Will Brehm  1:34
David Edwards, welcome back to FreshEd.

David Edwards  1:35
Pleasure, Will.

Will Brehm  1:36
So, the WHO declared COVID a pandemic on March 11, 2020. So, we’re basically just past the two-year mark, and I want to reflect on those past two years with you. Just to start, where were you when you realized that COVID was actually going to have a massive effect on education?

David Edwards  1:54
I was in Malaysia on March 4, and I was flying back. And everybody on the flight was wearing masks. And I thought to myself, this felt a lot like Liberia with Ebola. It just sort of felt like the Avian flu, but it felt a little bit different. Then I was in your city. I was in London, actually, at a meeting of the general secretaries of the Global Union Federation when Boris gave his big speech about well, a lot of people are going to die and sort of all of us decided we needed to get back to our offices who basically closed things down. And I was on one of the last trains out of Pancras. I think we were two people on the train -on the Eurostar- to Brussels. And it was very eerie because I’ve never been in the Pancras station, you know, in the waiting area alone when it wasn’t packed with people. And I thought, this feels eerie. The doctor from Wuhan, who is the whistleblower, I was thinking a lot about academic freedom and the need for academic freedom for scientists, at the time had just passed away, you know. I got to the offices, basically was able to come into the studio, make a recording, send an email to everyone and said, all the things that we’ve been doing online and virtual will be how we’ll have to go from here on, and then I held an emergency Executive Board meeting on the 12th and basically shared as much information as I could. At that time, I had a tie into the World Health Organization. I hadn’t become an advisor to the COVID In Schools Task Force at that point, but I had a connection in with Dr. Tedros. He had been participating in World Teachers Day and things like that.

Will Brehm  3:16
How soon did the WHO start thinking about schooling and schools?

David Edwards  3:20
I think probably the first meeting was around the 20th of March, the 21st of March, when UNICEF and UNESCO -in between there, though, we did a lot of research and surveys of our members quickly just to see how they were doing and what they needed. And I commissioned some research on pedagogy during a pandemic to try to kind of crowdsource, what do we know about platforms? What are the different ways if you don’t have any type of connectivity, which is the case for most of our members, right? Or in countries that didn’t have a virtual option, what can be done with WhatsApp? What could be done with radio? So, we started collating and bringing all of that experience together. And there was this big focus on students. At that time, they weren’t saying outwardly that it was airborne. They knew it was airborne but they weren’t saying it. Trump knew it was airborne but they weren’t saying it openly. There were no masks allowed, remember, and we were wiping surfaces and things like that. And they were talking about washing hands. And we just basically did a quick fast survey of our members to find that many classrooms were not going to be able to socially distance at all. They had 80 kids in a classroom in some parts of Uganda and they had no potable water. There was no running water, so they weren’t going to be able to wash their hands. So, you went from kids in Norway that actually had their hands chaffing from repeated washing. And then you had kids in Uganda who had nothing.

Will Brehm  4:33
It’s quite amazing the sort of inequalities that sort of appeared because of COVID inside schools. I remember UNESCO very quickly set up their website to start tracking out of school children, and I think the height of it got to 1.4 billion children out of school. I mean, that is, it’s still unbelievable to think that that happened.

David Edwards  4:56
Yeah. And it was the private schools that closed first. And so, you also had all the public schools receiving all these extra kids, which was also quite -and then the Bank put out a sort of an analysis, obviously looking at it from an economic lens in terms of foregone wages, what the impact was going to be on reading. But there was this eerie comment in there about probably, there’s going to be a lot of teachers that are going to pass away as a result of the pandemics. So, we’ll have to be ready to replace them.

Will Brehm  5:20
And has that happened?

David Edwards  5:22
We’ve lost a lot of teachers in the pandemic. We don’t have a total tally. We held an event on World Teachers Day, a memorial event. We created a wall where teachers organizations, unions around the world uploaded pictures and testimonies of the teachers who died. But I mean, you had, I think, close to 10,000 in South Africa. More than that in Brazil. Actually, there’s some of the videos, its on our website from there. It was called Present, it was the name of the memorial. But then you had countries like New Zealand that didn’t lose anyone, right? And so you had the US lost 1,000s. And, you know, the AFT and the NEA had their own walls up. You know people were scared. And I think one of the things I’m going to say too, about both the WHO -well, there was the WHO that was really talking about children and the impact on children. And whether or not children would get very sick. And there was a Lancet study that came out pretty early, I guess it would have been about May, that showed that if you compare it, if you looked at school populations, you know, there were really only about 5% to 10% of the school populations that were seeming to be high risk in terms of transmission and getting sick. So, kids in general should be okay, was what they were saying. What they weren’t saying was that 5% and 10% were adults. They were the teachers and the support staff and the administrative staff. In many countries like Portugal, the majority, over 50% of teachers are 60 and over. So, you have some countries with really an older teaching population. You had this sort of focus on kids, you had the sort of economic focus, and we were quite concerned that no one was really thinking about both in terms of the well-being of teachers, the pedagogical support for teachers, teachers voice. We did the survey and then we did our Forward to School Report, which we thought talked about how to ensure teachers participation in the plans going forward.

Will Brehm  7:02
One of the things that always shocked me was how certain people were when talking about COVID. And I think it still happens. So, taking the issue of wash your hands, and that’ll protect you and not necessarily thinking about it in terms of being airborne. Or this notion that children are safe in schools. But at that point, no one -or maybe some people were but there was very little dialogue about long term impacts on children or just on anyone when it came to having COVID, long COVID, as we sort of talk about now. To me, there was a bit of disappointment in how humanity responded because there was so much certainty and yet we knew so little. For me, it was a big indictment on, I guess, education generally, right? Like the way in which our educated societies function, and I don’t know, maybe it’s confidence, I don’t know how to talk about it. But there’s something that was just really unsettling to me.

David Edwards  7:57
What we saw was the societies that had high levels of trust, you know, trust in institutions, trust in governments, trust in teachers, trust in science. You know, this was happening -remember who was president of the United States at the time, right. So, I mean, there was authoritarian populist’s all over the world that had their own fake news. But the societies that had trust already built in, had dialogue already institutionalized, those were the ones that throughout the pandemic fared the best, you know? And those who trusted their teachers, trusted their health experts, as the science changed, it didn’t mean you needed to have another entirely different sort of messaging campaign to shift people. It’s just the science change. Well, we have more information. So, now we have to do this. That’s not consistent with this. Well, we didn’t know that then. And now we know it now. So, that has to change. And we’ve sort of watched this arch ourselves, where, if you remember the beginning, the applause for teachers, and the appreciation of teachers and different comedians and people were doing videos about how teachers should make a million dollars and everybody’s testimony as to how hard it was. And there was all this gratitude. And we were thinking, is that going to translate into meaningful sort of policy changes and investment around status? And the answer to that question. I think, in general, the feeling is it didn’t.

Will Brehm  9:17
You know, and that’s what’s so frustrating, is that there were all of these moments of possible different futures. The one thing I remember seeing, as early as March and April of 2020, was in London, some of the communities where I sort of lived and was sort of active, there were all of these mutual aid societies popping up. And it was just sort of, wow, there is a totally different way of organizing society. And then, you know, by the summer those mutual aid societies were basically gone. And in a way, it’s a similar story of there’s this hopeful moment of the narrative changing, teachers being celebrated, paying them a million dollars and then sort of fading out to the background and going back to normal so to speak.

David Edwards  9:58
I say this wherever I get a chance to say it but I think one of our challenges as EI, one of the things we want to really make sure is that the lessons that were learned during the pandemic are then incorporated to inform the decisions moving forward in terms of what post-pandemic education recovery plans look like. As you know, and we’ve talked about on this show before, I’m somewhat wary of opportunistic edtech companies who promise the moon and under deliver effectively. And I remember at one such sort of edtech show prior to the pandemic, there was an edupreneur talking about, to ministers of education, a future. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, hypothetically, a world where we no longer need brick and mortar school, a world where we don’t need teachers to take up 80% of recurrent expenditure. It could be fantastic with technology, kids wouldn’t even need to leave their bedroom, parents could just support them, and the kids naturally want to be on tech. And we can just sort of reimagine education as being in your bedroom. And I always say, Well, now that it’s no longer a hypothetical, I think I tried to make those who proposed it. Oh, what a bad idea that was, and sort of the broader purpose of education and the purpose of school, the human interaction, the social. I think that’s one of the lessons. We all felt hope that the fads and what was behind the fads, those are now exposed and that there’s some more humility. There’s still probably not going to be a whole lot of humility but a bit more humility.

Will Brehm  11:21
How do we go, or you, you know, EI in particular, how do you go about trying to incorporate some of the lessons that we learned from the past two years into policy changes, into meaningful changes that will actually change the way in which we think about an organized schooling and education in the future? And I should say that the pandemic is still obviously going on, it’s not over. But how do you go about it? How do you actually go about incorporating these changes?

David Edwards  11:49
We start by documenting and sharing the stories and the cases and demonstrating the difference of success and utter complete failure. We’ve partnered with colleagues that our organization wouldn’t normally have partnered with because they sort of came around to see things our way. I think one of the things that is unmistakable is that if you don’t have coherent policy that’s informed by continuous dialogue with the practitioners in the classrooms, and you don’t have the trust of the practitioners to make meaningful pedagogical choices versus following a script, or you know, the people that actually know their kids know who’s not showing up, know who’s hungry, know who might now be a child bride, or in child labor. If you don’t make the investments to support them in terms of the tools that they need, the training and support that they need, and the respect that they need, then what you end up with is sort of a scattershot approach, where those with means are able to game a system to get more, as we saw, a lot of people made a lot of profits on the pandemic. And a lot of people fell really not just far behind, they disappeared. And when I say policy coherent, everyone talks about leadership, and you just need these sorts of strong, fearless leaders and whatever. But think about this: in one school, I talked to some teachers in a certain country, I won’t say which, but the school leadership was so scared of parents, and so scared of the politics, they didn’t want to have to say whether or not school would be held presentially, hybrid, or virtually. So, they said they let the parents choose whether they wanted to send their kids to school part time or have a laptop with their kids picked in the school -these are countries that had the connectivity, availability- or keep their kids at home. And so, what that meant for a teacher in terms of organizing the learning and the teaching, I can’t tell you how disruptive that would be to try to plan, having three different jobs. And then in the evenings, also, parents who are contacting constantly, and you’re trying to follow up with the parents. And then of course, heaven forbid we mention it, teachers tend to be parents themselves. And so, there was this sort of lack of policy coherence and information. And teachers were telling us, they were finding out in the newspaper the morning, whether or not they were going in or not, and that if they had COVID what the regulations were in terms of whether there was going to be anyone with their kids, supporting their kids. So, there wasn’t enough support teachers or substitute teachers. And by not having that dialogue. Now, you had the other countries where the minister met with the head of the teachers, our affiliate, every week. They look together at the data, they looked at what teachers would need in terms of technology and supports and make sure that the social supports and the health supports and nutritional supports in the community school approach. And they didn’t have the same problems with burnout. They still had burned but they didn’t have it nearly to the extent of these teachers who feel like they’re just cogs in the machine. They’re just the last to know but actually have to bear the brunt of all the weight and all the stress and all the tension to actually make something happen meaningfully. So, that’s something that has to change. The professional autonomy, the trust in the profession, investment and looking against the sort of high stakes scripted curricula, what we used to call the teacher proof curriculum. I really think that the teacher proof curriculum needs to go.

Will Brehm  12:33
You need to center the teacher and empower them. And, you know, it does make me think with the policy coherence, things were changing so quickly. So, for instance, I’m thinking about what the rules were for testing, and if you tested positive and what you were supposed to do, and it’s like, those rules kept changing. And as a teacher, myself, in higher education, it almost just got to the point where it felt like the team that I was working with, we had to make decisions that sort of put public health first but also still was able to figure out how to provide the education that we were tasked to do. But it really felt like we were on our own. And I’m sure all of these other groups of teachers in higher education in the UK made different decisions than we did, right? There really was no support even if there was this guidance that was coming out. It almost was written in a way that was quite meaningless.

David Edwards  16:06
In the UK, you know, I know that for the NEU and others, they had their first information session. Mary Bousted told me something like 300,000 people showed up online for the first information session that they did because they weren’t getting anything from NASUWT. And so, they were really desperate to say, but what does this mean? What are our rights, you know? In Argentina, they had the first ever pandemic collective agreement, which had the right to disconnect, which actually talked about the time, which talked about what the state’s obligations were, not just the teachers’ responsibilities and get that down. So, if you had to teach all nights, what did that mean in terms of your own leave, your own health?

Will Brehm  16:46
Yeah. I mean, even just like, going back to very classic labor struggles over the working day. Like how many hours in a day are you supposed to work? And when is that supposed to happen? was just sort of thrown out the door during COVID? It still is, in many ways. They just expect you to work at all hours.

David Edwards  17:03
Yeah. There’s this sort of expectations that it’s a vocation and it’s a calling. You know, there’s people who still see education as charity, right? They don’t believe it’s a right, they don’t believe it’s a public good, as a public service. Likely they really see it as charity, and the teachers should just do what they need to do. And at the same time, there was this sort of push to try to say, oh, well, teachers unions are going to try to do whatever they can to keep schools closed which actually wasn’t the case. They just wanted to make sure they had information, whatever the regulations were, that the government said, were actually in place. And in the middle of a pandemic, that became quite an issue.

Will Brehm  17:47
Yeah. When do you open? How do you open? What’s safe? Who’s deciding what’s safe? How do we take care of all the different needs of the teachers and the students and the support staff? I mean, it’s so complex when it comes to public health. But yet, I guess what also frustrated me was that a lot of the public health was analyzed through economic analysis and economic thinking. You know, it wasn’t just simply what is the right thing to do for public health? It was, let’s compare all of these alternatives and pick the most cost-effective approach. And it was a bit disheartening when I think back on it now.

David Edwards  18:23
Yeah, I know. that was absolutely -and I think for many, especially, once the vaccines were on the table and the conversation around prioritization for the vaccines. We wanted teachers to go back, but there were some countries where they didn’t want to prioritize them for the vaccines. There’s Michael Mina at Harvard, who had a lot of really important work. I was working with him, Annie Sparrow, and some others that really early on, were talking about the importance of the rapid tests but because they weren’t at the high level of efficacy as the PCRs, WHO and others didn’t want to even discuss them. The fact that they could be produced for 1/100th of the cost. We were thinking about how could you make them more widely available? So, if you just had testing happening in school, and teachers, and students. They piloted places but again they were saying the costs were just too high for that. And then all of a sudden, they weren’t. And then they were everywhere, you know?

Will Brehm  19:18
Yeah. I mean, it really does sort of just shadow the whole notion of what government can pay for, right? I mean, at certain points, it’s just with the government, there can be money to do things in particular in some countries. Yeah. It’s just sort of shattered that myth that there’s some limited amount of money. I want to ask your opinion on this notion of learning loss because that’s an idea that sort of came out early and has really gained a lot of steam. And it’s almost now quite common to hear it, that there’s an amount of learning loss that has happened in different societies and that we need to provide more tutoring or do new things to sort of overcome this learning loss. How do you think about this notion? Is this something that we should really be prioritizing?

David Edwards  20:04
I kind of think about learning loss the way I think about learning poverty. So, learning poverty is poverty. It’s just poverty. There’s no food poverty, there’s hunger, right? And so, learning loss, it’s just poverty and inequalities that we’ve always dealt with, right? They’re just being exacerbated for people with more means we’re now seeing it more. So, to preface it, I’ll just say teachers have always been about learning. Teaching and learning has always been something we cared very much about. Literacy wasn’t something that a bunch of donors created. You know, the literacy campaigns of the 70’s and 80’s that we were a part of, we’ve always talked about people’s access to materials, to books, to reading, to teacher training possibilities. So, it’s not like teachers just show up for some random reason to get a fabulous paycheck that they get. So, we’ve always been concerned about the fact that when students are absent, and when they don’t have the support, when you don’t have a quality environment and the tools, that they’re getting short-changed if they’re in a classroom with 80 kids, they’re getting shortchanged. So, we’ve always talked about these inequalities in terms of education and learning. And we, I guess, during the pandemic, that mental health of students was so negatively impacted. Depression that our members were talking about, the emotional burnout from empathizing with our students and what they were going through and how that was impacting teachers. Where, certainly, you’re trying to teach as best you can with every way you can. But you also are much more cognizant of the well-being aspects of all these other multidimensional aspects of education and learning.

So, to have sort of a bumper sticker about the learning loss was useful for those that were always talking about learning poverty, and the learning crisis which gins up a bunch of donor dollars, and impact assessments and rate of return computations and things like that. We were looking at the educational loss. So, we were looking at the much more broad, I think, in terms of just the reading and math. But our teachers were really concerned about the fact that they hadn’t seen some of their students for years, for eight months, the students that came back after. In Uganda, they just came back recently, a couple months ago, right? So, I mean, there were students that were not receiving any kind of education in that period. And the plans that you have, and the way in which education plans build off of each other, right. And so whether you have a looping kind of process, or whatever your scaffolding is, it’s really, really difficult. But it isn’t like not no learning was happening the same time. I think Pasi Sahlberg and others were talking about the fact of what students were learning about the pandemic and about public health, and about the importance of schools and each other, and all sorts of other things that we weren’t tracking because they’re not easily measured. And that is the big failure of our whole movement, right? We only measure where the streetlight is under the streetlight and leave the rest of the avenue as less important.

Will Brehm  23:33
It’s been two years, the pandemic isn’t going away. There’s going to be new variants, it’s going to continue to impact schools in different ways, and students and teachers in different ways around the world. For the foreseeable future, I have no clue how this really ends, what lessons would you draw? The big lessons from the past two years that you would like to see us keep a focus on and in mind as we move forward into the third year of the pandemic?

David Edwards  23:59
Well, I mentioned some of them already. The community school lesson: The lesson of the school is the heart and hub of a community for public services and the public school. I think, is just -if we don’t learn that one, and if we don’t then sort of backward map from there saying, okay, what are the resources that they actually need? Not what are we willing to give them? What are the actual resourcing that it’s actually going to take? The underinvestment in education has been laid bare for a long time but never so much as right now. So, I think really talking differently about how you work across sectors, how you think sort of about the cross section of health and nutrition and education and support systems in a school. Figuring out the other institutions that could work together to sort of support that school versus a model where you have this top down directives that kind of go out. So, I think the community participation, community involvement but with real investment coming from the center. The tax base is absolutely essential. I think we don’t treat our teachers very well. And I think that was something that’s really hard to swallow. And that we need more than thanks for teachers around the world. And stagnant wages, really incredibly difficult conditions, that you can’t separate out the sort of the teaching part and the pedagogy from the conditions and the structures in which enable that. That’s a false choice. Those are two inextricably linked things that have to be done in concert because we’re losing teachers, quite frankly. Teachers are leaving the profession, younger teachers. Young people are less likely to want to come into the profession right now. And I think we need to have a real rethink, as a society, as societies, about the valuing of teachers and their rights but also talking about their salaries, talking about their working conditions, talking about their voice, talking about their research, and their expertise, and their knowledge in a very fundamentally different way is another piece.

I think infrastructure is the other one. Anyone who’s following this ventilation. We’re going to be for a long time thinking about ventilation in different ways. We’re talking about the climate crisis, we’re talking about increased temperatures, we’re talking about overcrowded schools that are at a distance that for some rural children to get to, we’re going to need to be able to build more schools. We’re going to need to be able to hire more teachers. But we’re going to really think about help, promoting schools and help, promoting infrastructure decisions that I think. And having teachers themselves at the table in the design and definition of what that looks like is going to be really, really important going forward. I think in the end, it’s sort of like the experts just need to kind of take a back seat. I really think -no offense to my friends in Washington and London and all the other think tank centers that are tracking and telling ministries and everybody else what needs to happen. But I think they just need to take a backseat right now because a lot of their predictions and a lot of their advice actually didn’t lead to substantially more learning or access or safety and the micro innovations, the collaboration happened at the school level did. So, I think we need to shift. We need to shift the power away from the talking heads and the experts and really ask communities what they need. And I think that power shift has to happen as a result.

Will Brehm  27:53
David Edwards, thank you so much for joining FreshEd again. It’s always a pleasure to talk and I totally agree. The experts need to just step aside.

David Edwards  28:01
Thank you, Will. It’s a pleasure to be with you as always.

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Mentioned Resources

UNESCO Global School Closures due to COVID-19 

EI Teacher Memorial Wall

EducationWeek: Educators We’ve Lost to the Coronavirus

Estimates of the Population at Increased Risk of Severe COVID-19 in 2020

Forward to School Report

Sustaining Mutual Aid Groups During and Beyond the Pandemic

Michael Mina on COVID

Annemarie Sparrow

Learning poverty

Pasi Sahlberg – Trust, Flexibility & Learning during COVID-19 in Finland 

Recommended Resources

COVID-19 and Global Teacher Education

How Learning Continued During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era

How COVID-19 has Shaped the Teacher Workforce

Teachers’ Voices on the Impact of COVID-19 on School Education

Teacher Education and “Climate Change”: Navigating Multiple Pandemics

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com