Children learning remotely often have to rely on parents or a sibling for help.

The pandemic has caused the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting more than one billion learners in more than 190 countries, according to a 2020 United Nations report, Policy Brief: Education During COVID-19 and Beyond. Closures of schools and other learning spaces have had an impact on 94 percent of the world’s student population; for low and lower-middle income countries, the impact has been up to 99 percent. As a result, problems and inequities that were fissures before the pandemic have blown wide open, forcing students, their families, and educators to confront a greater range of challenges simultaneously, among them widening socio-economic gaps, the digital divide, food and housing insecurities, domestic abuse, and, in some countries, access to education for girls.

HBS faculty members Joseph Fuller and Debora Spar, and alumni John Alford (MBA 2001), Stacey Childress (MBA 2000), and Ashish Dhawan (MBA 1997) have identified important ways business leaders can use their insights and resources to help solve these problems. Key among the inequities, they all agree, is the digital divide brought to light by the rapid transformation of the classroom experience from in-person to remote learning.

The pandemic has been a disaster for education overall and has exacerbated inequity as well. Unlike in the United States and Europe, all public and private schools in India have been completely shut for in-person classes since mid-March 2020, with the exception of 10th and 12th grades, which reopened in January for students preparing for board (school leaving) exams. There are 250 million K–12 students and 10 million teachers who have been affected by school closures in India, in addition to 35 million students in higher education. We have the largest school system in the world, one that’s complex and was already underperforming, especially on learning dimensions.

See more from the online-only March Alumni Bulletin Impact section’s exploration of how business and school leaders are addressing inequities in education.

BRIDGING THE GAP

See more from the online-only March Alumni Bulletin Impact section’s exploration of how business and school leaders are addressing inequities in education.

BRIDGING THE GAP

The learning inequity starts early and then gets magnified later as children progress. It centers around our inability to ensure that all children attain foundational literacy and numeracy skills. In simple words, if a child at age 10 can’t read and do basic math, they get left behind and can’t independently access the texts. The critical juncture is in third grade, when a child switches from learning to read, to reading to learn. By some reports, more than half of kids are getting left behind. A government mission on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) has been launched to address this.

I think the government has a role to play in terms of creating the right enabling conditions and making the budgets available. Then, beyond that, the private sector can play a really important role. There are a number of companies in India where there’s a mandate to set aside 2 percent of profits for corporate social responsibility. About $2 billion annually is set aside, and 40 percent of that goes to education—about $800 million. Business people are also allocating a lot of private philanthropy money.

The funding mechanisms for K–12 education create “have and have not” communities in terms of spending. When you get really gross spending disparities per capita for students, that shows up in everything from extracurriculars, to the depth of a curriculum, to the salaries paid to teachers. And those disparities also have a significant impact on the career readiness of many young Americans, perpetuating intergenerational income inequality.

Companies should reflect on what their role should be. There are numerous instances of local activism by companies, particularly those in the infrastructure business, addressing things like the digital divide. A good example is in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the local electric utility came together with foundations and educators to ensure digital access for all citizens. They addressed a specific issue, connectivity. They did not take the stance that, “We're going to solve all the problems in the Chattanooga K–12 system.” Companies should emulate that posture: “Let us provide you backbone financial and other needed resources, rather than tell you how to educate kids.”

In the future—especially post-COVID-19—companies should place particular focus on creating work-based learning opportunities for young people, engaging school districts and community colleges and creating apprenticeships. I'm not talking about jobs tourism, “Come on a field trip to my company.” I'm talking about compensated work to gain work experience and earn credentials. Such programs are the absolute gold standard in terms of getting young people on a pathway to prosperity.

In the United States, more than 80 percent of educators reported using ed tech at least a few days a week in 2019. But when nearly every school closed last spring, we had to face the jarring reality of low-income families’ lack of access to devices, connectivity, and learning tools outside of school. We’ve optimized digital learning tools for use inside classrooms over the last decade. There’s a long way to go to ensure that seamless, high-quality learning experiences persist whether students are in classrooms, at home, or in a community space. This includes devices and broadband, but also the quality and usability of digital learning products.

Given the systemic nature of education inequities, it’s hard to rank them. That said, here are two priorities for US business leaders to address. First, work to eliminate the broadband gap in your region and nationally. Your resources and voice can make a difference, and it’s absolutely possible to fix this. Second, high-quality individual tutoring is a concrete way to help students who have fallen further behind during COVID-19. Look for proven programs and solutions that support kids in your community and fund them generously.

In addition to access to resources, a big inequity we’re seeing revolves around childcare. In many of our lower-income neighborhoods, which is where most of our schools are, you have a lot of single-family households run by a mother who has to go to work, often at an hourly minimum-wage job. When we shifted to online, we saw that younger kids couldn’t do their schoolwork online without an adult supporting them at home. If mom is at work, younger students rely on older siblings to help them, which means that the older students are not spending time on their own schoolwork. And if they don’t have other siblings, that makes this even harder. Some sort of childcare solution is necessary.

If employers could be flexible with an employee’s scheduling, that would enable the parent to support their kids’ education, particularly when they’re young. It’s important for parents to know that if they need to help their child with their education, they won’t lose their job. That’s one example of how businesses can help during and after the pandemic.

Another area is early childhood education, which should be fully funded so that everyone gets at least a half day, ideally a full day of pre-K regardless of income. Studies show that if students entering kindergarten don’t know their letters, they’re already behind and it becomes more difficult to catch up, so this is a really good use of resources. Employers could subsidize this as a benefit for all families with young children. And we need state and federal government to do more here, but we’re a ways off from that happening.

The pandemic has thrown into high relief what we’ve known for a long time, which is that education in this country and around the world is deeply unequal, starting with preschool and going up through tertiary education. And now with the move to online, we visually see in many cases the different circumstances that people are living in. People are “going to school” from their cars in Walmart parking lots. We’ve known that intellectually, but teachers and classmates are actually seeing students on Zoom in cars.

Looking more globally, we know that as a result of the pandemic, in every major city, the inequities are now being multiplied. Wealthy kids have access to learning pods, tutors, and learning tools that poor kids don’t. The UN report (see above) pointed out that close to 24 million kids are going to lose access to school just because of the economic circumstances that the pandemic has forced their families into.

We’ve known for a while that having access to high-speed broadband is important. Now it is literally a lifeline. What the business community can do to help is provide greater access to connectivity. Just as electrification was seen as a priority for this country in the 1920s and ’30s, the new digital infrastructure has become similarly important.

At some level, there should be critical learning coming out of the past year as to how to deliver education through new channels. We have the opportunity to throw the model up into the air and let the pieces reassemble themselves in very different ways. My hope is that we take advantage of this moment to say, when we move back into “normal,” “What do we want that new normal to be?”

MORE STORIES ABOUT IMPACT:

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A For-Profit Business that Makes Education Accessible

Empowering School Leaders to Meet Today’s Challenges

Community Colleges as Engines of Opportunity

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