One thing coming out of the pandemic is that we are suffering greater austerity as governments struggle to balance the high costs of health services with the cost of maintaining quarantine and policing new laws. A recent OECD article confirmed that while public attention focuses on short-term challenges – health and maintaining employment – “the learning losses that follow from school closures will throw long shadows over the economic well-being of individuals and nations”. What the report goes on to say is a fundamental fact that we frequently lose sight of: “Our schools today are our economies tomorrow”. As such it is imperative that the public are made aware of the importance of schools and teachers to boost engagement from communities and parents. A periodic loss in the school calendar, while difficult to calculate, the economists, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, estimate that “the students in grades 1-12 affected by the closures could expect some 3% lower income over their entire lifetimes”. This projected on to our economies translates to a long-run cost range “of $14.2 trillion in the USA and $15.5 trillion in China”. If disruptions continue into next year, those losses will grow further.
