Improving Education for Everyone
How can we make education more fair, efficient, and accessible for everyone? On Episode 7 of the Reimagine podcast, I am joined by Founder and Chairman of Ashoka University, Ashish Dawan, discusses the evolving educational landscape in India and how technology is enabling more personalized learning. Then, economics professor, Dania Francis, dives into the American system and how we can start to address the racial and economic barriers holding back so many students.
With COVID, I’m worried about the future of education and this generation of students. School systems have long been far from perfect, but the pandemic is bringing a new level of challenges — further exacerbating inefficiencies and inequities not just in the U.S., but across the world. Education has many obvious benefits that go far beyond economic growth and opportunity. More education means less violence, more peace, and better civic engagement. In any case, it’s the morally correct thing to do. We’ve made so much progress expanding and improving education globally; we can’t let the pandemic reverse that trend.
The first step is to address the education inequality that perpetuates systematic disadvantages and limits personal and national growth. McKinsey, for example, estimated that if the Black and Hispanic academic achievement gap had been closed in 2009, 2020 US GDP would be between $426 billion and $705 billion higher.
Black and brown communities in the United States have been battered by the pandemic; compared to white communities, they face higher rates of lost wages, hospitalizations and deaths. The threat of extended school closures will not only impact families that need to find care for their children, but also the future success of those kids.
On my podcast Reimagine, both Indian philanthropist Ashish Dhawan and economics professor Dania Francis identified gaps in education and promising solutions to begin to solve this complex challenge.
Right now, many schools aren’t open. We need to focus on getting our students back in classrooms, but the current surge in remote learning may also speed up a promising trend: the integration of digital tools into in-person instruction. Digital platforms are not a substitute for the power of classrooms. However, they do provide some incredibly useful advantages, namely that they allow educators to personalize lessons and exercises for students at scale. This is an area where I see tremendous potential.
Today, we are not using the rise of digital learning to serve as a testbed for continuously measuring, refining, evaluating, and asking, “What’s happening to the kids?,” what’s working, and for whom. We need to constantly assess and address these shortcomings and use the unprecedented tools provided by modern computing to help more people more quickly.
I believe technology and data-driven decision making will make education more fair, efficient, and effective. But to achieve that vision we need to pair the fields of computer science and learning science more closely together, just as computational biology is integrating the methods of CS into new insights about our bodies and our search for new therapies and treatments.
That’s why my philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, has a significant focus on the emerging interdisciplinary field of learning engineering. By using large online learning platforms as research hubs, and tools like artificial intelligence to concurrently test many approaches, we can advance our fundamental understanding of how people learn and figure out how different students learn best and then customize lesson plans for better results. We’re betting on this as a major catalyst to help create a more prosperous — and fundamentally more educated — world for everyone.
We’re also making a major investment in supporting young talent. This month, we are launching a new initiative called Rise. In partnership with the Rhodes Trust, we want to find talented young people around the world, then support them for life as they serve others. It’s an investment in the power of young minds to solve major challenges — but also a bet that technology can help us reach more young people around the world than has ever been possible before.
It’s time for us to play the long game. I want our leaders to be infinitely smarter, because I know the world will continue to become infinitely more complex. In order for that to happen, we need to improve education, create more opportunities for all people, and ensure that today’s children are given the chance to thrive more than any previous generation.
