An article by Karine Hindrix
School closures and shifts towards (partial) distance learning were and are common practice in the context of COVID-19. The enormous impact of COVID-19 measures on primary and secondary education is well known and increasingly scientifically documented. In this blog entry, I explore the academic impact of COVID-19 on school education as well as pupils´ learning and connect these pandemic effects to the materialization of racial inequality in our contemporary economic system. Burden-Stelly´s concept about the political economy of racial capitalism offers the theoretical lens for this examination (Burden-Stelly, 2020a&b).
Research in the UK and the Netherlands show that students from advantaged, as well as disadvantaged families, experience losses of subject learning, especially in primary education because of the shift to online distance learning caused by the pandemic. In the case of the UK, these losses seem to be even stronger in secondary education (Pensiero, Kelly & Bokhove, 2020; Engzell, Frey and Verhagen, 2020).
Children of ethnic minority groups are often embedded in student groups that are particularly vulnerable to (academic) learning losses due to major changes in the organization of education such as distance learning and homeschooling because of the pandemic. Another study reports increased disparities in exposure to distance learning throughout school education, carrying the danger of furthering the racial divide in educational performance in the US (Parolin and Lee, 2020). Furthermore, Engzell, Frey and Verhagen (2020) looked into the proportion of immigrants in schools and concluded that this proportion functions as a predictor for learning losses, even when the effects are adjusted to consider covariates such as parental education, sex, and prior performance of the students. Additionally, Bayrakdar and Guveli (2020) found in their study “Inequalities in home learning and schools’ provision of distance teaching during school closure of COVID-19 lockdown in the UK” that the schools´ distance learning approach moderates disparities caused by parental and racial backgrounds. They observed that students from Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage spent less time at school work compared to other groups of pupils. Furthermore, they are overrepresented in the group of those pupils, who do not receive any distance teaching. The researchers hypothetically explain this by the schools´ limited resources and/or its situatedness in a more COVID-19 affected area as well as parents´ aspirations influencing their academic expectations and their guidance of their children's learning processes (2020).
The role of education for the strength of our economic system, especially our so-called “knowledge economy”, has been confirmed throughout the last two decades. The European Union for instance states in its “Education and Training 2020 Strategy”, which is still the reference framework for the European Union´s education policy, that “Efficient investment in human capital through education and training systems is an essential component of Europe's strategy to deliver the high levels of sustainable, knowledge-based growth and jobs that lie at the heart of the Lisbon strategy” (Council, 2009, p. C119/2).
The educational implications of COVD-19 could be considered as contributing to the reproduction of the racial hierarchy in our “knowledge economy” (Burden-Stelly, 2020b).* The pandemic pushes education out of the public sphere, conditioning it on the economic, social and cultural capital of the students family. In other cases, COVID-19 is exhausting the schools´ resources to guarantee quality in distance education. The pandemic highlights the way race structures academic disaccumulation because of a resource scarcity of certain schools´ and displacing teaching and learning to private-familial spaces often marked by discriminated access to economic and cultural capital. Consequently, the impact of COVID-19 reinforces the materialization of educational inequality among racial lines. Especially Black pupils and those with migration backgrounds are more vulnerable to the burdens of the capitalist economic crisis that accompanies this pandemic (Burden-Stelly, 2020a).
Educational research focusing on racial groups exposes educational performative disparities with their peers. On the one hand, this informs governments and communities about the urgency of public measures to mitigate the inequalities COVID-19 in this case reinforces. On the other hand, we wonder to what extent distinguishing racial groups in educational research populations carries the risk of reinforcing deeply rooted ‘regimes of representations’ (Hall, 1997, p. 232). Could it influence educational actors´ prejudices and expectations concerning the ‘Other’ (e.g. as having language problems, or being less diligent, criminal, …) and their (lack of) success in our education system? In that case, educational research contributes to reproducing the racial order rather than improving their understanding of racially discriminating mechanisms in our educational system, especially in times of this pandemic.
* Burden-Stelly´s (2020a&b) theory of racial capitalism is anchored in Blackness in a US context but she states that methodologically her framework opens up analysis of other racialized groups in a capitalist system (Noname Book Club, 2020).
References:
Bayrakdar, Sait and Guveli, Ayse (2020). Inequalities in home learning and schools’ provision of distance teaching during school closure of COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. Working Paper. ISER Working Paper series. Online: http://repository.essex.ac.uk/27995/ (retrieved 15th November 2020).
Burden-Stelly, Ch. (2020a). Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: History, Theory, and Lessons for the Present. Online: https://thedaily.case.edu/modern-u-s-racial-capitalism-history-theory-and-lessons-for-the-present
Burden-Stelly, C. (2020b). Modern US racial capitalism. Monthly Review, 72(3), 8-20.
Council of the European Union. (2009). Council conclusions of 12 May 2009 on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (ET 2020), OJ C 119, 28.5.2009. Consulted 27th December 2020 at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A52009XG0528%2801%29
Engzell, Per & Frey, Arun & Verhagen, Mark D. (2020). Learning Inequality During the Covid-19 Pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ve4z7
Noname Book Club. (5 October 2020). Free Reading Program with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly. [video file]. Consulted 1st December 2020, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUEYjLpKZKE
Pensiero, N., Kelly, A., & Bokhove, C. (2020). Learning inequalities during the Covid-19 pandemic: how families cope with home-schooling. London: University of Southampton. DOI:10.5258/SOTON/P0025