91�鶹������Ʒ����

The study "The urgency of educational recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean", published by the UNESCO Regional Multisectoral Office in Santiago and launched at the extraordinary meeting of education ministers "Ministerial of Education: Santiago 2024", highlights the extent of the educational setback caused by COVID-19 in its various dimensions. It states that if countries do not adopt a systemic and comprehensive response, the consequences of the crisis will affect the learning of students in the region for many years. 

This new UNESCO document provides an updated X-ray of the educational systems in the region in the years following the pandemic, focusing on the most affected dimensions.

The report acknowledges that governments have made significant efforts to respond to the challenges of the educational crisis caused by the pandemic. The results are evident in the quick recovery in 2022 of some key indicators, although historical debts in terms of learning, equity, and educational achievements persist. Despite these efforts, materialized in a variety of public policy actions, in most cases, they have not had an integral, systemic, and coordinated approach. Therefore, the recovery of learning remains an outstanding issue.

The document outlines the most severe effects of the pandemic, which have impacted the opportunities for boys, girls, and adolescents to attend school and learn, in a pre-existing concerning context where results in the region have not shown signs of improvement over the last decade. Currently, there are 9.6 million children and adolescents out of school, many of whom temporarily dropped out or remained minimally connected with school during 2020. One in three young people does not complete upper secondary education, a level considered by SDG4 as the minimum floor for sustainable growth with equality.

The data reveal that during the pandemic, there has been a drop in attendance rates at all educational levels, especially in 2020, with a greater impact on pre-primary education. Only at this level, attendance decreased from 86.2% to 79.2% between 2019 and 2020, on average across the countries. These figures are in addition to those who were minimally connected with educational proposals during the school closure period. This occurs alongside an increase in inequalities, indicating a greater impact on the most vulnerable populations.

Assessment results show disparate outcomes, with a majority of countries reporting a regression in learning levels of varying magnitudes. Additionally, international assessments reveal that the performance of students in the region is low compared to other countries worldwide, and there have been no improvements in the last decade: just over half of the third-grade primary students achieve minimum competency levels, and there is a decline by the sixth grade. For lower secondary, only a third achieves minimum competency levels in mathematics, results that have remained constant at least since 2015.

The situation of populations affected by historical inequalities reflected in their access to and quality of education they receive (those in poverty and extreme poverty, indigenous populations, rural population) is also recognized. This group is joined by other groups for which there are no regional estimates, such as people in situations of human mobility or with disabilities. Although governments have launched multiple actions to address these adversities, the diagnosis indicates that debts have increased in key aspects of fulfilling the right to education for children and adolescents.

Among the priority issues highlighted in the document, there is also an alert about the importance of working on the socio-emotional well-being of educational communities. UNESCO calls for continuing to strengthen strategies, plans, and programs for emotional support and containment within them.

For Claudia Uribe, the director of the UNESCO Regional Multisectoral Office in Santiago, this report is key to strengthening a roadmap with educational plans and programs that can address the population in a situation of vulnerability in the region more urgently. In this sense, we call for "carrying out learning recovery actions from an integral perspective, avoiding relying exclusively on specific and short-range actions. For this, it is crucial to enhance state governance capacities and increase educational budgets," she stated.

Despite the efforts of multiple public educational policy actions, the recovery of learning remains an open debt. With this challenge, UNESCO proposes to develop a framework for the recovery and acceleration of learning in Latin America and the Caribbean that includes the axes of educational inclusion, improvement of learning, strengthening of teaching and governance capacities, and financing of the educational systems in the region. This is the main challenge facing Latin America and the Caribbean today. It is essential to enhance state capacities for systemic governance and increase educational budgets, prioritizing resources for learning recovery.

This great challenge is not incompatible with a broader vision of improving and transforming educational systems to promote a humanistic, scientific, sustainable, and creative vision to face the challenges of a constantly changing world. The recovery and transformation of education in the region are part of the urgent agenda to achieve the SDG4 goals by 2030. Along this path, the educational conditions for a fairer, more inclusive, and developed world in the coming decades are defined.