Bernstein, M. (2017). Scaling Up Education in a Climate of Crisis. Solutions 8(1): 24-26. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/scaling-education-climate-crisis/
Perspectives Scaling Up Education in a Climate of Crisis by Molly Bernstein
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s their rickety boat approaches shore, sending ripples across the surface of the glossy river water, 17-year-old Filipe and a handful of his classmates hop off and head to class. Teachers are scarce in this remote swath of the Brazilian rainforest. But Filipe’s classroom now has a television screen, and as he arrives, a teacher standing hundreds of miles away appears via live stream to greet him. Across the world, 250 million children do not have even basic reading and math skills.1 In September 2015, 193 countries committed to the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) 17 Sustainability Development Goals for 2030.2 The fourth item on the list is inclusive and quality education for all. The Media Center where Filipe studies is the focus of one of the 14 case studies featured in an April 2016 report entitled “Millions Learning: Scaling Up Quality Education in Developing Countries,” released by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. Filipe is one of the lucky students benefitting from the progress made in education over the last decade. If countries across the globe remain committed to pursuing the UNDP’s Sustainability Development Goals, then he will join the ranks of millions more children with access to quality education where none exists today. Filipe’s school, called the Media Center, is among 1,000 local government schools built in recent years by the Amazonas State Secretary of Education (SEDUC) to make education accessible to children living in rural Amazonas areas, many of whom are in school for the first time. “We hope the impact will be more attention and investment in scaling,
Dominic Chavez/World Bank
Syrian refugee children participate in a religion class in the Ketermaya refugee camp outside of Beirut, Lebanon.
and not just in pilot ideas, which usually get most of the attention,” says Jenny Perlman Robinson, a Nonresident Fellow with the Center for Universal Education and one of the report’s primary writers. Filipe’s story at the Media Center stuck out to Robinson and her colleagues as a confluence of the strategies they see working best to scale education. As a project initiated by the state, the achievement of the Media Center is an example of central government granting autonomy to the state level. The program also utilizes technology and reaches the most marginalized communities. “I didn’t appreciate how remote it really is,” Robinson explains. “To get from these villages to the capital can take weeks if not months by boat.” The Media Center in Brazil is an example of what’s working in education. How can these successes be scaled up to reach other students, especially those living in conflict, and those who are currently being failed by the education systems in Syria and Turkey?
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Countries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan face challenges in providing quality education to their own youth populations. According to an October 2014 UNICEF Report, more than 76,000 children are out of school in Jordan, and an additional 50,000 are at risk of dropping out.3 By the end of 2015, close to a million refugees had arrived in Jordan from Syria, adding immense pressure to an already strained education system.4 In nearby Turkey, Mohammad would be in 11th grade if he was able to go to school. Instead he works in a small auto repair shop in Istanbul in order to help support his family after fleeing from Syria last year. Even if he could afford to go to a nearby Arabicspeaking school, he’d have to enter 6th grade, the grade he was in when he last entered a classroom. Five years after the start of civil war in Syria, more than three million Syrian children are not in school. Injaz Jordan, founded in 1999 and featured as another case study in the Millions Learning report,