Learn about the action taken to address the dropout rate in schools. Cluster Resource Persons (CRPs) are actively investigating and working towards bringing back students who have discontinued their education. Find out more about the efforts being made to ensure students' data accuracy and reduce dropout rates.
Following the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 in 2020, schools around the world closed for significant periods of time. Many scholars provided projections of the likely impacts on educational outcomes, with potentially dire impacts on learning loss and—especially in low-income contexts–dropout rates. Now, two years after schools began shutting down, we identify 40 empirical studies directly estimating student learning loss (29 studies) or dropout rates (15 studies) for students in pre-primary, primary, or secondary school in countries at any income level. Most estimates of average learning loss are negative, although–especially in low- and middle-income countries–this is not always the case, and average losses are not as significant as some models predicted. Furthermore, learning loss was consistently much higher among students with lower socioeconomic status in high-, middle-, and low-income countries, even in contexts with little or no average learning loss.
The Education Minister of Buenos Aires City in Argentina is being criticized for her comments about students in poor areas who dropped out of school in the wake of the pandemic.