such events. Schools need to work collaboratively with their local and state health departments, and be attentive to guidance offered by the CDC , to determine how to ensure safe learning environments. For detailed guidance on how to develop emergency operations plans capable of addressing pandemic illnesses refer to “Preparing for a Pandemic Illness: Guidelines for School Administrators and Crisis Teams.” This document provides suggestions for the immediate school response to the threat presented by COVID-19.

School Emergency Operations Plan

Ideally, schools have a well-developed emergency operations plan (EOP, also often referred to as crisis response plan ) to help them respond to multiple emergencies. In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education developed a guide to support schools in developing an EOP ( Guide for Developing High Quality School Emergency Operations Plans ). The EOP provides information that can support pandemic illness planning. Regardless of the status of your EOP, there are a number of specific actions that school crisis response teams can take right now in response to COVD-19. These include actions taken by what are often referred to as the Communication and Warning Annex; Public Health, Medical, and Mental Health Annex; Continuity of Operations (COOP) Annex; and Recovery Annex.

Communication and Warning Actions

The timely distribution of crisis facts is among the most important things a school can do when responding to a threatening situation. Thus, the following suggestions are offered:

• In consultation with school and community health officials, and consistent with guidance offered by the CDC , draft communication messages for school community members that provide updated information about COVID-19 and how to remain healthy. All of these communications should include current information about actions schools are taking to help ensure safety and provide guidance that empowers caregivers to help students cope with this health crisis.
• Schools should draft several communications and social media posts for (a) when the illness is confirmed in the community, (b) when a significant number of students are found ill, and (c) when schools need to close due to the illness.
• Identify multiple communication outlets (e.g., television, social media, email, letters home, voicemail) through which these messages might be shared.
• Share information for parents on how to talk to support their children regarding COVID-19 ( Talking to Children About COVID-19 (coronavirus): A Parent Resource from NASP and NASN)

Public Health Actions

Promote daily preventive actions for all staff, students, and families. For example, schools should encourage students to engage in health-promoting behaviors that prevent illnesses:

• Wash hands multiple times a day for at least 20 seconds.
• Don’t share food or drinks.
• Give elbow bumps instead of handshakes.
• Encourage students and school staff members to eat a balanced diet, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly to help them develop strong immune systems capable of fighting illness.

Public health actions also include activities that help reduce the spread of infectious diseases. For example:

• Know the symptoms of COVID-19 and ensure that information is made available to the school community in developmentally appropriate ways.
• Provide training about flu transmission and control measures. Train students to cover their mouths with a tissue when they sneeze or cough and throw out the tissue immediately, or to sneeze or cough into the bends of their elbows.
• Educate employees, visitors, and primary caregivers not to come to the school if they have flu symptoms. Reinforce for families to keep sick children home.
• Establish or reinforce procedures for how families let the school know if their child is sick. These procedures should include letting the school know why the student has been kept home so as to be able to track symptoms. If children are diagnosed with COVID-19, parents must let the school know so they can communicate with, and get guidance from, local health authorities.
• School health professionals might consider interviewing flu-like illness cases for pandemic risk factors and following CDC guidelines for health professionals regarding next steps.
• Begin to conduct active surveillance to identify influenza cases (e.g., review temperature logs; triage “sick” calls, hospitalizations, staff absences, unexplained deaths).

Also, attend to the school building itself. For example:

• Consider changing the air conditioning system filters; during the day, where possible, increase ventilation.
• Following each school day, the school should be thoroughly ventilated and cleaned. This can be done by opening all doors and windows or turning the air conditioning or heating systems up.
• Ensure that school administrators can control access to the buildings. Each school should have a plan to close certain entrances and exits, and to monitor others. To prepare for disease outbreaks, identify a main entrance and an indoor area where students and staff can be screened prior to moving to classrooms or other areas of the school.

Medical Actions

If they have not already done so, school health professionals should:

• Assess adequacy of infection-control supplies and review distribution plan.
• Identify areas within the school facility that can be used for isolation and quarantine.
• Develop plans for stockpiling and distributing infection-control supplies.
• Initiate screening for flu-like illnesses at the front desk and nurses’ offices.
• Isolate and send home staff or students with flu-like symptoms, utilizing supervised isolation areas in the school—access to this room should be strictly limited and monitored (i.e., parents picking up their ill children should be escorted to and from the isolation area), and a carefully monitored student checkout system should be activated.

Mental Health Actions

School personnel should provide caregivers with information regarding how to address the stress that might be generated by COVID-19. In addition to being told who to contact if they want help addressing their child’s anxiety about this virus, they should be advised that striving to find ways to make the danger associated with COVID-19 more predictable and controllable reduces how threatening their children will view the situation. Specifically, youth should be provided with developmentally appropriate information that (a) helps them to accurately gauge the threat presented by this disease and (b) reduces their risk of getting sick. In addition, giving students concrete things they can do to keep themselves and others healthy will reduce stress. And finally, highlight the actions that adults are taking to ensure student safety. See the companion document “ Preparing for Infectious Disease Epidemics: Brief Tips for School Mental Health Professionals .”

Continuity of Operations Actions

Administrators should begin to consider how they would maintain essential operations should COVID-19 affect their school. Previously issued guidance, provided by the U.S. Department of Education, titled Preparing for the Flu: Department of Education Recommendations to Ensure the Continuity of Learning for Schools (K–12) During Extended Student Absence or School Dismissal , will support such considerations. Among the issues this emergency operations plan (EOP) should address are the continuity of learning activities (e.g., how to continue learning activities if there are school closures or extended absences), order of succession and delegation of authority (e.g., who makes decisions should school administrators get sick), how to maintain essential school operations (e.g., what are the essential activities that must not be interrupted, such as payroll, and how will they be maintained during school closures), and guidelines for school staff members (e.g., who needs to continue working even during school closures).

Recovery Planning

Finally, begin to consider actions that would be taken should COVID-19 actually be present within a school. The companion document “ Preparing for a Pandemic Illness: Guidelines for School Administrators and Crisis Response Teams ” provides such guidance.

Additional Resources

• Preparing for a Pandemic Illness: Guidelines for School Administrators and Crisis Teams: https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-climate-safety-and-crisis/health-crises/preparing-for-a-pandemic-illness-guidelines-for-school-administrators-and-school-crisis-response-teams
• Preparing for Infectious Disease Epidemics: Brief Tips for School Mental Health Professionals: https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-climate-safety-and-crisis/health-crises/preparing-for-infectious-disease-epidemics-brief-tips-for-school-mental-health-professionals
• Talking to Children About COVID-19 (coronavirus): A Parent Resource: https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-climate-safety-and-crisis/health-crises/talking-to-children-about-covid-19-(coronavirus)-a-parent-resource

Interim Guidance for Administrators of U.S. Childcare Programs and K-12 Schools to Plan, Prepare, and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19):

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/guidance-for-schools.html

• Handwashing and Hand Sanitizer Use at Home, at Play, and Out and About: https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/pdf/hand-sanitizer-factsheet.pdf
• How to Disinfect Schools to Prevent the Spread of Flu: https://rems.ed.gov/Docs/How_to_ pdf

For more information related to schools and physical and mental health, visit www.nasponline.org and www.nasn.org

© 2020, National Association of School Psychologists, 4340 East West Highway, Suite 402, Bethesda, MD 20814, 301-657-0270, www.nasponline.org

Please cite this document as:

National Association of School Psychologists. (2020). Responding to COVID-19: Brief action steps for school crisis response teams [handout].

COVID-19: Brief Action Steps for School Crisis Response Teams

Beyond reopening schools: How education can emerge stronger than before COVID-19

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emiliana vegas and emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development @emivegasv rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

September 8, 2020

• 52 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in at least one positive thing: a much greater appreciation for the importance of public schools. As parents struggle to work with their children at home due to school closures, public recognition of the essential caretaking role schools play in society has skyrocketed. As young people struggle to learn from home, parents’ gratitude for teachers, their skills, and their invaluable role in student well-being, has risen. As communities struggle to take care of their vulnerable children and youth, decisionmakers are having to devise new mechanisms for delivering essential services from food to education to health care.

We believe it is also valuable to look beyond these immediate concerns to what may be possible for education on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to imagine there will be another moment in history when the central role of education in the economic, social, and political prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population. Now is the time to chart a vision for how education can emerge stronger from this global crisis than ever before and propose a path for capitalizing on education’s newfound support in virtually every community across the globe.

It is in this spirit that we have developed this report. We intend to start a dialogue about what could be achieved in the medium to long term if leaders around the world took seriously the public’s demand for safe, quality schools for their children. Ultimately, we argue that strong and inclusive public education systems are essential to the short- and long-term recovery of society and that there is an opportunity to leapfrog toward powered-up schools.

A powered-up school could be one that puts a strong public school at the center of a community and leverages the most effective partnerships, including those that have emerged during COVID-19, to help learners grow and develop a broad range of competencies and skills in and out of school. For example, such a school would crowd in supports, including technology, that would allow for allies in the community from parents to employers to reinforce, complement, and bring to life learning experiences in and outside the classroom. It would recognize and adapt to the learning that takes place beyond its walls, regularly assessing students’ skills and tailoring learning opportunities to meet students at their skill level. These new allies in children’s learning would complement and support teachers and could support children’s healthy mental and physical development. It quite literally is the school at the center of the community that powers student learning and development using every path possible (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Powered-up schools

While this vision is aspirational, it is by no means impractical. Schools at the center of a community ecosystem of learning and support is an idea whose time has come, and some of the emerging practices amid COVID-19, such as empowering parents to support their children’s education, should be sustained when the pandemic subsides. In this report we draw upon: 1) the latest evidence emerging on both the dire effects of the pandemic on children’s schooling and on the new strategies that hold promise for strengthening children’s education post-pandemic; 2) a series of dialogues between March to August 2020 with former heads of state and education leaders from around the globe on the big questions facing education in the pandemic response and recovery; and 3) our ongoing research on harnessing innovation to leapfrog education toward a more equitable and relevant learning ecosystem for all young people.

This central question has guided our inquiry: “Is it possible to realistically envision education emerging from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than it was before?” To spark the discussion around this question, we describe four key emerging trends resulting from the impact of COVID-19 on education globally and propose five actions to guide the transformation of education systems after the pandemic.

Four emerging global trends in education from COVID-19

1. accelerating e ducation i nequality: education inequality is accelerating in an unprecedented fashion, especially where before the pandemic it was already high.

Even before COVID-19 left as many as 1.5 billion students out of school in early 2019, there was a global consensus that education systems in too many countries were not delivering the quality education needed to ensure that all have the skills necessary to thrive. It is the poorest children across the globe that carry the heaviest burden, with pre-pandemic analysis estimating that 90 percent of children in low-income countries, 50 percent of children in middle-income countries, and 30 percent of children in high-income countries fail to master the basic secondary-level skills needed to thrive in work and life. It is children in the poorest countries who have been left the furthest behind. As economist Lant Pritchett explained in his 2013 book “ The rebirth of education ,” although countries in the developing world had largely succeeded in getting almost all primary-aged children into schools, too many students were not learning even the basic literacy and numeracy skills necessary to continue learning. The World Bank’s “ 2018 World Development Report ” called it a “learning crisis,” and the global community mobilized to seek more funding to support education systems across the world. The Education Commission’s 2016 report, “ The learning generation: Investing in education for a changing world ,” emphasized that technology was changing the nature of work, and that growing skills gaps would stunt economic growth in low- and middle-income countries; it called for increasing investment in education in these countries.

Yet, for a few young people in wealthy communities around the globe, schooling has never been better than during the pandemic. They are taught in their homes with a handful of their favorite friends by a teacher hired by their parents . Some parents have connected via social media platforms to form learning pods that instruct only a few students at a time with agreed-upon teaching schedules and activities. These parents argue that the pods encourage social interaction, improve learning, and reduce the burden of child care during the pandemic. However, they often exclude lower income families, as they can cost up to $100 per hour .

There is nothing new about families doing all they can for their children’s education; one only has to look at the explosion of the $100 billion global tutoring market over the last decade. While the learning experiences for these particular children may be good in and of themselves, they represent a worrisome trend for the world: the massive acceleration of education inequality .

While by mid-April of 2020, less than 25 percent of low-income countries were providing any type of remote learning and a majority that did used TV and radio, close to 90 percent of high-income countries were providing remote learning opportunities. On top of cross-country differences in access to remote learning opportunities, within-country differences are also staggering. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau , during the COVID-19 school closures, 1 in 10 of the poorest children in the world’s largest economy had little or no access to technology for learning. And UNICEF estimates that 463 million children—at least one-third of the world total , the majority of whom are in the developing world—had no chance at remote learning via radio, television, or online content. However, this does not take into account the creative use of text messages, phone calls, and offline e-learning that many teachers and education leaders are putting to use in rural and under-resourced communities. Indeed, these innovative practices suggest that the school closures from COVID-19 are setting the stage for leapfrogging in education, as we discuss next.

2. A leapfrog moment: Innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems, and there is an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, can help young people get an education that prepares them for our changing times.

This unprecedented acceleration of education inequality requires new responses. In our ongoing work on education innovation, we have argued that there are examples of new strategies or approaches that could, if scaled up, have the potential to rapidly accelerate, or leapfrog, progress. Two years ago, in “ Leapfrogging inequality: Remaking education to help young people thrive ,” we set forth a leapfrog pathway laying out a map to harness education innovations to much more quickly close the gap in education inequality. We argued that at two decades into the 21st century, the goal should be for all children to become lifelong learners and develop the full breadth of skills and competencies—from literacy to problem-solving to collaboration—that they will need to access a changing world of work and be constructive citizens in society. We defined education innovation as an idea or technology that is new to a current context, if not new to the world. And we proposed that those innovations that could help provide a broader menu of options for delivering learning were those with the potential to help leapfrog education, namely: 1) innovative pedagogical approaches alongside direct instruction to help young people not only remember and understand but analyze and create; 2) new ways of recognizing learning alongside traditional measures and pathways; 3) crowding in a diversity of people and places alongside professional teachers to help support learning in school; and 4) smart use of technology and data that allowed for real-time adaptation and did not simply replace analog approaches.

When we surveyed almost 3,000 education innovations across over 160 countries, we found that some innovations had the potential to help leapfrog progress, as defined along our four dimensions, and many did not. We also found that many of the promising innovations were on the margins of education systems and not at the center of how learning takes place. We argued that to rapidly accelerate progress and close the equity gaps in education, the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to young people would need to spend more time documenting, learning from, evaluating, and scaling those innovative approaches that held the most leapfrog potential.

Today we are facing a very different context. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education innovation into the heart of almost every education system around the globe. Based on a recent 59-country survey of educators and education administrators, Fernando Reimers and Andreas Schleicher note that: “The crisis has revealed the enormous potential for innovation that is dormant in many education systems.” 1 The question is no longer how to scale innovations from the margin to the center of education systems but how to transform education systems so that they will source, support, and sustain those innovations that address inequality and provide all young people with the skills to build a better future for themselves and their communities. By doing this, we ultimately hope not only that those who are left behind can catch up, but that a new, more equal education system can emerge out of the crisis. Fortunately, across the world, communities are increasingly valuing the role that schools play, not only for student learning, but also for the livelihoods of educators, parents, and others, as we discuss below.

3. Rising p ublic s upport: There is newfound public recognition of how essential schools are in society and a window of opportunity to leverage this support for making them stronger

March 2020 will forever be known as the time all the world’s schools closed their doors. As teachers and school leaders around the world struggled with hardly any forewarning to pivot to some form of remote learning, parents and families around the globe who had relied on schools as an anchor around which they organized their daily schedule faced the shock of life without school. An outpouring of appreciation on social media for teachers from parents deciding between caring for their children and earning money quickly followed. To underscore this sentiment of appreciation, Gabriel Zinny of the Buenos Aires government says: “Societies are recognizing that schools and teachers are heroes … that schools are the place not only where we get to learn and progress, fulfill our hopes and dreams, but also where we learn to live in community. Just recently in Buenos Aires, families went out to their balconies to applaud not only doctors and nurses, but teachers.”

This broad recognition and support for the essential role of education in daily life can be found on the pages of newspapers across the globe. It can be found in emerging coalitions of advocates urging that education be prioritized across communities and countries. The global education community is also mobilizing from UNESCO’s broad consortium with the newly formed Save Our Future campaign that brings together a broad coalition of actors in the international development sphere to advocate for sustained education funding, especially among international aid donors, for low- and middle-income countries.

Ultimately, today for the first time since the advent of universal education, the majority of parents and families around the world share the long-standing concerns of the most vulnerable families: They are in urgent need of a safe and good enough school to send their children to. This reality, which is so well known to the families of the 258 million out-of-school children, has brought the issue of education into the living rooms of middle class and elite parents around the globe. And they are forging, at least for a moment, common cause between many of the parents of the 1.9 billion school-aged children around the world. As a result, new stakeholders are getting involved in supporting education, an emerging trend we describe next.

4. New e ducation a llies: The pandemic has galvanized new actors in the community—from parents to social welfare organizations—to support children’s learning like never before.

Alongside increasing recognition of the essential role of public schools, the pandemic has galvanized parts of communities that traditionally are not actively involved in children’s education. As school buildings closed, teachers began to partner with parents in ways never done before, schools formed new relationships with community health and social welfare organizations, media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with nonprofits and governments, and local nonprofits and businesses contributed to supporting children’s learning in new ways.

The idea of children’s education being supported by an ecosystem of learning opportunities in and outside of school is not new among educationalists. The community schools movement envisions schools as the hub of children’s education and development, with strong partnerships among other sectors from health to social welfare. Schools remain open all day and are centers for community engagement, services, and problem-solving. Proponents of “life-wide” learning approaches point out that children from birth to 18 years of age spend only up to 20 percent of their waking hours at school and argue that the fabric of the community offers many enriching learning experiences alongside school. In our own work on leapfrogging in education, we argue that diversifying the educators and places where children learn can crowd in innovative pedagogical approaches and complement and enrich classroom-based learning. More recently, the concept of local learning ecoystems has emerged to describe learning opportunities provided through a web of collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, and government agencies that often pair direct instruction with innovative pedagogies allowing for experimentation.

There is evidence ranging from the U.K . to Nicaragua that young people engaging in diverse learning opportunities outside of school—from classic extracurricular activities such as music lessons to nonformal education programming—can be quite helpful in boosting the skills and academic competencies of marginalized children. But until recently there has been only limited empirical examples of local learning ecosystems. Emerging models are appearing in places such as Catalonia, Spain with its Educacio360 initiative and Western Pennsylvania, where several U.S. school districts have engaged in a multiyear Remake Learning initiative to offer life-wide learning opportunities to families and children. One of the opportunities emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic may just be the chance to harness the new energies and mindsets between schools and communities to work together to support children’s learning.

Five proposed actions to guide the transformation of education systems

Given these four emerging trends and building on previous research, we put forth five proposed actions for decisionmakers to seize this moment to transform education systems to better serve all children and youth, especially the most disadvantaged. We argue that because of their responsibility to all children, public schools must be at the center of any education system that seeks to close widening inequality gaps. We highlight the creative use of technology—especially through mobile phone communication with parents—as examples of strategies that have emerged amid the pandemic that, if sustained, could complement and strengthen children’s learning in public schools. We acknowledge that the highlighted examples are just emerging, and there is more to learn about how they work and other examples to consider as events unfold. For this reason, we propose guidance for identifying which new approaches should potentially be continued. We argue that innovations that support and strengthen the instructional core, namely the interactions in the teaching and learning process, will have a greater chance at sustainably supporting a powered-up school. We also argue that the urgency of the moment calls for an adaptive and iterative approach to learning what works in real time; hence, improvement science principles should accompany any leapfrogging effort to build evidence and correct course in real time.

1. Leverag e p ublic s chools: Put public schools at the center of education systems given their essential role in equalizing opportunity across dimensions within society

Public schools play a critical role in reducing inequality and strengthening social cohesion. By having the mandate to serve all children and youth regardless of background, public schools in many countries can bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and needs, providing the social benefit of allowing individuals to grow up with a set of common values and knowledge that can make communities more cohesive and unified.

The private sector has an important role to play in education—from advocating that governments invest in high-quality public schools because they help power economies and social stability to helping test innovative pedagogical models in independent schools. In many low-income countries, low-cost private schools have expanded in recent years, helping to address the challenge that fiscally- and/or capacity-constrained governments have long faced in expanding access to education. Many families in developing countries, ranging from Chile to India to Nigeria to Kenya , opt to send their children to these low-cost, often for-profit, private schools. Indeed, the expansion of private schools in low-income countries has in some locations played a role in increasing universal access to primary education.

However, there are a range of concerns with private schools, both in terms of their effectiveness as well as their impact on inequality. For example, the extent to which private schools might provide a better education, the so-called “private school advantage,” has been a long-standing debate. While it is difficult to isolate the impact of private schools, a recent analysis of over 40 countries that participated in the OECD’s 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) concludes that public schools outperform both publicly subsidized private schools, as well as independent schools, in a majority of countries.

In addition, in many countries, the expansion of private schools has not been accompanied by regulations to guide student selection processes or the fees schools may charge (which also directly affect selection). A troubling unintended consequence of the unregulated expansion of private schooling is an increase in segregation of students by socioeconomic and other background characteristics. In many countries, private schools select students based on multiple factors, including academic ability, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic background. As a result, private schools tend to be less diverse than public schools. Further, entry into private school may not be entirely merit-based. In middle- and high-income countries, the private sector has stepped in to provide services to help students gain admission into selective education institutions. Since these services are costly, they select for wealthier families that can afford the help to get their students into the “right” schools, further excluding low-income families. In the U.S., for example, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that public schools are much more diverse than private schools: In 2017, 67 percent of private school students were white , compared with just 48 percent of their public school counterparts .

A growing body of research shows that segregation can have a negative impact on children’s academic and social outcomes . For example, in Chile, where a school choice program was introduced in 1981, there has been a steady exodus from public schools over time, and today more than half of its students are enrolled in private schools. Not only did national average test scores stagnate, but unfettered school choice also led to student segregation into private and public schools based on parental education and income. Achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students began to decline after a reform to the per-student subsidy (or voucher)—called the Preferential School Subsidy Law—was introduced in 2008. The reform introduced higher value per-student subsidies to schools serving low-income students and required schools who accepted the higher value vouchers to take part in a new accountability system. Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged households soon improved their performance, leading to an increase in national average test scores and a reduction in the income-based achievement gaps .

In many countries, a central debate is whether education should be seen as a public good or a private consumable. Advocates of expanding private school choice see education as a private consumable. Advocates who argue that education is a public good put forth that schools are about more than preparing individuals for the labor market, and that they have an irreplaceable role in generating multiple public benefits, including public health and in developing citizens to participate in democratic societies .

We follow Levin (1987) in arguing that schools play a crucial role in fostering the skills individuals need to succeed in a rapidly changing labor market, and they play a major role in equalizing opportunities for individuals of diverse backgrounds. Moreover, schools address a variety of social needs that serve communities, regions, and entire nations. And while a few private schools can and do play these multiple roles, public education is the main conduit for doing so at scale. Hence, we argue that public schools must be at the center of any effort to build back better or, in the words of UNICEF’s chief of education Robert Jenkins, “build back equal,” after the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A l aser f ocus on t he i nstructional c ore: Emphasize the instructional core, the heart of the teaching and learning process.

To develop powered-up schools, it will be essential to figure out how to identify what strategies, among the many that communities are deploying amid the pandemic, should be sustained to power up a school as the crisis subsides. We argue that decisionmakers should ground their actions on rigorous evidence of what works to improve student learning, as well as how school change happens and ultimately should include a heavy emphasis on the heart of the teaching and learning process, what is often called the instructional or pedagogical core. Indeed, how educators engage with students and instructional materials, including education technology, is crucial for learning given the strong evidence that educators are the most important school-side factor in student learning. 2

In our forthcoming CUE publication co-authored by Alejandro Ganimian, Emiliana Vegas, and Frederick Hess, “ Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? ,” the authors note that significant research has shown that one of the main reasons many education innovations and reforms have failed, despite serious effort, is that they have paid insufficient attention to the instructional core. While there have been several variations and terms associated with the instructional core, at its heart is the understanding that it is the interactions among educators, learners, and educational materials that matter most in improving student learning. 3 For example, higher quality learning materials—whether they are new online resources or revamped curriculum—will not on their own improve student learning. Only when educators use them to improve their instruction can students have an improved experience. The authors build on this model of the instructional core to integrate parents, given not only their predominant role in children’s lives but also the new ways in which they have supported children’s learning amid the pandemic (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The instructional core

Using the instructional core as a guide can help us identify what types of new strategies or innovations could become community-based supports in children’s learning journey. Indeed, even after only several months of experimentation around the globe on keeping learning going amid a pandemic, there are some clear strategies that have the potential, if continued, to contribute to a powered-up school, and many of them involve engaging learners, educators, and parents in new ways using some form of technology.

Grounding decisions on existing evidence is necessary, but not sufficient. It will also be essential to ask people—students, families, teachers, school leaders—what their experience has been and what new educational practices they hope will continue post pandemic. The Just Ask Us Movement in the U.S., for example, aims to discover and share at least a million student and family perspectives on how school systems should respond to the pandemic and its effects. Communities will certainly identify important strategies that fall outside the instructional core, such as essential collaboration between health and social protection services, that could be vital to developing a powered-up school. For example, Sierra Leone’s new “radical inclusion” policy aims to bring together health and banking services to help marginalized girls stay in school. Or in the U.S., where David Miyashiro, the superintendent of Cajon Valley, a school district with one of the highest populations of refugee students in California, has heard from parents that they need more help with child care and hence has established a new Extended Day Program .

While we focus in this report primarily on those innovations that support the interactions in the instructional core, we recognize that there will be a myriad of strategies needed to support marginalized children and bring a powered-up school to life. Ultimately, communities should have a view on what these strategies should be. Grounding decisions in the lived experience of the people at the center of education, especially students and teachers, is one of the central principles of designing for scale and will be an essential component of developing a powered-up school. When asked what her one piece of advice would be to heads of state today, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, said “Listen to your people, they may not be educated but they are knowledgeable.”

3. Harness e d ucation t echnology: Deploy education technology to power up schools long term in a way that meets the teaching and learning needs of students and educators; otherwise, technology risks becoming a costly distraction.

Leveraging technology to help with educational continuity is a topic front and center in schools around the world. Countries are using whatever they have at their disposal—from radios to televisions to computers to mobile phones. For many families, accessing educational content through technology is not easy. For example, a nationally representative survey in Senegal conducted approximately three weeks after schools closed found that children were far more likely to continue their education through work assigned by their parents than accessed through any technology. Less than 11 percent of survey respondents said students accessed educational material using either radio, television, or web-based resources. 4

This is not necessarily surprising given education’s past record of using technology to support learning. Indeed, while there has been the expectation that ed tech would radically transform teaching and learning, the impact of ed-tech interventions on student learning has been mostly disappointing. 5 But, as put forth in “ Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? ,” this is most likely because most ed-tech interventions have paid limited attention to the instructional core. However, when we consider rigorous evidence on the comparative advantages of technology vis-a-vis traditional instruction, we find that ed tech can help improve learning by supporting the crucial interactions in the instructional core through: (1) scaling up quality instruction (by, for example, prerecorded lessons of high-quality teaching); (2) facilitating differentiated instruction (through, for example, computer-adaptive learning or live one-on-one tutoring); (3) expanding opportunities for student practice; and (4) increasing student engagement (through, for example, videos and games).

While we envision powered-up schools after COVID-19 using technology in these four ways to improve learning, we emphasize the need to support educators to embrace the comparative advantages of technology. Without involving and supporting educators in innovation, efforts will not be sustainable over time. Indeed, throughout the global school closures, we have seen the heroic efforts of educators, many of whom are in poor communities with limited ed-tech resources, and yet have innovated to continue engaging students in learning. For example, from Chile to the United Kingdom, we have seen teachers coming together to rapidly lend their expertise to develop relevant remote-learning content for students. In Chile, a network of teachers came together to develop a series of 30-minute radio lessons for secondary students who had no access to online learning. The initiative, which the teachers dubbed La Radio Enseña , is supported by the civil society organization Enseña Chile, and the radio lessons went from being distributed by a handful of radio stations to over 240 only one month after schools closed. Similarly in the U.K., a group of teachers worried about learning continuity for their students when schools were about to close, developed within two weeks an online classroom and resource hub to help educators and parents help their children learn. As of the end of July, users accessed lessons 17 million times and this initiative, called Oak National Academy, has been a significant feature of the government’s remote learning strategy.

Listening to educators as technology is deployed for learning and responding to their concerns with real-time iteration is also essential in helping make ed-tech rollouts successful. In response to the school closures, Peru’s ministry of education embarked on an ambitious national-scale remote-learning strategy called Aprendo en Casa using multiple channels—television, radio, and online resources. Curriculum-aligned lessons were recorded, and, to make the content engaging, the ministry hired actors to serve as content facilitators. After the initial rollout, the government requested feedback from school leaders, teachers, and parents, which led to the inclusion of a teacher and a student in each lesson. Additionally, reporting requirements of teachers were initially quite onerous leading to overburdening already stretched teachers and were adapted to a more manageable streamlined approach. Feedback from users was solicited regularly, not only on usage (which was reported to be as high as 74 percent among students), but also on quality (59 percent of parents reported being satisfied with the program). In addition, over 90 percent of teachers reported having been in regular communication with principals and students. 6 Interestingly, a very recent study confirms that teachers’ sense of success was higher in school systems that had strong remote working conditions, including communication, training, collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts.

These examples are just a few of the education technology experiments underway during the pandemic. Some rely on good internet and connectivity, and the OECD and HundrED have curated a list of online learning resources for schools. Others utilize offline technology or basic cellphones to facilitate learning for those less-resourced communities. Ultimately, the evidence is clear that there is no single “ed-tech” initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere because school systems vary in multiple ways. However, after COVID-19, one thing is certain: School systems that are best prepared to use education technology effectively will be better positioned to continue offering quality education in the face of school closures. Learning about those strategies that have emerged due to the closures and that have forced school leaders, educators, parents, and students to engage with technology in new and productive way will be important for developing powered-up schools in the long term. One such strategy is how technology, often through low-tech texts and phone calls, has helped engage parents in a whole new way, which is where we turn to next.

4. Parent e ngagement: Forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers.

Rarely is the topic of parent engagement at the top of the “to do” list for education administrators and educators whose days are filled with numerous decisions—from bell schedules to safety to lesson plans—around how to deliver education to children. In the recent OECD-Harvard survey of educators and education administrators across 59 countries on school reopening strategies, three-quarters of the respondents stated that the reopening plans were developed collaboratively with teachers, but only 25 percent said that collaboration included parents as well.

This limited engagement with parents and families should come as no surprise given that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of parent engagement occupied a relatively marginal place in the education discussions. Practitioners working with schools and families to build strong parent-teacher relationships frequently point out that strategies for community outreach and collaboration are frequently missing in teacher preparation programs and are given short shrift in professional development courses for administrators. Additionally, researchers are much more likely to focus their study on school-based factors such as curriculum development or assessment policies. In a recent search of the Education Resources Information Center database, which has close to 20 years of articles, the citation “teachers” was used almost four times the amount that the citation “parents” was used.

But the coronavirus pandemic has put the topic of engagement with parents and families at the center of today’s education debates, and education leaders across the globe are finding out just what powerful allies parents can be in their children’s learning—including parents from the most marginalized communities. From Asia to Africa to North America, examples are emerging of new ways of partnering with parents and families that provide real promise for supporting children’s learning in and out of school over the long term.

For example, creative mechanisms for real-time guidance to parents on their children’s education are popping up around the globe using the low-tech but, in many places, ubiquitous ability to make a phone call. In Argentina, the government of the State of Buenos Aires developed a call-in center staffed by the Ministry of Education to provide real-time information and guidance to any parent with concerns or information requests about their children’s education during the pandemic. In the first five months, over 100,000 calls were received. 7 In some places, civil society organizations are collaborating to provide this type of live, real-time support to parents. In the U.S. for example, the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative, a coalition of over 50 local organizations serving families and children, has created a family hotline to help provide parents and families with guidance and resources to assist with their children’s learning. In its first month, the hotline received 1,000 calls.

Mobile phones have also helped parents directly facilitate their children’s learning in India. In Himachal Pradesh, a state of almost 7 million people, the government is using a multilayered approach to remote learning that engages parents in a new way. In response to pandemic-related school closures, in April the government launched the Har Ghar Pathshala initiative. The initiative developed thousands of videos and digital worksheets and then deployed 48,000 teachers to connect to all parents in the state through WhatsApp. The goal was to develop a clear understanding among parents of the materials children should be accessing, including taking a weekly WhatsApp assessment that would come to their phones. Students themselves are unlikely to have electronic devices and a family phone—the main avenue for accessing online learning—so the materials are shared between parents and the children in the household. Over 92 percent of parents engaged with teachers through “ePTMs,” electronic Parent Teacher Meetings, and ultimately 70-80 percent of students in the state have engaged with the digital materials and 50 percent of students are taking the WhatsApp assessments. 8

Perhaps the most significant part of the government’s strategy, and the component that holds the most promise for powering up schools long term, has been building a relationship between students’ caregivers and their teachers and schools. 9 “Until now, in India we have not been able to establish the parent-to-teacher connection for first-generation learners at scale,” said Prachi Windlass, director of India Programs at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. “The pandemic has brought to light how parents of first-generation learners can—and now clearly do—help with their children’s learning.” 10 Parents themselves are eager to continue being allies in their children’s learning, with 88 percent of parents saying they would like to attend future ePTMs.

It is not only the government that is realizing what is possible when they invite parents and families into the teaching and learning process. Civil society organizations such as Pratham pivoted during school closures to engage directly with parents and families on children’s learning by using a combination of daily WhatsApp or text messages and weekly phone calls. “While we are further away physically, we have gotten closer,” says Samyukta Subramanian, a Pratham team lead and former CUE Echidna Global Scholar . The text messages provide activities to keep children engaged in learning and can include fun and interactive activities such as asking children to count how many teeth their parents have or how many buckets of water their family uses and text the answers back. The Pratham staff members call each family once a week to see how the activities are going, and by June they were sending over 100,000 text messages and reaching parents in over 12,000 rural communities. Noting that this approach to engaging parents is something they hope to continue after schools reopen, the Pratham Education Foundation CEO Rukmini Banerji says she hopes “there is a celebration for parents when children return to school to recognize all that they have done to continue their children’s learning and to give parents the confidence to stay engaged.”

The Ministry of Basic Education of Botswana has also learned the power of harnessing mobile phone technology to partner with parents and boost children’s learning. Prior to the school closures, the Ministry had been working closely with a coalition of partners to scale up an approach to teaching numeracy that involved interactive teaching methods geared to students’ learning levels rather than their grade. This Teaching at the Right Level initiative brings together a range of partners, including a Botswanan nonprofit called Young 1ove working with the government and university partners to implement and evaluate the approach, and the Real-Time Scaling Lab team at Brookings to help guide and document the scaling process.

During the closures, Young 1ove worked with the government to rapidly pivot from working with teachers to deliver numeracy lessons to working with parents . They reached out to over 7,000 parents and invited them to take part in remote learning during school closures—60 percent of whom accepted the invitation. While they tested several approaches, the most successful included a weekly math problem sent to parents by text message and followed up with a weekly 15-20 minute phone call. On the phone call, Young 1ove facilitators would ask parents to get their child and put the phone on speaker so they could ask if they had seen the math problem and then discuss it. A rapid and rigorous evaluation of the intervention , which included a control group, showed startling results. For the children whose parents received text messages and phone calls from Young 1ove, the drop in innumeracy levels was 52 percent . Clearly, when invited in as partners to their children’s learning, parents in Botswana also showed how powerful their partnership can be for children’s schooling.

While likely surprising to many, these examples of the capability of low-income or marginalized parents and families to be powerful allies in support of their children’s learning aligns with existing evidence on effective parent engagement and will come as no surprise to the select group of practitioners, researchers, and advocates working on this issue around the globe. In the U.S., for example, several decades of research have shown that parents, especially for low-income students, have a positive influence on student academic achievement largely through equipping parents to support their children’s learning at home. Rigorous evaluations in Ghana and the U.K. also demonstrate this. 11

When a respectful relationship among parents, teachers, families, and schools is at the center of engagement activities, powerful support to children’s learning can occur. A thread running across the above examples is schools inviting families to be allies in their children’s learning by using easy-to-understand information communicated through mechanisms that adapt to parents’ schedules and that provide parents with an active but feasible role. The nature of the invitation and the relationship is what is so essential to bringing parents on board.

Getting this relationship right is no easy task, and there are many dimensions to parental involvement in their children’s schooling, which can also reflect tension and power dynamics active in society writ large. 12 Schools and teachers can find it difficult to navigate the range of expectations, many of them conflicting. At times, engaging parents does not always lead to desirable outcomes for children’s learning. For example, a randomized control trial using longitudinal data in Ghana’s preschools found marked improvement in student outcomes that were sustained over several years in schools that received a yearlong teacher training and coaching program aimed at making classrooms more student-centered. The program incorporated play-based learning approaches and influenced the instructional core by improving teacher-child interactions. 13 But this improvement was only seen when the busy working-class parents of the students were not informed about the shift in the teaching approach. In the schools where the teacher training was paired with discussion sessions with parents about the purpose of the training and what the new teaching methods entailed, the opposite happened. The parent awareness sessions counteracted any of the benefits of the teacher training, and the children’s outcomes were worse than those in the control group. Ultimately, the parents who took part in the information sessions had a cooling effect on the teachers, leading them to stop using many of the techniques learned in the training. The researchers posited that rather than building support for the new pedagogical approach, the information sessions, which were infrequent and passive, raised concern among parents that the teaching was becoming less rigorous. This phenomena is not unique to Ghana. Through our own Brookings research initiative on parents and education, we have found stories of this parental cooling effect in interviews with educators and education leaders across 50 countries.

Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers. It is an opportunity for parents and families to gain insight into the skill that is involved in teaching and for teachers and schools to realize what powerful allies parents can be. Parents around the world are not interested in becoming their child’s teacher, but they are, based on several large-scale surveys , asking to be engaged in a different more active way in the future. Perhaps the most important insight for supporting a powered-up school is challenging the mindset of those in the education sector that parents and families with the least opportunities are not capable or willing to help their children learn.

5. An i terative a pproach: Embrace the principles of improvement science required to evaluate, course correct, document, and scale new approaches that can help power up schools over time.

As we have seen above, there are some promising new approaches that have the potential to enable a broader learning ecosystem to support children’s schooling. However, in most countries around the world, there is a long road to travel before we fully understand how to leverage technology or transform parent engagement to realize a powered-up school for each community. The speed and depth of change mean that it will be essential to take an iterative approach to learning what works, for whom, and under what enabling conditions. In other words, this is a moment to employ the principles of improvement science . Traditional research methods will need to be complemented by real-time documentation, reflection, quick feedback loops, and course correction. Rapid sharing of early insights and testing of potential change ideas will need to come alongside the longer-term rigorous reviews. CUE’s own work on system transformation and scaling change in education provides one possible model for doing just this. Through our Real-Time Scaling Labs , teams of practice-oriented researchers are working to scale and sustain transformative change in education systems. These teams learn, document, and share emerging insights in rapid, iterative cycles making sure peers across the different components of an education system are included in the process and that failures, one of the most valuable insights, are documented alongside successes.

A key principle underlying the Real-time Scaling Labs is that scaling is an iterative process that requires ongoing adaptation based on new data and changes in the broader environment. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed brought this reality front and center. In the Real-time Scaling Labs, two categories of adaptation have emerged: (1) adaptations and simplifications to the model being scaled itself and (2) adaptations and adjustments to the scaling approach and strategy. While both are critical to scaling, adapting the scaling strategy is especially challenging, requiring not only timely data, a thorough understanding of the context, and space for reflection, but also willingness and capacity to act on this learning and make changes accordingly.

Conclusion: Having a vision of the change we want to see matters and can help guide discussion, debate, and—ultimately—action.

We acknowledge that emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources. But we argue that articulating such a vision is essential, and that amid the myriad of decisions education leaders are making every day, it can guide the future. With the dire consequences of the pandemic hitting the most vulnerable young people the hardest, it is tempting to revert to a global education narrative that privileges access to school above all else. This, however, would be a mistake. There are enough examples of education innovations that provide access to relevant learning for those in and out of a school building to set our sights higher. A powered-up public school in every community is what the world’s children deserve, and indeed is possible if all stakeholders can collectively work together to harness the opportunities presented by this crisis to truly leapfrog education forward.

Note: The authors are grateful to Brian Fowler for his valuable research assistance in preparing this paper.

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• Fernando M. Reimers and Andrews Schleicher. “Schooling disrupted, schooling rethought: How the Covid-19 pandemic is changing education” OECD, 2020. p.7.
• See Chetty et al. 2005; Chetty, 2014; Rivkin et al., 2005.
• Cohen and Ball, who originated the idea of the instructional core, used the terms teachers, students, and content.  The OECD’s initiative on Innovative Learning Environments later adapted the framework using the terms educators, learners, and resources to represent educational materials and adding a new element of content to represent the choices around skills and competencies and how to assess them. Here we have pulled from elements that we like of both framework using the term instructional core as the relationships between educators, learners, and content and adding parents. 
•  Le Nestour, A., L. Moscoviz, and S. Mbaye. “Phone survey on the Covid crisis in Senegal.” Center for Global Development, 2020. https://www. cgdev. org/blog/five-findings-new-phonesurvey-senegal.
• See Bulman & Fairlie, 2016; Escueta, Nickow, Oreopoulos, & Quan, forthcoming; Tauson & Stannard, 2018.
• See Alberto Munoz-Najar L. “Peru: Aprendo en Casa (I Learn at Home).”
• Personal Communication, Gabriel Sanchez Zinny, May 26, 2020.
• “Parent Engagement: Himachal Pradesh.” Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Internal report: unpublished, 2020.
• “Large Scale Assessments Common Report.” Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Internal report: unpublished, 2020.
• Personal Communication, Prachi Jain Windlass, August 28, 2020.
• See for example, Henderson, A. and Mapp, K., “A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement.“ National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools, 2002.; http://www.columbia.edu/~psb2101/BergmanSubmission.pdf. 
• See for example https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/insight4.pdf and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/nyregion/school-integration-progressives.html?action=click&auth=login-email&login=email&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article. 
• Wolf, Sharon. “Year 3 follow-up of the ‘Quality Preschool for Ghana: interventions on child development.” Developmental Psychology 55.12 (2019): 2587.

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

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For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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‘When Normal Life Stopped’: College Essays Reflect a Turbulent Year

This year’s admissions essays became a platform for high school seniors to reflect on the pandemic, race and loss.

By Anemona Hartocollis

This year perhaps more than ever before, the college essay has served as a canvas for high school seniors to reflect on a turbulent and, for many, sorrowful year. It has been a psychiatrist’s couch, a road map to a more hopeful future, a chance to pour out intimate feelings about loneliness and injustice.

In response to a request from The New York Times, more than 900 seniors submitted the personal essays they wrote for their college applications. Reading them is like a trip through two of the biggest news events of recent decades: the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, and the rise of a new civil rights movement.

In the wake of the high-profile deaths of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers, students shared how they had wrestled with racism in their own lives. Many dipped their feet into the politics of protest, finding themselves strengthened by their activism, yet sometimes conflicted.

And in the midst of the most far-reaching pandemic in a century, they described the isolation and loss that have pervaded every aspect of their lives since schools suddenly shut down a year ago. They sought to articulate how they have managed while cut off from friends and activities they had cultivated for years.

To some degree, the students were responding to prompts on the applications, with their essays taking on even more weight in a year when many colleges waived standardized test scores and when extracurricular activities were wiped out.

This year the Common App, the nation’s most-used application, added a question inviting students to write about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives and educations. And universities like Notre Dame and Lehigh invited applicants to write about their reactions to the death of George Floyd, and how that inspired them to make the world a better place.

The coronavirus was the most common theme in the essays submitted to The Times, appearing in 393 essays, more than 40 percent. Next was the value of family, coming up in 351 essays, but often in the context of other issues, like the pandemic and race. Racial justice and protest figured in 342 essays.

“We find with underrepresented populations, we have lots of people coming to us with a legitimate interest in seeing social justice established, and they are looking to see their college as their training ground for that,” said David A. Burge, vice president for enrollment management at George Mason University.

Family was not the only eternal verity to appear. Love came up in 286 essays; science in 128; art in 110; music in 109; and honor in 32. Personal tragedy also loomed large, with 30 essays about cancer alone.

Some students resisted the lure of current events, and wrote quirky essays about captaining a fishing boat on Cape Cod or hosting dinner parties. A few wrote poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, politics and the 2020 election were not of great interest.

Most students expect to hear where they were admitted by the end of March or beginning of April. Here are excerpts from a few of the essays, edited for length.

Nandini Likki

Nandini, a senior at the Seven Hills School in Cincinnati, took care of her father after he was hospitalized with Covid-19. It was a “harrowing” but also rewarding time, she writes.

When he came home, my sister and I had to take care of him during the day while my mom went to work. We cooked his food, washed his dishes, and excessively cleaned the house to make sure we didn’t get the disease as well.

It was an especially harrowing time in my life and my mental health suffered due to the amount of stress I was under.

However, I think I grew emotionally and matured because of the experience. My sister and I became more responsible as we took on more adult roles in the family. I grew even closer to my dad and learned how to bond with him in different ways, like using Netflix Party to watch movies together. Although the experience isolated me from most of my friends who couldn’t relate to me, my dad’s illness taught me to treasure my family even more and cherish the time I spend with them.

Nandini has been accepted at Case Western and other schools.

Grace Sundstrom

Through her church in Des Moines, Grace, a senior at Roosevelt High School, began a correspondence with Alden, a man who was living in a nursing home and isolated by the pandemic.

As our letters flew back and forth, I decided to take a chance and share my disgust about the treatment of people of color at the hands of police officers. To my surprise, Alden responded with the same sentiments and shared his experience marching in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Here we were, two people generations apart, finding common ground around one of the most polarizing subjects in American history.

When I arrived at my first Black Lives Matter protest this summer, I was greeted by the voices of singing protesters. The singing made me think of a younger Alden, stepping off the train at Union Station in Washington, D.C., to attend the 1963 March on Washington.

Grace has been admitted to Trinity University in San Antonio and is waiting to hear from others.

Ahmed AlMehri

Ahmed, who attends the American School of Kuwait, wrote of growing stronger through the death of his revered grandfather from Covid-19.

Fareed Al-Othman was a poet, journalist and, most importantly, my grandfather. Sept. 8, 2020, he fell victim to Covid-19. To many, he’s just a statistic — one of the “inevitable” deaths. But to me, he was, and continues to be, an inspiration. I understand the frustration people have with the restrictions, curfews, lockdowns and all of the tertiary effects of these things.

But I, personally, would go through it all a hundred times over just to have my grandfather back.

For a long time, things felt as if they weren’t going to get better. Balancing the grief of his death, school and the upcoming college applications was a struggle; and my stress started to accumulate. Covid-19 has taken a lot from me, but it has forced me to grow stronger and persevere. I know my grandfather would be disappointed if I had let myself use his death as an excuse to slack off.

Ahmed has been accepted by the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Miami and is waiting to hear from others.

Mina Rowland

Mina, who lives in a shelter in San Joaquin County, Calif., wrote of becoming homeless in middle school.

Despite every day that I continue to face homelessness, I know that I have outlets for my pain and anguish.

Most things that I’ve had in life have been destroyed, stolen, lost, or taken, but art and poetry shall be with me forever.

The stars in “Starry Night” are my tenacity and my hope. Every time I am lucky enough to see the stars, I am reminded of how far I’ve come and how much farther I can go.

After taking a gap year, Mina and her twin sister, Mirabell, have been accepted at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and are waiting on others.

Christine Faith Cabusay

Christine, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York, decided to break the isolation of the pandemic by writing letters to her friends.

How often would my friends receive something in the mail that was not college mail, a bill, or something they ordered online? My goal was to make opening a letter an experience. I learned calligraphy and Spencerian script so it was as if an 18th-century maiden was writing to them from her parlor on a rainy day.

Washing lines in my yard held an ever-changing rainbow of hand-recycled paper.

With every letter came a painting of something that I knew they liked: fandoms, animals, music, etc. I sprayed my favorite perfume on my signature on every letter because I read somewhere that women sprayed perfume on letters overseas to their partners in World War II; it made writing letters way more romantic (even if it was just to my close friends).

Christine is still waiting to hear from schools.

Alexis Ihezue

Her father’s death from complications of diabetes last year caused Alexis, a student at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Lawrenceville, Ga., to consider the meaning of love.

And in the midst of my grief swallowing me from the inside out, I asked myself when I loved him most, and when I knew he loved me. It’s nothing but brief flashes, like bits and pieces of a dream. I hear him singing “Fix You” by Coldplay on our way home, his hands across the table from me at our favorite wing spot that we went to weekly after school, him driving me home in the middle of a rainstorm, his last message to me congratulating me on making it to senior year.

It’s me finding a plastic spoon in the sink last week and remembering the obnoxious way he used to eat. I see him in bursts and flashes.

A myriad of colors and experiences. And I think to myself, ‘That’s what it is.’ It’s a second. It’s a minute. That’s what love is. It isn’t measured in years, but moments.

Alexis has been accepted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is waiting on others.

Ivy Wanjiku

She and her mother came to America “with nothing but each other and $100,” writes Ivy, who was born in Kenya and attends North Cobb High School in Kennesaw, Ga.

I am a triple threat. Foreign, black, female. From the dirt roads and dust that covered the attire of my ancestors who worshiped the soil, I have sprouted new beginnings for generations.

But the question arises; will that generation live to see its day?

Melanin mistaken as a felon, my existence is now a hashtag that trends as often as my rights, a facade at best, a lie in truth. I now know more names of dead blacks than I do the amendments of the Constitution.

Ivy is going to Emory University in Atlanta on full scholarship and credits her essay with helping her get in.

Mary Clare Marshall

The isolation of the pandemic became worse when Mary Clare, a student at Sacred Heart Greenwich in Connecticut, realized that her mother had cancer.

My parents acted like everything was normal, but there were constant reminders of her diagnosis. After her first chemo appointment, I didn’t acknowledge the change. It became real when she came downstairs one day without hair.

No one said anything about the change. It just happened. And it hit me all over again. My mom has cancer.

Even after going to Catholic school for my whole life, I couldn’t help but be angry at God. I felt myself experiencing immense doubt in everything I believe in. Unable to escape my house for any small respite, I felt as though I faced the reality of my mom’s cancer totally alone.

Mary Clare has been admitted to the University of Virginia and is waiting on other schools.

Nora Frances Kohnhorst

Nora, a student at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in New York, was always “a serial dabbler,” but found commitment in a common pandemic hobby.

In March, when normal life stopped, I took up breadmaking. This served a practical purpose. The pandemic hit my neighborhood in Queens especially hard, and my parents were afraid to go to the store. This forced my family to come up with ways to avoid shopping. I decided I would learn to make sourdough using recipes I found online. Initially, some loaves fell flat, others were too soft inside, and still more spread into strange blobs.

I reminded myself that the bread didn’t need to be perfect, just edible.

It didn’t matter what it looked like; there was no one to see or eat it besides my brother and parents. They depended on my new activity, and that dependency prevented me from repeating the cycle of trying a hobby, losing steam, and moving on to something new.

Nora has been admitted to SUNY Binghamton and the University of Vermont and is waiting to hear from others.

Gracie Yong Ying Silides

Gracie, a student at Greensboro Day School in North Carolina, recalls the “red thread” of a Chinese proverb and wonders where it will take her next.

Destiny has led me into a mysterious place these last nine months: isolation. At a time in my life when I am supposed to be branching out, the Covid pandemic seems to have trimmed those branches back to nubs. I have had to research colleges without setting foot on them. I’ve introduced myself to strangers through essays, videos, and test scores.

I would have fallen apart over this if it weren’t for my faith.

In Hebrews 11:1, Paul says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My life has shown me that the red thread of destiny guides me where I need to go. Though it might sound crazy, I trust that the red thread is guiding me to the next phase of my journey.

Gracie has been accepted to St. Olaf College, Ithaca College and others.

Levi, a student at Westerville Central High School in Ohio, wrestles with the conflict between her admiration for her father, a police officer, and the negative image of the police.

Since I was a small child I have watched my father put on his dark blue uniform to go to work protecting and serving others. He has always been my hero. As the African-American daughter of a police officer, I believe in what my father stands for, and I am so proud of him because he is not only my protector, but the protector of those I will likely never know. When I was young, I imagined him always being a hero to others, just as he was to me. How could anyone dislike him??? However, as I have gotten older and watched television and social media depict the brutalization of African-Americans, at the hands of police, I have come to a space that is uncomfortable.

I am certain there are others like me — African-Americans who love their police officer family members, yet who despise what the police are doing to African-Americans.

I know that I will not be able to rectify this problem alone, but I want to be a part of the solution where my paradox no longer exists.

Levi has been accepted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and is waiting to hear from others.

Henry Thomas Egan

When Henry, a student at Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, attended a protest after the death of George Floyd, it was the words of a Nina Simone song that stayed with him.

I had never been to a protest before; neither my school, nor my family, nor my city are known for being outspoken. Thousands lined the intersection in all four directions, chanting, “He couldn’t breathe! George Floyd couldn’t breathe!”

In my head, thoughts of hunger, injustice, and silence swirled around.

In my ears, I heard lyrics playing on a speaker nearby, a song by Nina Simone: “To be young, gifted, and Black!” The experience was exceptionally sad and affirming and disorienting at the same time, and when the police arrived and started firing tear gas, I left. A lot has happened in my life over these last four years. I am left not knowing how to sort all of this out and what paths I should follow.

Henry has not yet heard back from colleges.

Anna Valades

Anna, a student at Coronado High School in California, pondered how children learned racism from their parents.

“She said I wasn’t invited to her birthday party because I was black,” my sister had told my mom, devastated, after coming home from third grade as the only classmate who had not been invited to the party. Although my sister is not black, she is a dark-skinned Mexican, and brown-skinned people in Mexico are thought of as being a lower class and commonly referred to as “negros.” When my mom found out who had been discriminating against my sister, she later informed me that the girl’s mother had also bullied my mom about her skin tone when she was in elementary school in Mexico City.

Through this situation, I learned the impact people’s upbringing and the values they are taught at home have on their beliefs and, therefore, their actions.

Anna has been accepted at Northeastern University and is waiting to hear from others.

Research was contributed by Asmaa Elkeurti, Aidan Gardiner, Pierre-Antoine Louis and Jake Frankenfield.

Anemona Hartocollis is a national correspondent, covering higher education. She is also the author of the book, “Seven Days of Possibilities: One Teacher, 24 Kids, and the Music That Changed Their Lives Forever.” More about Anemona Hartocollis

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Exploring the need for a responsive school curriculum to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic in Pakistan

1 Department of Education, University of Malakand, Chakdara, Dir Lower, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan

Gulab Khilji

2 Bureau of Curriculum Secondary Education Department, Quetta, Balochistan Pakistan

The article investigates the response of the Pakistani curriculum to the Covid-19 outbreak. It also looks into the development of a curriculum that addresses the specificities of students’ situations, while reminding them of global connectedness. The article is based on semi-structured interviews with 10 curriculum experts, 20 principals, and 35 teachers, as well as content analysis of the 2018 National Curriculum Framework of Pakistan. Its findings reveal participants’ disappointment with the top-down, predetermined nature of the curriculum, which makes it inadequate for situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The curriculum was perceived as being highly rigid, with little room for alternative modalities. Participants believed the curriculum could not support children’s learning in normal times, much less during a pandemic. Therefore, this article suggests a complete revamping of the curriculum and strengthening of teachers’ capabilities. It also suggests curricular material be updated to make it context specific, responsive to the needs of learners, and supportive of independent learning.

At present, the world seeks insight into, knowledge of, and solutions to the myriad challenges confronting the education sector due to the Covid-19 pandemic (Gul and Khilji 2020 ). A country’s needs, as well as the needs dictated by a rapidly changing working world, directly affect the educational environment and the ability to ensure a career-oriented experience and maximize individual development (Hayes and Juárez 2012 ). Since the world changes so rapidly, school curricula become outdated fast, creating a gap between learning and social and practical work situations (Ullah 2020 ). It is therefore crucial for education systems to reform their curriculum, to respond to changes in society; and to form a learning society that liberates every person’s creative and intellectual energies and prepares them for a world in which knowledge and multifaceted interactions are the keys for achieving success and economic expansion.

As in other developing countries, the Covid-19 pandemic has negatively affected the education of millions of students in Pakistan (Gul and Khilji 2020 ), a country that is already accustomed to 10 million children being out of school throughout the year (Rahman 2020 ). Since the end of the pandemic does not seem imminent, private schools have started an online system of education to save students’ careers. However, due to limited resources and technology, public schools have been hesitant to embark on such initiatives. To facilitate the education of public-school students, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training has started a tele-school system of education that uses a national television channel to disseminate student learning outcome (SLO)-based educational content for grades 1 through 12. Nevertheless, parents, teachers, and educational stakeholders have growing concerns regarding the efficacy of this system with respect to students’ short-term learning and long-term success. Even if it overcomes the unpredictable and far-reaching challenges of such a delivery system, curriculum can appear to be set in stone, stuck in the past, unable to respond in timely ways, struggling to catch up or adapt, or critical of the status quo; it can even appear to get ahead of the curve. This is a serious blind spot, one that could undermine the Education 2030 Agenda (Pinar 2020 ).

The Covid-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of the critical necessity for curriculum to become more responsive and proactive, perhaps even refocusing curricular time away from traditional school subjects and toward timely topics, the understanding of which would be informed by traditional school subjects (Pinar 2020 ). To fulfill the widespread demand for curriculum reforms, higher educational institutes in Pakistan have implemented innovations to ensure improvement in interdisciplinary curricula by allowing greater flexibility in course content and modes of delivery, as well as in the assessments linked to social and work-related problems, and by allowing students to take greater responsibility. All these innovations aim at increasing a curricular response to emerging social needs. However, at the school level, the existing curriculum, established in 2006, still requires the education stakeholders’ attention to implement innovations. Therefore, in this article, we aim to determine whether the existing school curriculum responds to and supports fast-changing, unpredictable, and often disruptive events, such as the outbreak of Covid-19. Additionally, we seek to suggest proposals for the development of a responsive curriculum that addresses the specificities of students’ situations, while reminding them of global connectedness.

The process of curriculum development in Pakistan

In the curriculum development process, what is taught, who is taught, and how it is taught are systematically organized. Every component affects and interacts with the others. For example, who is being taught (their age, maturity, education level) is affected by what is being taught. Methods of teaching content vary according to who is being taught, the characteristics, and the environment. The following are considered important factors of non-formal learning in light of these three basic components. Curriculum experts have suggested sequenced interventions, or steps, for curriculum preparation and development. For instance, Taba ( 1962 ) described six major steps in curriculum development (Figure ​ (Figure1 1 ).

Major steps followed during the curriculum development process

In sum, the curriculum reform process comprises the following: (a) diagnosing students’ learning needs, (b) stating learning goals and objectives, (c) selecting appropriate content, (d) organizing content and learning experiences, (e) developing delivery strategies and conducting evaluations, and (f) conducting research and assessment of the field.

These six steps include various complex courses of action, research, reflection, contemplation, and choices between different alternatives. Each contains two distinct steps. At each stage of decision making, however, utmost care must be taken. Considering the curricular requirements and set procedures, we developed the following overarching questions for the current study:

• To what extent did the school curriculum respond to address the Covid-19 pandemic in Pakistan?
• In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, what corrective measures can be taken to make the current curriculum capable of responding to any critical situation?

Research context

This research study was conducted in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, the largest province in the country (occupying 44% of the area), with the smallest population (5%). Balochistan is home to 10 million people. The province borders Iran in the west, Afghanistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to the north, and the Punjab and Sindh provinces to the east. The Arabian Sea borders its south. Balochistan has 32 districts, and Quetta is the capital city. Quetta is also the largest city in the province, and its only metropolis, with a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual population. The rest of the province has small cities with mostly rural features. In addition to its three major languages (i.e., Balochi, Pashto, and Brohi), the minority languages of Balochistan include Hazargi, Saraiki, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Hindku. Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is spoken and understood by most people and serves as the major vehicle of oral communication between speakers of the various native languages of Pakistan.

Pakistan has many minority ethnic groups in addition to the two major ethnicities of Baloch and Pashtun. Most of the minority ethnic groups live in Quetta. Other districts are roughly counted as either Baloch or Pashtun territory. The culture is primarily tribal, with deeply patriarchal and conservative roots. Most of the population is Muslim. However, some follow other religions, such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Sikhism.

The curriculum in Pakistan was previously developed at a central level, whereas textbooks were created at the provincial level. A recent constitutional amendment (the 18th Constitutional Amendment of 2010) relegated education to the provinces; however, the central government has continued to develop curriculum at the central level to ensure national cohesion and uniformity. This new curriculum has been termed the Single National Curriculum . Its centralized approach poses challenges to the curriculum’s responsiveness to the needs and realities of the provincial context of Balochistan.

Theoretical perspectives

Moore ( 2015 , p. 2) asserted that “we understand ourselves as social, cultural, ethical being in a world whose future is increasingly uncertain and difficult to predict”. This assertion highlights the uncertainty and unpredictability of future events. Therefore, curriculum must be constructed to be responsive to uncertain and difficult situations. Moore alluded to the current system of education that predominately relies on indoctrination and thus hinders innovation and the dissemination of alternative modalities of education. Radical, global curricular change is likely to require a “long revolution” (Williams 1961 ) rather than an overnight coup; however, sometimes emergency situations invite curriculum workers to figure out alternatives in the absence of organized learning schools. Moore discussed Lawton’s ( 2000 , pp. 32–35) five proposals regarding the reorganization of curriculum:

• from content and objectives to skills and processes;
• from subjects and cognitive attainment to cross-curricular themes and the affective domain;
• from didactic teaching to self-directed learning;
• from academic or vocational to the integration of both aspects of experience;
• from a national curriculum for 5–16 to lifelong learning.

The first proposal promotes the incorporation of skills into the curriculum, as well as a focus on processes. Skills and the learning of concepts and ideas can be related to Vygotsky’s ( 1978 ) sociocultural theories and can also be associated with Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ), whereby students learn in a specific learning environment with support from teachers as mentors. Similarly, off-school time can be used if structured cognition is juxtaposed with cross-curricular themes and the affective domain. The third domain specifically relates to situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic. If the curriculum is developed to promote self-directed learning, learning will never cease. Similar to Young’s ( 1998 ) concept of integrating vocational and academic experiences, the fourth proposal draws attention to the curriculum’s focus in this direction. The fifth proposal points to lifelong learning, which recommends flexibility instead of controlled knowledge distribution.

Building on Lawton ( 2000 ), Moore ( 2015 , pp. 164–165) proposed the following characteristics for a curriculum of the future:

• forward-looking and proactive (in addition to paying full attention to the present and valuing the past);
• both respons- ive and respons- ible in their orientation (responsive to wider social and physical change and responsible in encouraging students to envision and to wish, knowing how to contribute to the creation of a safer, more equitable future);
• prioritising individual and collaborative problem-solving skills, “useful knowledge”, and the promotion of love and capacity for learning; for investigation of self-expression over “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” within active, student-centered classrooms;
• taking a more deliberate and thought-out ethical stance regarding concerns and issues that are global rather than local or national;
• ensuring that education—learning—is both relevant (to society and to the learner) and enjoyable;
• providing the stability that schools and teachers need while at the same time continuing to evolve and self-evaluate;
• seeking as far as possible to base judgements on curriculum inclusions and exclusions, on educational and social principles rather than on political ideology or educational myths or illusions of objectivity;
• promoting both collective , communitarian values and the development of the individual citizen as a happy, creative, well rounded, and culturally enriched human being.

These broad aims provide a framework for developers to mold the curriculum to be responsive to physical and social changes. Our attention is directed to both individual problem solving and collaborative work. These may be possible in virtual-classroom situations.

Moore ( 2015 ) further posed certain questions to guide the development of a responsive curriculum:

• What might a school curriculum look like if we decided to reject sameness as the dominant discourse in favour of difference, and if we rejected orderliness in favour of dealing with a certain amount of disorderliness—of recognising uncertainty, perhaps, and learning how to live with it rather than hoping or pretending it wasn’t there?
• What if we listened more attentively and respectfully to the voices of young learners and their own articulations of their needs?
• What if we envisioned, in line with Bates’ suggestion (Bates 2008 , p. 98), a curriculum that set out to serve the interests of “the working class, women, ethnic minorities, etc.”, and in doing so perhaps considered how “the insurrection of subjugated knowledge [might] be made a part of the curriculum of schools”?
• What if we predefined our curriculum in some alternative way, calling it, for example—and fashioning it accordingly—the Critical Curriculum, or the Democratic Curriculum, or (to hark back to a previous chapter) the Global Curriculum, or the Activity Based Curriculum, or (in a reminder of the tyranny of The Answer) the Inquisitive or Questioning Curriculum?
• What if, after Atkinson ( 2013 , p. 19), we structured our curriculum on Deleuze’s “notion of immanence, where learning emerges from within the contingencies, differences and diversity of individual life”, in which we focused our attention “not with a pre-ordained subjectivity but with a subject-yet to-come” transforming our and our students” conception of the world “from something given, that is to say already grounded in established knowledge, to something to be explored and continuously created not in terms of what exists but more in terms of what this world is capable of”?

Moore ( 2015 ) drew upon the concepts of Stenhouse ( 1975 , pp. 86–87) with respect to how the curriculum should respond to students’ needs. Stenhouse said, “one activity is more worthwhile than another if:

• It permits children to make informed choices in carrying out the activity to reflect on the consequences of their choices.
• It assigns to students’ active roles in the learning situation rather than passive ones.
• It asks students to inquire into ideas, applications of intellectual processes, or current problems, either personal or social.
• It involves children with realia (i.e., actual objects, materials, and artifacts).
• Completion of the activity may be accomplished by children at several levels of ability.
• It asks students to examine a new setting idea, an application of an intellectual process, or a current problem that has been previously studied.
• It requires students to examine topics or issues that citizens in our society rarely examine, which are typically ignored by the nation’s major communication media.
• It involves students and faculty members in “risk” taking—not a risk of life or limb but a risk of success or failure.
• It requires students to rewrite, rehearse, and polish their initial efforts.
• It involves students in the application and mastery of meaningful rules, standards, or disciplines.
• It gives students a chance to share the planning, the carrying out a plan, or the activity results with others.
• It applies to the expressed purposes of the students”.

Responsive curriculum

Curriculum has been planned to direct learning experiences and intended outcomes for students’ ongoing and active learning through the development of personal-social skills, by means of the structured rebuilding of knowledge and expertise, under the aegis of their schools (Zimu-Biyela 2019 ). Fomunyam ( 2014 ) argued that curriculum is a series of potentially disciplining and thinking experiences organized in a school. A responsive curriculum addresses students’ changing intellectual and workplace requirements by, on the one hand, breaking down the gap between theories and universal knowledge, and on the other hand, adapting to the context of real-life situations. To be successful, learning experiences must fulfill students’ needs and those of their community.

Moll ( 2004 ) argued that the capacity to respond to societal circumstances reflects the quality of the curriculum taught at schools and universities. This means that a specific program or curriculum is not merely about what is happening in the classroom but also about what a student has learned to do. Curricular responsiveness tackles employability (i.e., economic responsiveness), cultural responsiveness (i.e., a form of underlying awareness), and pedagogical or learning responsiveness within a discipline or a disciplinary capacity.

Conceptualization of a responsive curriculum

Curriculum can be conceptualized from different points of view. From the traditional perspective, it is viewed as a program of planned course activities for a subject, and their intended learning outcomes (Schubert 1986 ), whereby the focus is directed at the content of the curriculum, with very little attention to teaching and learning (Tanner 2007 ). According to the progressive perspective, as articulated by Tanner, curriculum can be reconceived through the reconstruction of knowledge, thoughts, and modes of guided experiences, thereby enabling learners to gain intellectual mastery over the course of successive educational experiences.

This ensures that the curriculum prepares students for future scenarios they may not encounter at school. Schubert ( 1986 ) echoed that curricular activities must adapt to specific contexts; curriculum should always be rebuilt to fit changing circumstances. Similarly, Peters ( 2000 ) emphasized that a curriculum should not be made uniform and long term; rather, it must be linked to individual requirements, the challenges confronting practitioners, and expected future trends.

In this article, we use the term responsive curriculum to refer to an adaptive course of studies that, on one end, bridges the gap between abstract educational theories, universal knowledge, and learning, and on the other, connects the more contextually demanding realities of changing situations with the world of work.

The literature on responsive curriculum has highlighted various requirements to respond to the changing needs of students; these include interdisciplinarity (Alexander 2011 ) and emphasis on teaching and learning that are based on problem areas (Kiguli et al. 2011 ). It also stressed the importance of developing students’ competencies required to perform tasks in real-life situations (Kouwenhoven 2009 ); the need to involve teachers, students, and society in the development of the curriculum, as well as the centrality of faculty and the need for expert support in the curriculum development process (Taylor 2000 ).

Attributes of a responsive curriculum

A list of the attributes of a responsive curriculum explicitly demonstrates that a process that can guarantee the curriculum will fulfill students’ intellectual needs in emergencies is rare, especially in Balochistan. Therefore, we hope that this study will fill a gap in the literature. With the aid of the literature on conceptualization (discussed in the previous section), we have established some specific attributes of a responsive curriculum creation process. These attributes are related to the design process, implementation process, and evaluation process of the curriculum. Some of the major attributes are described in the following sections.

Aims, goals, and objectives of the curriculum

Manathunga ( 2011 ) described aims and goals as a basic attribute of a responsive curriculum. With such a teaching and learning approach, students and teachers are encouraged to understand and describe the curriculum in a manner that makes it aims, goals, and objectives clear. Extensive discussion and reflection can clarify curricular content and delivery methods (Wolf 2007 ) for desired learning goals and learning outcomes (McFadden et al. 2011 ).

Curriculum is inclusive

An inclusive curriculum expects, respects, and acknowledges all students’ access and involvement in study. Villegas and Lucas ( 2002 ) mentioned that a responsive curriculum is always inclusive because it meets the different needs, experiences, preferences, and unique characteristics of all students and ensures that every student is involved in the learning process. This helps the teachers accept students with all abilities and promote positive attitudes among students from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Curriculum responds to the needs of students, parents, and society

A responsive curriculum adapts to the learning needs of students and the expectations of parents and society by presenting content in a simple, comprehensible manner and by ensuring that students and parents can access and assess it in ways they understand (Moll 2004 ; Sarason 2009 ; DHET 2012 ; Hayes and Juárez 2012 ). This means that course content reflects the connection between students’ learning needs and society’s changing circumstances. To achieve this, content must allow flexibility in case assignments, bring real-life examples into the learning context, and include role playing or immersive games. Boughey ( 2009 ) stated that a responsive curriculum has the ability to teach and train students to meet their own needs for growth, to grow in ways that meet society’s changing needs, and to be able to contribute their best to society accordingly.

Curriculum is intellectually and emotionally stimulating

According to Biggs ( 2003 ), two important steps are necessary for the effective use of material (curricular). First is students’ level of perception and methods for getting new knowledge beyond their own existing (intellectual) understanding; second is students’ awareness of their experiences (emotional). The extent to which the curriculum covers both these aspects reflects its responsiveness. This attribute sets the framework, and participants’ views were collected accordingly by the researchers.

Curriculum optimizes students’ learning potential

Learning optimization is best defined as the activities that encourage students to simultaneously think, evaluate, question critically, and acquire factual knowledge (Biggs 2003 ). In the context of this study, the researchers view learning optimization as “engaging students in activities that involve learning through other skills beyond listening and reading” (p. 15). A responsive curriculum promotes student-teacher interaction, develops students’ higher-level cognitive skills, and promotes active learning by enhancing students’ potential to work both collaboratively and independently. The major goal of such a responsive curriculum is to create autonomous and self-directed learners (McKinney 2009 ; Phan and Deo 2007 ).

Curriculum support for e-learning / distance learning

Designing a curriculum for distance-learning programs is distinct from designing internal or face-to-face learning, due to the fact that the needs of distance learners are quite different from those of learners using other modes of study. Smaldino and Simonson ( 1999 ) held that in the process of curriculum design, the learners, their specific learning needs, and the medium of instruction through which such learning takes place should be the top priority for curriculum experts. The focus should be on “what is needed to improve performance”. This implies the satisfactory condition of “what is actually happening?”, “how do the students feel about e-learning / distance learning?”, and “what are the alternate modalities?”. Smaldino and Simonson also emphasized a few other elements of a responsive curriculum that need consideration while designing any distance learning course. These include “the course contents, the teaching strategies, and assessment techniques”. A well-crafted responsive curriculum has meaning. Moreover, assignments are supported with strong instructional and assessment approaches.

Although the curriculum development literature offers valuable information regarding a responsive curriculum for emergencies situations, few studies provide an empirical overview of the methods used to implement such a curriculum in practice (Cunha et al. 2000 ; Kiguli-Malwadde et al. 2006 ; McFadden et al. 2011 ; Paulsen and Peseau 1992 ). Moreover, no such study has been conducted in Pakistan, much less in the context of Balochistan (as per the researchers’ knowledge). Balochistan, where students are studying in schools, colleges, and universities, has been victimized for years due to historical events, such as devastating earthquakes and the global war on terrorism (for the last two decades). There is a crucial need for in-depth studies on the existing curriculum and the initiation of a responsive curriculum that can cope with any emergency (Gul and Khilji 2020 ). It is widely said that “tragedy teaches lessons”, but lessons can only be learned if the victims identify the causes, create appropriate mechanisms, and devise plans to prevent or mitigate them in the future. Tragedies and pandemics not only ravage life but also show the extent to which the respective communities/countries and their institutions are vulnerable and unable to act. Moreover, if the affected countries, areas, or communities do not have adequate plans and effective systems in place to contribute to robust catastrophe preparedness, recovery, and response programs, such disasters leave behind long-term impacts.

Research methodology

Participants and data collection procedure.

This study is qualitative in nature. Qualitative research is used to discover the fundamental reasons, beliefs, and motives underlying a phenomenon. This method offers insights into research phenomena and establishes ideas or theories pertaining to future quantitative analysis work. Creswell ( 2009 ) pointed out that researchers who use qualitative approaches dive into situations and are vital resources for collecting data, often informed by knowledge and opinions.

As per the Carnegie Classifications, we used purposive sampling to ensure the diversity of institutional types and geographic locations within the sample. The criteria for participation was that individuals must know the curriculum or be experienced in the curriculum development process and provide detailed generalizable information. The purposeful sample for this study comprised 10 experts selected from the Bureau of Curriculum, in Balochistan, with wide working experience in the same field, as well as 20 school principals and 35 teachers with vast teaching experience in different districts of Balochistan. The principals were engaged in teaching practices; therefore, their responses were recorded as teachers.

With respect to academic qualifications, most respondents held MS/MPhil or MA/MSC degrees (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Similarly, with respect to professional qualifications, most respondents ( n = 58) held MEd degrees. Some respondents ( n = 07) held BEd degrees. In term of teaching experience, the greatest number of study respondents ( n = 27) had 11 to 15 years of experience and (n= 23) had 5 to 10 years of experience.

Demographic information on respondents

A content analysis of Pakistan’s existing National Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training 2018 ) was carried out to explore the research questions. Then semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain a more in-depth overview of the participants’ curriculum responsiveness during this pandemic, as well as the corrective measures for making the curriculum adequate enough to respond to any emergency. The basic attributes of a responsive curriculum, with respect to students’ learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, included (a) clarity in the purpose of the curriculum, (b) inclusiveness of the curriculum, (c) intellectual and emotional stimulation of students’ learning, (d) responsiveness of the curriculum to the needs of students and parents, and (e) curricular support for e-learning / distance learning. These were identified in the existing literature and coded for further analysis / pattern detection that informs the research question.

Data analysis

To ensure trustworthiness, ethnographic content analysis was conducted on the National Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training 2018 ). Ethnographic content analysis refers to a method of retrieving and analyzing documents for their significance and meaning in context (Elo et al. 2014 ). The emphasis is on a description, the search for context, explanatory meanings, patterns, and processes (Grbich 2013 ). The National Curriculum Framework is a lengthy document; therefore, due to time constraints, the focus was on the basic components of the curriculum development process and the guiding principles.

The collected data were analyzed using the thematic analysis model (Braun and Clarke 2006 ). According to Braun and Clarke, thematic analysis is “a tool to find, analyze and report trends within the data” (p. 79). In this thematic analysis, the researchers applied the six-step method suggested by Braun and Clarke ( 2006 ). Data were evaluated using all these six stages: familiarity, coding, generation, searching themes, naming and defining themes, and final reporting. Using this structure, with its consistency and practicality, constitutes an effective and powerful approach to conducting social science research that helps the researcher avoid obstacles during the study.

Using thematic analysis, we read, organized, and classified participants’ comments, and the segments relevant to research questions were coded. After this stage was completed, an internal audit was conducted in which two sets of codes were compared to validate the data. One set of themes were established. Each theme’s essence was interpreted in detail, and total code counts were generated by counting each time participants’ comments corresponded with a theme.

Content analysis of Pakistan’s National Curriculum Framework ( 2018 )

The curriculum framework is a document focused on national policy papers, such as Pakistan’s Constitution, national education policy, and Vision 2025. Such a framework includes mechanisms, time frames, curriculum development, reviews, and other related school-learning issues. It sets out fundamental principles for curricula, abilities, beliefs, and roles that students in the major fields of training are required to master at each level in order to achieve target outcomes. It also provides broad curriculum policy guidelines for designing the subject curricula, training systems, evaluations, and assessments of students’ achievement and teachers’ professional development.

The National Curriculum Framework of Pakistan was planned in 2018. This was the first-ever curriculum framework in Pakistan’s educational history. Earlier, the curriculum in Pakistan was regulated through subject-specific curricular guidelines. The new framework was launched as a guardian document to instill patriotism, safeguard national ideology, and promote national harmony in order to counter education’s devolution to the provinces and federating units, which were established by the 18th Constitutional Amendment of 2010. The 18th Constitutional Amendment made curriculum development and implementation a provincial responsibility. However, more recently, the central authorities have shifted curriculum development back to the national level. All the provinces agreed on the curriculum framework, which allows for broader national harmony and interest guidelines from the central authorities and delegates curriculum development to the provinces.

The provinces appreciated the devolution of curriculum development to the provinces, because they believe the curriculum’s provincial focus, being context responsive, will be more educational for children. However, the National Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training ( 2018 , p. 8) stated:

After the 18th Constitutional Amendment, the devolution of curriculum and standards has created several issues and challenges which need to be addressed urgently. Some key challenges are: Safeguarding and promoting the ideology of Pakistan; Ensuring integrity, solidarity, and national cohesion; Developing and maintaining uniform standards in learning and assessment; Ensuring uniformity in diversity; Honoring national and international commitments; Implementing Article 25A—Right to Education; Coordination, linkages, and harmonization; Equal access and opportunities to learners. Thus, the top-down curricular approach leaves less latitude for contextual realities. This approach also neglects the cognitive and psychological needs of learners. The framework gives predetermined curricular mandates that require the provincial education authorities to achieve educational goals that were set at the central level.

The framework highlights the curricular goals of Pakistani society. It vows to safeguard regional languages and pledges to promote unity among diverse cultural outlooks. For this purpose, educators believe the curriculum should be planned and controlled by the central authorities.

The framework offers detailed guidelines on the steps of curriculum development, based on Taba’s ( 1962 ) model. It states that curriculum development should start with the diagnosis of learners’ needs. Similarly, guidelines are provided to set learning objectives, select content and learning activities, and devise assessment methods. However, the framework ignores the realities and contexts of the schools. The guidelines given in the framework seem to be for the enactment of an ideal curriculum, whereas the expectations of the curriculum have not been matched with the school context. According to the Balochistan Education Department (Government of Balochistan 2018 ), 50% of primary schools have only one teacher to teach six grades. Additionally, 20% of primary schools have only two teachers available. Similarly, most schools lack basic facilities, such as water, electricity, and boundary walls. Most of the teachers are not prepared to use modern techniques of teaching. The framework is silent regarding the autonomy of teachers and the self-directed learning of students. It also does not provide guidelines on learning in the time of emergencies.

Thematic analysis of the interviews

The content analysis of the National Curriculum Framework was followed by a thematic analysis of the individual interviews with teachers, school principals, and curriculum experts. The study participants highlighted that the National Curriculum Framework was developed at the central level, without researching the regional contexts, although the provincial representatives took part in the development process. Consequently, the framework seems to be less responsive to the regional contexts.

The interview data were collected using an individual interview protocol, via phone, following standard operating procedures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006 ). The following themes emerged from the analysis.

Clarity of the aims, goals, and objectives of the curriculum

During this study, most participants agreed that the aims, goals, and objectives of the curriculum content were not clear. They suggested that the curriculum be flexible and have an apparent purpose, and that its development process (i.e., including the purpose of the learning material and course outcomes) should be transparent. Moreover, these outcomes should be structured. One of the curriculum experts alluded to this by stating,

The curriculum is to provide a guideline to the content and to what a course entails. The purpose of the curriculum should also be transparent to the needs of the industry and the country. This improves the quality of student education.

This statement shows that the curriculum is rigid in nature and controlled, with no flexibility for curricular material, such as textbooks, which are generally developed at the provincial level.

Another curriculum expert pointed out that “the curriculum does not support alternative modalities for students’ learning continuity”. This observation reflects the current Covid-19 situation, which left students helpless upon closure of the schools. The curriculum, according to the participants, does not have opportunities for independent learning.

The participants further stated that recommendations for textbooks appropriate for students’ age and grade levels are not clear. Additionally, the exercises within textbooks are not consistent with assessment practices, which should adhere to independent practices, as outlined in the national curriculum standards. Accordingly, some SLOs are not included in the textbooks, although they may be addressed through classroom activities or assessment questions not mentioned in the textbooks.

Curriculum inclusiveness

Participants showed disappointment about curriculum inclusiveness during the emergency situation of the Covid-19 pandemic. They stated that the curriculum was not inclusive. Inclusiveness requires that curricular guidelines be specific about outcomes and address challenges in practice. Inclusiveness should relate to other environments and be associated with other disciplines in the real world. Some of the teachers and school principals mentioned that they felt the content was outdated and did not support students during this emergency situation. One stated, “Students are not supported enough because, in regular face-to-face classroom practices, little intellectual growth had been noticed last year, and strategies for the students with physical disabilities or slow learners are excluded”. Teachers and school principals alike agreed with this statement. The school principals and teachers generally complained that the curriculum was divorced from the context and children’s realities. This might be a result of the exclusion of teachers and school principals from the curriculum development process.

Curriculum responsiveness to the needs of students, parents, and society

The curriculum should be responsive to students’ learning needs by teaching them in ways that are accessible and assessing them in ways they understand (Moll 2004 ; Sarason 2009 ; DHET 2012 ; Hayes and Juárez 2012 ).

One participant stated the curriculum was not responsive to the Covid-19 pandemic. She claimed,

A responsive curriculum ensures that the content speaks to students' needs and practices for students studying online from home. However, the curriculum in place does not have the potential to respond to either students’ needs or pedagogic needs of the teachers.

Some of the participants stated that the curriculum was partially responsive: “Somehow the curriculum is responsive, but it needs to be changed”. Additionally, they stated that the benchmark should be set to prepare students “studying anywhere, anytime” when emergency situations arise.

The teachers felt that the curriculum was not responsive because it did not address students’ and parents’ needs. The participants argued that the government needs to prepare parents so they can be responsible for their children learning at home, because most parents are uneducated. The participants highlighted the need for parents’ involvement in their children’s learning process. One pointed out, “The situation has convinced us that the relationship of school with parents must be redefined and revitalized”. This gap was experienced by all participants: teachers, school principals, and curriculum experts.

The participants suggested parents should be prepared to engage their children in learning at home. This can be made easier with social media platforms that allow parents to supervise their children in times of emergencies, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Contextual responsiveness of the curriculum to local and global needs

The school principals believed that the current curriculum has manifold deficiencies with respect to simultaneously responding to both local and global needs. However, this situation could be handled by local teachers who have been appointed at the village, tehsil, and district level.

At the local level, the teachers are in contact with parents and community members. They may prepare lessons and home-based assignments in order to remedy the disruption of studies. A participant commented, “The role of a local teacher is significant. They can help students sequentially by teaching them geography, history, culture, flora, and fauna of the vicinity. This would keep their learning context specific”. It is an expression of Balochistan’s culture that teachers living in the school locality have a close affinity with children and their parents. This allows them to interact with the children during off-school time. Thus, when situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic arise, the teachers can teach the children during off-school time. This can help the children remain connected with learning under the supervision of teachers. This also transcends conventional tunneled curricular approaches.

Intellectual and emotional motivation of the curriculum

The representative teachers stated that, in traditional classroom teaching, the contents of the curriculum are intellectually and emotionally stimulating to some extent; for example, a second chapter cannot be approached unless the first chapter has been taught. One teacher added, “The way the curriculum is structured helps us engage students with the curriculum, and we find it emotionally and intellectually stimulating because we are consistently thinking of ways to improve our students and keep them engaged with the content”. Nevertheless, this sequence may challenge students’ capacity for independent learning.

The majority of the participants thought the present curriculum did not allow students to optimize their independent learning and did not support their ability to work in out-of-classroom situations. One teacher pointed out, “In real, face-to-face teaching, we guide and encourage students’ learning potential by motivating them in different ways”. However, the majority of the students were not internally motivated to succeed in learning. The curriculum experts asserted that there was no opportunity for self-learning in the curriculum. This could be due to political influences on the curriculum not allowing for independent learning.

Curriculum support for e-learning/distance learning

Most of the participants (i.e., teachers, school principals, and curriculum experts) believed that online/e-learning and home-based learning could be alternative modalities for students to continue their education. However, all the mentioned modalities have pressing challenges. For example, some participants said they had not had electricity in their districts for the last two months. Others mentioned the limited electrical supply in some districts. These pose huge hurdles to the successful implementation of online/e-learning.

In addition to issues with accessibility, some participants highlighted that online/e-learning is only feasible in the higher grades, where students can independently respond to the online lecture, screen sharing, and assignments. Students in the lower grades (i.e., the primary level) are unable to participate in online learning without a teacher’s mentorship.

The provincial education department has initiated a home-based schooling concept, called “My home is my school”, that motivates parents to arrange for the continuity of their children’s learning at home. In response to this initiative, one of the participants said,

Home-based schooling would be arduous because they can never be as organized as schools on time and space realities. The habitual organized way of a school must go through a huge shift from formal schooling to home-based schooling. The curriculum material organization would need huge efforts, which would be extremely difficult to ensure in the absence of an organized structural approach.

However, some participants spoke in favor of online/e-learning if the scope was limited to grades above the elementary level. The participants encouraged online/e-learning, with the condition that the issues of accessibility be resolved. One participant stated,

The online methods may help students for the continuity of their education in the Covid-19 situation, but there are heavy issues of access/support to online resources. For example, in our village district, Ziarat, we do not have electricity supply for three months.

The participants believed that online-e-learning would depend on two major factors: parents’ educational level and the support system and facilities available at home. This means that online/e-learning has prerequisites before it can be implemented. The participants highlighted the critical issues of internet availability and connectivity.

Curricular support for emergency situations

The participants claimed that the curriculum was unprepared for dealing with emergency situations, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly with respect to the elementary grades. One of the curriculum experts opined, “Our curriculum should be redesigned so that it is responsive to such events. Apart from Covid-19, we could confront more natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and wars, which may cause closure of the schools”.

The participants pointed out that some covert or inexplicit guidelines relating to such incidents might exist, but the curriculum itself was mostly silent. The participants highlighted that the Covid-19 pandemic was a test case for the schools to design a curriculum configured with digital learning sources. This may also make educators rethink or redefine the teacher’s role in discovering alternative strategies for teaching and for facilitating students in case schools are temporarily closed. One of the participants claimed,

Our curriculum is not prepared for such incidents because our curriculum is predetermined and outcome based. The authorities harshly control it. The curriculum would have been responsive had it been somewhat flexible. The curriculum should be redesigned so that it produces analytical and critical souls.

The participants, as curriculum experts, were aware of the weaknesses of a predetermined and controlled curriculum. This predetermination snatches away teachers’ autonomy and places them in the system as a mere distributor of knowledge. The participants recommended that some degree of autonomy be established for both teachers and students, to meet the needs of their contextual realities.

The qualitative analysis revealed that the participants were disappointed with the curriculum’s responsiveness to situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic. However, they believed this situation has lessons for educators to ponder in redesigning the curriculum to support learning continuity in normal as well as challenging times. They expressed encouragement for incorporating online/e-learning in the curriculum, while simultaneously highlighting obstacles to overcome. The participants offered the following recommendations to ensure the curriculum is more responsive to learning in such situations:

• Part of the curriculum must be self-explanatory, so students can engage with the learning material until the situation returns normal.
• “Must-know” topics/themes in the curriculum should be identified. Special lessons can be prepared on the identified topics/themes and be shared with students through various channels: social media platforms, screen sharing, YouTube channels, and other methods. In this way, students’ learning progression will not be disrupted.
• Curriculum experts can identify must-know concepts and share them with educational authorities. The authorities should prepare teachers to develop lessons that can be shared with students.
• A separate curriculum should be available for emergencies. This can be a specialized curriculum only for use in emergencies. Alternatively, a portion of the regular curriculum could be treated as an emergency curriculum, guiding students to learn during such situations.
• The best way to respond to such situations is to equip students to be critical and analytical thinkers. This way, students, as future citizens, can deal with such challenges.
• A separate subject area should be dedicated to health and hygiene, and specifically, should include precautionary measures to avoid pandemics, such as Covid-19.
• Learning should not be limited to the written text. Alternative ways of educating children through social learning should be available.
• Schools should remain open; any loss of teaching time can be compensated through a condensed curriculum or curriculum mapping to identify and teach the most significant themes/concepts, skills, and behavior.
• The curriculum should include learning material designed for self-directed learning, particularly at lower grade levels and in the social sciences.
• A teacher guide on natural and human-made disasters should be prepared as part of teachers’ professional learning.
• School head teachers can play a significant role in improving this situation by inviting teachers to schools in shifts. Head teachers/principals can direct teachers to map their course content so it can be taught weekly, as needed in the current situation.
• Teachers can play a pivotal role in being aware of the realities of the local context. They can immerse themselves in creating opportunities for children so the children can continue learning.
• Currently, teachers are posted at the village level. Therefore, they can arrange to aid students in their studies. However, this requires a staunch commitment from the top-down educational hierarchy. Directives can be issued to cluster heads to assign responsibilities to teachers for their individual cluster.
• The entire curriculum does not need to be taught. Some subjects can be mapped. For example, subjects that are appropriate for independent learning can be left out. Science, English, and Mathematics can be the focus of the curriculum.
• Teachers need to be incentivized. This can be done by giving them additional money to motivate their participation.
• Another alternative is telecasting prepared lessons through TV and radio channels.
• When a course is designed for emergency situations, an assessment also needs to be designed for that course.
• Must-know topics should be identified for both instruction and assessment. Primary-level classes do not need assessment.
• It is hoped that arranging possible ways to ensure students’ learning continuity will bring about at least a 10% improvement. We believe something is better than nothing. We expect the multiplication effect of forming a healthy culture to challenge the multiplication effect of the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Teachers should be given reasonable autonomy, even in normal situations. However, for teachers to have autonomy, they must be supported with financial benefits and professional development.
• The curriculum should permit the adoption of a creative approach. The alignment between society and curriculum should be clear.
• Different stakeholders (e.g., lecturers, industry, society, students, and heads of departments) should be part of the curriculum development process.

Discussion and conclusions

We conducted this study in the Balochistan province of Pakistan. Balochistan is area-wise the largest and population-wise the smallest province of Pakistan. Additionally, it is the poorest province of the country. There has been a tussle between the central authorities and the provinces over control of Pakistan’s curriculum matters for the last few years. The school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic occurred amid these circumstances. The tussle is still going on; however, we focused on how responsive the curriculum in Pakistan is to situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic, irrespective of whether the curriculum is constructed at the national or the provincial level.

The participants in the study were curriculum experts, teachers, and school principals. They showed their disappointment with the curriculum’s responsiveness to situations such as the Covid-19 pandemic. They believed that the top-down approach and predetermined nature of the curriculum make it difficult to respond to such a situation. They thought the curriculum was highly rigid, not allowing for alternative modalities. Their ideas regarding the curriculum in Pakistan synchronize with the banking concept of Freire ( 1973 ). This finding contradicts the theoretical perspective promoted by Moore ( 2015 ), who envisioned a more flexible curriculum that is responsive to learners’ needs and allows for pedagogical readjustments.

The participants noted a distrust of the educational system by teachers. Teachers in Pakistan, according to the participants, should be more than the distributors of official knowledge. They also highlighted the low self-respect of teachers. A teacher is a person who enacts the curriculum. Teachers give life to the curriculum. However, their very identity as a teacher has not been recognized in society. Identity is the most important dimension in human life (Bracher 2006 ). Therefore, the participants suggested the whole curriculum be redesigned to make it responsive to emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Bertram ( 2006 ), and Moll ( 2004 ) also suggested the need for a heightened responsiveness of the curriculum to students’ as well as society’s needs and interests. The curriculum framework serves as an empty structure that is impotent to cope with this type of situation.

We draw attention to the challenge of teachers’ low autonomy in both curricular matters and pedagogical aspects, in contrast with the demand by curriculum theorists for more power for teachers. The reconceptualized curriculum theorists (Grundy 1987 ; Pinar et al. 1995 ) challenged the narrow description of curriculum; they consider curriculum a process instead of a product. This notion allows the curriculum to encompass learning in both off-school and in-school contexts.

The study has limitations due to the lockdown situation in Pakistan. Ideally, focus group interviews should have been conducted to supplement the thorough review of all relevant documents related to Pakistan’s curriculum. Nevertheless, the findings offer a representative picture of curriculum in Pakistan. The participants explicitly shared that the current curriculum is nonresponsive to emergencies. Moreover, they believed the curriculum to be unsupportive of children’s learning even during normal times. As a remedy to this issue, they suggested the curriculum be completely revamped in line with the extensive findings of research studies. They further suggested that teachers be properly financially compensated and professionally developed before they can be expected to produce improved educational outcomes. They recommended the development of curricular material that is current, context specific, and supportive of independent learning.

We believe that, by presenting the perspectives of curriculum experts, teachers, and principals who face the on-ground realities of the existing curriculum’s positive and negative aspects, this study’s findings provide a foundation for developing and improving the existing school curriculum. The findings also suggest ways to design a responsive curriculum that can fulfill the students’ requirements as well as those of society in emergency situations. As Schubert ( 1986 ) pointed out, “Since curriculum activities are necessary for specific contexts, a curriculum is always created and reconstructed to meet changing conditions”. Likewise, Peters ( 2000 ) stressed that a curriculum should be long term, consistent, and adaptable to emergent needs.

Biographies

is Assistant Professor at the University of Malakand, KPK, Pakistan. Her research spans a wide range of issues covering different domains of educational psychology, linguistics, curriculum, pedagogy, teacher education, and science education. She has been engaged in teaching and supervision activities at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in both private and public sector universities.

is currently serving as Deputy Director (Curriculum) at the Bureau of Curriculum Secondary Education Department Balochistan, Quetta. He received his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, with a concentration in Curriculum Studies, from the University of North Texas, in 2016. He has been working on teacher education, education policy, curriculum, and education assessment in the province of Balochistan. His research interests include curriculum studies, education policy, teacher education, sociocultural theory, and qualitative research.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Rani Gul, Email: [email protected] .

Gulab Khilji, Email: moc.liamtoh@ijlihk_balug .

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Going back to school during the covid-19. - voices of children, children tell about their feelings and challenges they face.

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Starting a new school year is always full of emotions and especially during a pandemic.

Part of the schools in Georgia started teaching at classrooms, other part continues the distance learning. But children in every city or village are looking forward to meet their friends and teachers in person.  

We asked children to tell what they feel, how their lives have changed and how they handle these challenges.

Natia Samnashvili, 10 years old.

"I am happy to return to school. Distance learning was hard, working with computer caused pain for eyes and fingers. I could understand the online lessons, but it was easier when we had face-to-face meetings with the teacher. One more thing I am happy about is to see my friends, meet new teachers. If the lessons were distance again, we won't have a chance to get introduced with teachers. We have new teachers this year." 

Andria Khocholava, 9 years old.

"Don’t remind me about online lessons. Going to school is cool. There are many changes though: you can’t hug the teachers, they always wear masks, hugging friends is not allowed either, but we violate this rule sometimes. Breaks are shortened and we have to wash our hands many times. Also, you are not allowed to lend something to others. I am carrying water in the bottle as the water dispensers are turned off. Still, it’s good to go to school. We are repeating the materials from the previous year and I understand everything better in class than on the online lesson. We have a new game called “Coronobana” – it’s like a game of catch." 

Teona Jghiradze, 13 years old.

"I didn’t have a personal computer and was attending online lessons from a mobile phone. We had to either write the homework in the workbook and then send the photo of it or type it on the keyboard.  Sometimes there were technical problems with the internet or electricity and we were missing the lessons, now we will cover those materials too. I am happy to return to school, it was boring at home and also I missed my friends and I am happy to see them."

Lasha Devlarishvili, 11 years old.

"Yes, I am happy to return to school. It was boring at home. I was playing or reading books. In school, there will be more positivity and better learning process". 

Elene Melikadze, 12 years old.

"Online classes were interesting at the beginning, but now I think going to school is better. We could only see the face of the teacher at online lessons, eyes were getting tired and you miss the human interaction. But it was good that the exams were cancelled.

Now I am back to school. My friends got taller in this period. I am happy to return to school because I can see the people and talk to them. I am having fun on breaks, but we all remember that we must be careful. We have to avoid getting the virus or transfer it. Yes, we have lots of homework, but I don't complain. I like school and I am happy. If the online lessons are back, I don't know what will I do. I think I will start drawing instead of studying."

Data Sulaberidze, 10 years old.

"I am happy to return to school because I really missed my friends and teachers. I love school and I think that interaction with my peers is part of the education process." 

Nino Khvichia, 10 years old.

"I am very happy to go back to school. I was very nervous on the first day about the mandatory distance, and I was looking forward to hug everyone, I missed everyone so much. I am getting up early in the mornings not to be late and get to school early. Sometimes I was forgetting about the lessons when we were on distance learning and could not join the classes, could not interact with children normally and sometimes I was shy to ask questions. I love the lessons held in school, they are more interesting and joyful." 

Giorgi Alavidze, 6 years old.

"School is good. Very good. It is fun there. There are many friends of mine from kindergarten. We have two new students too and I made friends with one of them. From lessons, I like Georgian more than math, teachers read books and it is like a literature club. I like drawing club too. I want the breaks to be longer to have more time for playing with friends. I want to go to school by school-bus and make friends with more people. Teachers were masks and gloves at school. I know if anyone catches the virus in school, it will be closed again."

Aleksandre Alasania, 7 years old.

"I was happy to return to school. It was different though, our class was split into half. We wore masks and maintain the distance, and we could not play and "go crazy".

When we turned back to distance learning, I was very upset. I am not able to communicate with friends and miss them. The software is always laggy during the lessons, I can't hear the voice well. When everyone starts to talk together, I am getting tired and turning off the software. We again have to sit at home to avoid getting infected by "Conora" (he calls Coronavirus like that)." 

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What do we know about covid-19’s effects on the brain?

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• Katharine Lang , freelance journalist
• lang.kathj26{at}gmail.com

Katharine Lang investigates how SARS-CoV-2 infection can affect the brain, how it might have these effects, and what can be done to minimise the risk

What are the neurological symptoms of covid-19?

Covid may be primarily a respiratory infection, but a common symptom is “brain fog”—problems with memory or concentration—which can persist for weeks or months as part of long covid. 1 And it’s not the only neurological effect.

Giovanni Schifitto, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical School in New York, explains that neurological symptoms are widespread. “In the acute phase, common things like lack of smell, changes in taste, increase in headaches, cognitive dysfunction, and strokes have been reported, and there are effects on the peripheral nervous system,” he says.

Although these complications are more likely in people with severe covid—a 2021 study found that 80% of people admitted to hospital with covid-19 experienced neurological symptoms 2 —they can also affect people who experience only mild covid symptoms. 3 These neurological symptoms were also found to be more likely in people who were older, male, or white and in people with pre-existing neurological disorders.

The most common neurological symptoms are loss of smell (anosmia) and loss of taste (ageusia). Studies have suggested that during a bout of covid as many as 68% of people experience loss of smell and 44% lose their sense of taste. 4 5 But no evidence suggests that these effects are due to the virus entering the brain.

Other studies have reported a range of neurological symptoms alongside general fatigue. These symptoms are much like those experienced after a “mild traumatic brain injury” (as defined in one study 6 ) or from concussion—including dizziness, headaches, seizures, stroke, delirium, and balance disturbances.

The UK Covid and Cognition study (Covcog, from the University of Cambridge) reported cognitive dysfunction in some 70% of people with signs of long covid (or “post-covid condition,” 7 although it’s worth noting that there are no agreed international diagnostic criteria for long covid), and brain fog and difficulty concentrating were found to be more common than lasting respiratory symptoms. 8 The Covcog study found that the severity of lasting symptoms was related to the severity of symptoms during acute covid.

Data from the UK Coronavirus (Covid-19) Infection Survey from March 2023 9 showed that difficulty concentrating was the second most common symptom in long covid (after fatigue) and was experienced by 51% of respondents. More recently, a community based study used online assessments to evaluate cognitive impairment after covid infection. 10 Participants who had been infected showed measurable long term cognitive deficits not evident in the no-covid group.

What causes these symptoms? Is it the virus entering the brain?

This is a complex issue and the subject of much debate. In vitro studies have found that the virus disrupts the blood-brain barrier, although this was seen only with the original wild-type SARS-CoV-2 and omicron variants. 11 This research also found that the virus may affect the function of cells in the central nervous system.

Because loss of smell is a common symptom, some researchers have suggested that the virus may enter the brain through the olfactory system. Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds, notes that the UK Biobank study 12 recorded “reduced grey matter thickness—comprised of the main cellular ‘bodies’ of neurons, rather than their tendril-like projections—in parts of the brain linked with olfactory sensing, namely the limbic system and primary olfactory cortex,” which could be evidence for this route of entry.

However, there’s little other evidence that the virus enters cells in the brain. Schifitto says, “There’s been one report suggesting the virus gets into astrocytes 13 ; others have not really found the virus in specific cells.”

But he adds, “The virus can cause damage without infecting cells. If it’s activating other cells in the brain that cause inflammation, you don’t need the virus to be there to cause problems. The amount of cytokines in the blood could activate, for example, microglia, a classical cell type involved in chronic neuroinflammation.”

Does inflammation play a role?

The consensus is that inflammation, rather than invasion by the virus, is highly likely to be responsible for the neurological symptoms seen in both acute and long covid. One 2023 study found raised levels of brain injury markers and inflammatory mediators during the acute phase of covid. 14

Daniel Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, says, “Many ideas have been put forward, but just as there can be immunopathology in any other organ—for example, through excessive inflammatory cytokines—so it is for the brain.”

He cites a 2022 study in mice and people 15 that showed lasting post-covid cytokine activity, particularly CCL11 (eotaxin 1) in the central nervous system. CCL11 is known to play a role both in allergic conditions and in brain disorders. 16 Studies in mice revealed that, as well as elevated cytokines/chemokines in the cerebrospinal fluid, the myelin on nerve cells was damaged, which could be one explanation for cognitive issues. Little evidence suggests that demyelination has been seen in people after covid.

Another study, published in October 2023, has proposed an alternative theory: that peripheral serotonin reduction after covid impedes the vagus nerve—impairing the responses of the hippocampus, which is involved in learning, memory, and emotion. 17

What about microbleeds and strokes associated with covid-19?

Many people have reported microbleeds and strokes after infection. Schifitto says that the virus often infects endothelial cells anywhere in the body, including those in the brain vessels. He explains, “It’s not surprising, if something is affecting the endothelial cells, that this may predispose people to small strokes, large strokes, or dysregulation of the blood-brain barrier, which then could predispose to additional inflammation coming from the bloodstream into the brain.”

Altmann says, “There is massive evidence for this. Many mechanisms have been demonstrated for endothelial, prothrombotic effects of the virus, so the effect is fairly easily rationalised.”

What’s the effect of covid-19 on dementia?

Schifitto expresses concern that covid may lead to an increase in dementias, telling The BMJ that dementias are “almost always a mix with vascular disease included—so if SARS-CoV-2 has had an impact on the microcirculation, we may see an increase in vascular disease in the brain, which may contribute to earlier or more aggressive dementia. That’s a concern, but there’s no evidence so far.”

Benedict Michael, professor of neuroscience at the University of Liverpool, says that this risk may well not apply to the whole population but could potentially increase the likelihood of dementia in people already at increased risk of neurodegenerative disease.

Schifitto adds, “Most dementias do not progress rapidly, so it would be unlikely that we’d see a surge within a few years.” He’s currently investigating neuroimaging biomarkers to see if these might give early warning of small vessel disease or microcirculation problems in people who have had covid.

Can vaccination help reduce the neurological effects of covid-19?

The only way to avoid neurological symptoms during and after infection is to avoid catching covid in the first place, says Altmann. But vaccination could also reduce the risk.

Griffin points to preclinical studies 18 indicating that vaccination can prevent SARS-CoV-2 from damaging the brain in some experimental models. He adds, “Plus, we know that vaccination is one of the few things that reduce the risk of long covid.”

Griffin warns that the long term consequences of covid aren’t being considered enough when planning vaccination and other prevention strategies in the UK—“which would seem most unwise given the accumulating evidence of long term harm in neurological and indeed other tissues.”

Competing interests: None declared.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; peer reviewed.

This article is made freely available for personal use in accordance with BMJ's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic or until otherwise determined by BMJ. You may download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained.

• McCorkell L ,
• GCS-NeuroCOVID Consortium and ENERGY Consortium
• Fastenberg JH ,
• Granholm AC
• ↵ World Health Organization. Post-covid 19 condition (long covid). 7 Dec 2022. https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/post-covid-19-condition
• Benito Ballesteros A ,
• ↵ Office for National Statistics. Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (covid-19) infection in the UK: 30 March 2023. 30 Mar 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/30march2023
• Hampshire A ,
• Atchison C ,
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• Alfaro-Almagro F ,
• Michael BD ,
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• ISARIC4C Investigators ,
• COVID-CNS Consortium
• Fernández-Castañeda A ,
• Geraghty AC ,
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• Murdjeva M ,
• Devason AS ,
• Villadiego J ,
• García-Arriaza J ,
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Families of Uvalde School Shooting Victims Are Suing Texas State Police Over Botched Response

The families of 19 of the victims in the Uvalde elementary school shooting in Texas have filed a $500 million federal lawsuit against 92 state police officers who were part of the botched law enforcement response

Javier Cazares, center, stands with families of the victims in the Uvalde elementary school shooting during a news conference, Wednesday, May 22, 2024, in Uvalde, Texas. The families of 19 of the victims announced a lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who were part of the botched law enforcement response. The families say they also agreed a $2 million settlement with the city, under which city leaders promised higher standards and better training for local police. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The families of 19 of the victims in the Uvalde elementary school shooting in Texas on Wednesday filed a $500 million federal lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who were part of the botched law enforcement response to one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

The families said they also agreed to a $2 million settlement with the city, under which city leaders promised higher standards and better training for local police.

The lawsuit and settlement announcement in Uvalde came two days before the two-year anniversary of the massacre. Nineteen fourth-graders and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022, when a teenage gunman burst into their classroom at Robb Elementary School and began shooting.

The lawsuit, seeking at least $500 million in damages, is the latest of several seeking accountability for the law enforcement response. More than 370 federal, state and local officers converged on the scene, but they waited more than 70 minutes before confronting the shooter.

It is the first lawsuit to be filed after a 600-page Justice Department report was released in January that catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems that day.

The lawsuit notes that state troopers did not follow their active shooter training or confront the shooter, even as the students and teachers inside were following their own lockdown protocols of turning off lights, locking doors and staying silent.

“The protocols trap teachers and students inside, leaving them fully reliant on law enforcement to respond quickly and effectively,” the families and their attorneys said in a statement.

Terrified students inside the classroom called 911 as agonized parents begged officers — some of whom could hear shots being fired while they stood in a hallway — to go in. A tactical team of officers eventually went into the classroom and killed the shooter.

“Law enforcement’s inaction that day was a complete and absolute betrayal of these families and the sons, daughters and mothers they lost,” said Erin Rogiers, one of the attorneys for the families. “TXDPS had the resources, training and firepower to respond appropriately, and they ignored all of it and failed on every level. These families have not only the right but also the responsibility to demand justice.”

A criminal investigation into the police response by Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell’s office is ongoing. A grand jury was summoned this year, and some law enforcement officials have already been called to testify.

The latest lawsuit against 92 Texas Department of Public Safety officials and troopers also names the Uvalde School District, former Robb Elementary Principal Mandy Gutierrez and former Uvalde schools police Chief Peter Arredondo as defendants. The state police response was second only to U.S. Border Patrol, which had nearly 150 agents respond.

The list of DPS officials named as defendants includes two troopers who were fired, another who left the agency and several more whom the agency said it investigated. The highest ranking DPS official among the defendants is South Texas Regional Director Victor Escalon.

The Texas DPS told The Associated Press that the agency would not comment on pending litigation.

The plaintiffs are the families of 17 children killed and two more who were wounded. A separate lawsuit filed by different plaintiffs in December 2022 against local and state police, the city, and other school and law enforcement, seeks at least $27 billion and class-action status for survivors. And at least two other lawsuits have been filed against Georgia-based gun manufacturer Daniel Defense, which made the AR-style rifle used by the gunman.

The families said the settlement with the city was capped at $2 million because they didn’t want to bankrupt the city where they still live. The settlement will be paid from the city’s insurance coverage.

“The last thing they want to do was inflict financial hardship on their friend and neighbors in this community. Their friends and neighbors didn’t let them down,” Josh Koskoff, one of the attorneys for the families, said during a news conference in Uvalde on Wednesday.

The city of Uvalde released a statement saying the settlement would bring “healing and restoration” to the community.

“We will forever be grateful to the victims’ families for working with us over the past year to cultivate an environment of community-wide healing that honors the lives and memories of those we tragically lost. May 24th is our community’s greatest tragedy,” the city said.

But Javier Cazares, the father of slain 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, noted that the announcement — which was made in the same Uvalde Civic Center where the families gathered to be told their children were dead or wounded — was sparsely attended.

“On the way over here, I saw the sticker, which I see everywhere, ‘Uvalde Strong.’ If that was the case, this room should be filled, and then some. Show your support. It's been an unbearable two years. ... No amount of money is worth the lives of our children. Justice and accountability has always been my main concern.”

Under the settlement, the city agreed to a new “fitness for duty” standard and enhanced training for Uvalde police officers. It also establishes May 24 as an annual day of remembrance, a permanent memorial in the city plaza, and support for mental health services for the families and the greater Uvalde area.

The police response to the mass shooting has been criticized and scrutinized by state and federal authorities. A 600-page Justice Department report in January catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems that day,

Another report commissioned by the city also noted rippling missteps by law enforcement but defended the actions of local police, which sparked anger from victims’ families.

“For two long years, we have languished in pain and without any accountability from the law enforcement agencies and officers who allowed our families to be destroyed that day,” Veronica Luevanos, whose daughter Jailah and nephew Jayce were killed, said Wednesday. “This settlement reflects a first good faith effort, particularly by the City of Uvalde, to begin rebuilding trust in the systems that failed to protect us.”

Copyright 2024 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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