Changes in the Justification of Educational Inequalities: The Role of Perceptions of Inequality and Meritocracy During the COVID Pandemic

Background Cycles of school closure and reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with remote learning, led to concerns about increasing inequality in education that persist in 2024. The aim of this abstract, within a wider study of safe school reopening, is to explore health and education professionals’ perceptions of inequalities among students during the pandemic. Methods In 2021, online semi-structured interviews were conducted in 6 languages with education and health professionals. They explored the: 1-effect of the pandemic on schools/pupils/teachers; 2-reorganisation of schools; 3-experience of implementing infection control measures in schools; 4-intersectoral working; 5-important resources for keeping schools open. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and translated into English where needed. A deductive qualitative analysis was undertaken using the conceptual framework developed by the United Nations H6+ Technical Working Group on Adolescent Health and Well-Being. Domain 3 (safety and supportive environment) includes consideration of equality. Results 62 interviews were included in the analysis (22 health and 40 education professionals from 28 countries). Professionals perceived greater negative impact on education for specific groups of students. Those with chronic illness stayed out of school for longer than others. Good access to distance learning was difficult for students from rural areas (lack of internet/electricity), disadvantaged families (lack of electronic equipment) or larger families (less learning space at home). Conclusions Professionals perceived that school closures intensified the disadvantage experienced by certain groups of students, exacerbating inequalities in education. Targeted catch-up strategies are still needed. Key messages • School closure during the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated inequalities in education. • In future health crisis impacting schooling, targeted catch-up strategies would be needed for certain groups of students.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Individuals With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: Clinical and Scientific Priorities.

ObjectivesThe COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary moment of uncertainty and rapid transformation. The effects lockdowns had on youths’ mental and physical health, as well as the challenges they posed for young peoples’ learning, were of great concern. It quickly became clear that government responses to COVID-19, in particular regarding the social determinants of health, were not equally experienced across all social groups. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary lens at the intersection of health and education and uses Max Weber’s lifestyle theory to analyze the inequitable experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine most directly social inequities in education during the first wave of COVID-19 and explore long-term effects on youths’ educational opportunities, health, and well-being.MethodsWe use focus group materials collected from our Spring 2020 study. This study explored how youth were differentially experiencing the pandemic. Participants included 18 youth between the ages of 13 and 18 (11 girls, 7 boys). Participants were stratified by private and public secondary schools and we ran focus groups in which experiences of the pandemic were discussed.ResultsOur results show (1) clear differences in early access to education for youth who attended public and private institutions in Quebec during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) access to the internet and computers offset learning opportunities for students across Quebec throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; and (3) few of the differences experienced during the pandemic were based on youth’s behaviours, or life choices, but rather stemmed from differences in material and structural opportunities, based largely, but not solely, on what type of school the youth attended (public or private).ConclusionThe way in which the COVID-19 pandemic was handled by the Quebec education system deepened existing social inequities in education between private and public school attendees. Given the importance of education as one of the main determinants of health, particularly during transition periods such as adolescence, we must ensure that future policies do not repeat past mistakes.

Acquiring an education is one of the Human Rights manifestations. Through education, someone can develop themselves to live a better life. Nowadays, the development of education in Indonesia is unequally distributed. The circumstances where students in urban are easier to access education than students in rural who have difficulty accessing education still exist. Furthermore, education inequality is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that changed the education system towards e-learning. It required students to quickly adapt to these conditions, although they are not ready to deal with them. West Sumatra is one of the provinces in Indonesia that has been implemented e-learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It causes educational inequality. Indirectly, the COVID-19 pandemic has divided students into several social classes due to their ability to access e-learning. Even though, education is a fundamental right for all human beings. This research dissected West Sumatra as the object of research. This aims to determine the extent of educational inequality that occurred in West Sumatra due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This research was uncovered by the concept of Marxism to articulate the educational inequality in West Sumatra during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research provides solutions based on the concept of capacity building, namely the establishment of The Education Care Community as a facilitator for students along West Sumatra to access education easily in the post-COVID times. This is done to realize equality of education for all students.

Challenges that arise during a time of crisis, as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are a basis for recognizing how different governments handle the governance of units such as schools and issues related to democracy and social inequality. By paying attention to similar or contrasting issues in the political welfare states’ characteristics and organization, the crisis's impact on different countries can be identified and can provide learning examples beyond the study's phenomena. Although Brazil and Sweden are historically and culturally diverse countries, they also share similarities in being politicized by global trends such as neoliberalism. The paper examines the two governments’ discourses and how centralization, decentralization, and neoliberalism and the resulting shift to privatized public services can form a basis for understanding declines in democracy and social inequality in education in both countries. The following research question guides the work, how are democracy and social inequality expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To investigate how democracy and social inequality were expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a quantitative ethnographic approach to analyze the governments’ discourses. With quantitative ethnographic techniques we identified how the states organized discussions and actions to investigate and solve socio-educational issues related to democracy and how access to resources for education related to inequalities. The governmental intensity of keeping the economy functioning was observed to be influenced by the advance of neoliberalism in both countries. In organizing the education during the COVID-19 pandemic, neoliberalism is pertaining to authoritarianism in Brazil and more culturally contingent actions related to the ethos - “openness” - in Sweden.KeywordsEducationDemocracySocial inequalityOrganizationQuantitative ethnography

More than 200 countries across the globe, including Pakistan, have closed educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities and madrassas) to contain the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19 pandemic). These closures have disrupted the learning of more than 1.7 billion learners (representing 91 per cent of the total enrolled students) across the world. It attempts to critically examine how schools’ closures in Pakistan perpetuate and reproduce inequalities in education. We have attempted to explore and explain inequalities in education during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and bring the issue of public school students’ learning loss into public debate. The paper is based on qualitative primary data and is analysed and interpreted vis-à-vis the social reproduction theories. We deduce that unequal schools, unequal parenting and geographical location have further inflamed education inequalities in Pakistan during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examined university students’ perceptions of inequality, relationships and power following the COVID-19 outbreak. We used a qualitative research method, inductive content analysis (ICA), to analyse their perceptions of inequality in their personal life, insiders and outsiders that show superiority in relationships and people with strong and weak characteristics of power structures. We extracted superordinate concepts, such as those in the individual, interaction and social/environmental dimensions, as the perceptions of inequality, insiders and outsiders and people with strong and weak characteristics. First, we found that university students experience inequalities when they perceive that individuals must cope independently with changes brought about by COVID-19. Second, the results showed that individuals can become insiders or outsiders depending on how they act during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we demonstrated that strong individuals are less affected by COVID-19-related changes than weak individuals. Therefore, improving university students’ quality of life requires plans based on the students’ perceptions of inequality.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has had a profound impact on many spheres of social life across the world. One of them has been the deepening of social inequalities and the aggravating of discrimination based on gender. Emerging studies in the field of education and occupation systems point to the fact that women seem to have been particularly affected, along with layoffs in those sectors of the economy where female staffs prevail. Additionally, in many countries, the burden of combining professional careers and supporting the education of young children falls disproportionately on mothers. These transformations pose a challenge to meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, wherein gender equality is an important factor. This article uses official statistical data to examine gender and educational structures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland, set against the backdrop of other European nations and analyzed in the context of sustainability. Have educational and gender inequalities been exacerbated as data from other countries suggest? In order to answer this question, the article traces changes in the education system in Poland and their implications for gender structures. The latter have also been affected by transformations on the labor market in various sectors of the economy, therefore, the second part of the analysis focuses on the labor market changes during the pandemic. The final section offers conclusions on the implications of the pandemic for the studied issues. Throughout the article, we apply the principles of unobtrusive research. Following the theoretical framework outlined in the first part of the paper, we carry out a descriptive analysis of existing statistical data collected by the Eurostat. These official statistics are supplemented by an overview of public opinion polls to allow for perspectives on structural changes, as they are perceived by those affected by them.

The Covid-19 pandemic has offered an opportune moment to assess the neoliberal tendencies in (South) African higher education. In critiquing neoliberal tendencies in higher education, this article proffers the thesis that university in (South) Africa perpetuates and entrenches neoliberalism as a Eurocentric canon, thereby shadowing the public good agenda of higher institutions of learning. The dawn of democracy in many African countries ushered in new thinking concerning higher education policy and practice. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fact that African higher education has remained tethered to the former colonial powers’ whims, thereby maintaining the dominator-dominated relationship. We argue that the imposed Western-style education has produced an educated élite with Western values and entrepreneurial attitudes that pilot their states on the path to modernity through the capitalisation of knowledge. Subsequently, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in relation to access to African higher education. To that end, we conceptualise the predominance of neoliberal philosophy in African higher education as an instrument of keeping the public good idea of the African universities under surveillance. We provide theoretical evidence of how African universities are still suffering from colonisation of the mind decades after the attainment of political independence through complicit or sometimes implicit imbibing and embracing of the Euro-centred neoliberal philosophy under the guise of globalisation. We make a case for (South) African higher education to turn the tide to encompass locally relevant teaching and research with an eye on local needs in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. On the understanding that Covid-19 pandemic affected places differently, we argue that the deep underlying inequalities in African higher education were exposed.

there is increasing concern that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the most vulnerable individuals. to determine whether education inequalities have widened during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.DESIGN: historic cohort study based on administrative databases. the study was based on subjects registered in the Base Register of Individuals on 01.01.2019, aged >=35 years, and followed-up until 30.06.2020. education inequalities in mortality before, during the first phase (March-April), and during the second phase (May-June) of the first pandemic wave in Italy were measured through the mortality rate ratios (MRRs). MMRs were estimated through negative binomial models. The interaction term between period and education was tested through the likelihood ratio test. the cohort included 37,976,670 individuals, and 719,665 of them died over the follow-up. In high pandemic areas, the MRR among less educated men were: 1.48 (95%CI 1.42-1.55) in the pre-pandemic period, 1.45 (95%CI 1.36-1.55) in the first phase and 1.42 (95%CI 1.30-1.56) in the second phase of the pandemic (p-value: 0.92). Corresponding figures among women were: 1.26 (95%CI 1.21-1.32), 1.39 (95%CI 1.30-1.49), and 1.35 (95%CI 1.23-1.48); p-value: 0.03. The MRRs substantially increased in the first pandemic phase among women aged 35-64 years (from 1.48 to 1.98; p-value; 0.011) and 65-79 years (from 1.22 to 1.51; p-value: 0.017). During the second phase, the MRRs returned to the values observed before the pandemic. in Italy, education inequality in mortality widened during the COVID-19 pandemic among working-age women and those aged 65-79 years.

Essential workers across multiple industries faced a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects were especially severe for agricultural and food processing workers, many of whom are members of the structurally vulnerable Latine community. Under current U.S. federal laws, children under 12 years old can legally work in agriculture, one of the most hazardous U.S. industries. Many of these working youth are Latine and experience health and educational inequities. Using a community-based participatory research approach and a qualitative design, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews in North Carolina in 2022, with service providers in health, education, and advocacy fields (n = 10) and Latine youth farmworkers aged 10-17 (n = 24). We used participatory qualitative analysis methods and a reflexive thematic analysis to understand and describe the work experiences of these youth during the first 2 years of the pandemic. Amidst precarious economic and school situations exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, many youths described an increased need to work to support their families. While aware and sometimes fearful of the added occupational health risks of COVID-19, youth and their families felt they had few other options. Service providers and youth described minimal employer-provided safety protocols or equipment, yet some workers organized their own attempts at safety protocols. Youth narratives imply limited knowledge of basic workplace safety requirements. Study findings emphasize the urgent need to address structural vulnerabilities shaping workplace policies and norms to protect Latine youth farmworkers to support their healthy development.

Background There is considerable literature suggesting that health inequalities increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, including conditions other than those immediately caused by COVID-19. Much of the evidence comes from routine unlinked data. Studies examining health inequalities during the pandemic in individual-level data remain sparse, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Purpose To compare, in a prospective population-based cohort, the educational inequalities in mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) in the Czech Republic before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also examined the role of partnered relationship. Methods We used data from the Czech arm of the multi-centre HAPIEE cohort, which recruited 8,857 men and women aged 45-69 years selected from population register at baseline in 2002-2005. The cohort was linked with national mortality register until 2022. Association between education (classified as primary, vocational, secondary and tertiary) and mortality was analysed (1) over the full follow up 2002-2022, (2) pre-pandemic period 2017-2019, and (3) pandemic period 2020-21. Participants marital status was classified into partnered (married/cohabiting) vs. non-partnered (single/divorced/widowed) categories. Age- and sex-adjusted odds ratios were estimated for each outcome. Results Over 2002-22, the numbers of deaths from all causes, CVD and CHD were 2771, 1020 and 488; in pre-pandemic period 516, 210 and 105; and in pandemic period and 512, 163 and 74, respectively. Over 2002-2022, there was a pronounced educational gradient in all mortality indicators; the age-sex adjusted hazard ratios for lowest vs. highest educational categories were 2.2 (1.9-2.5) for all causes, 2.8 (2.1-3.65) for CVD and 3.7 (2.6-5.41 for CHD. Comparing pre- vs. pandemic periods, the adjusted odds ratios were 2.6 (1.8-3.8) vs. 1.8 (1.2-2.6) for all-causes, 4.0 (2.1-7.7) vs. 1.2 (0.7-2.3) for CVD and 3.2 (1.4-7.2) vs. 2.6 (1.0-7.0) for CHD (Figure 1). The pattern was similar in men and women. In analyses of mortality in partnered vs. non-partnered subjects, the protective effect of living with a partner disappeared during the pandemic period; for all causes, the odds ratio changed from pre-pandemic 1.35 (1.08-1.68) to pandemic 0.85 (0.67-1.14) and for CVD mortality it changed from 1.71 (1.23-2.37) in pre-pandemic period to 0.75 (0.50-1.14) in pandemic period; again, the pattern was similar in men and women. Conclusions The relative educational gradient in mortality from all causes, CVD and CHD remained relatively stable over the pandemic period, in contrary to the original hypothesis that inequalities were widening. We observed a reduction or reversal of the protective effect of living with a partner; the interpretation of this finding is unclear. Some of the inconsistencies in the findings may be partly due to the smaller numbers of deaths in pre- and pandemic periods.

History teaches us that crises reshape society. While it is still uncertain how COVID-19 will reshape our society, the global pandemic is encouraging and accelerating innovation and advancement, especially in the digital sphere. This chapter focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education service, which is typically classified as a service industry in industrial classifications. Digital transformation in the education sector has attracted significant attention recently. The current education system in Japan is based on a structure that was institutionalized in the industrial age. Although education has seen innovation since then, it is one of the sectors wherein innovation occurs at a slow pace, and therefore, it does not meet the sector’s expectations and demands. The COVID-19 pandemic is, however, accelerating digital transformation in education: Not only in Japan, but globally too, educators, students, policymakers, and other role players are now actively undertaking efforts to bring about digital transformation in this sector. This chapter reviews the rapid expansion of digital transformation in the education service and explores, in detail, the two main trends in digital transformation in the education service in Japan. These trends are the expanding of distance education and increasing innovation in educational technologies. The discussion further reflects on prior studies questioning the impact of digital transformation on education; it also anticipates and explores the effects of and concerns about the digital transformation in the education service. Finally, the chapter includes a discussion on how to address these concerns and maximize the digital impact. It indicates three concerns of the digital transformation in the education service: (1) poor motivation management, (2) negative effect of IT devices usage in education, (3) educational inequality by digital divide. They can be overcome by changing roles of instructors and further investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service. The discussions in this chapter give insight into how the education service might evolve after the COVID-19 pandemic. The distance education is becoming a new normal in the education service. However, the education community in general is not ready to maximize the merits of distance learning. We need to change the role of instructors from a knowledge teacher to a learning motivator and progress manager. In addition, we need more investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service to enhance educational effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented emergency in education. This study examines the associations between family environments (i.e. parent employment, financial status, and mental health) and home educational factors (i.e. parental support, computer resources, school support, and study time). It utilizes a large-scale probability sample from the Understanding Society COVID-19 study in the UK that included 3125 participants who have school-age children in the household. Findings reveal that socioeconomic status plays a crucial role in explaining differences in family environments and home educational factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, there were significant gender gaps in employment, work hours, housework, mental health, and childcare. Nevertheless, people living with a partner had advantages in employment status, financial situation, mental health, childcare, and homeschooling. Overall, family environments were associated with home educational factors, and the relationships varied by family backgrounds in race, immigration status, partner status, and socioeconomic status.

We are still to learn from our learners: A hidden curriculum developed during the covid-19 pandemic