#072 - Dr. Harry Patrinos | The World Bank’s Fight Against the Global Learning Crisis

Dr. Harry Patrinos is the Head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a former Senior Adviser for Education at the World Bank. In this conversation, he shares his extensive experience, which spans over thirty years at the World Bank, focusing on the evolution of global education initiatives and the critical role of human capital. He discusses the challenges of promoting education, the importance of local ownership in projects, and the mistakes made during the initial school closures in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, we explore the importance of addressing post-pandemic learning loss, what school systems should do to mitigate it, and how funds should be allocated to support unfinished learning. Thank you all for tuning in and hope you enjoy the show. 

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Harry Patrinos and His Work
06:00 Understanding Human Capital in Education
12:04 Navigating Funding and Project Management
18:08 The Importance of Local Ownership in Education Initiatives
24:02 Reflections on COVID-19 and Education
31:31 Addressing Learning Loss and Differentiation
36:46 The Role of Technology in Education
42:31 Balancing Standards and Funding in Education
47:50 Lessons Learned from the Pandemic

Takeaways:

• The World Bank shifted its focus from infrastructure to education in the 90s.
• Human capital refers to investments in people's skills and capabilities.
• Cultural differences can impact negotiations and project implementation.
• Countries often have a clear understanding of their educational challenges when seeking help.
• Local ownership of projects is crucial for sustainability and success.
• Education projects often take longer to implement than infrastructure projects.
• The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of maintaining educational data.
• Lack of information in education systems can lead to poor decision-making. Schools were closed for too long in most places during COVID-19.
• Lack of spending on education during the pandemic was a major mistake.
• Raising educational standards is essential for improving outcomes.
• The pandemic highlighted the importance of teachers in education.
• Online tutoring programs were effective but had low uptake post-pandemic.

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Thoughts shared on the podcast are purely our own and do not represent the views of the Anglophone South School District or the relevant jurisdictions associated with my guests.

Transcript

Lucas Clarke (00:00.8)
All right, Dr. Harry Petrinos. Petrinos, am I saying that correctly? Perfect, all right, well thank you so much for coming on today, sir. I guess to kind of get us rolling, one of the, I've talked to a few professors on here kind of throughout the last few months, but definitely one thing that intrigued me with coming across your kind of, your work and your profile is your time at the World Bank specifically to start us off. So I guess you're getting into education.

Harry Patrinos (00:05.696)
Correct.

Lucas Clarke (00:29.154)
How does a World Bank type opportunity come up and kind of what is your initial phase like once you start working there?

Harry Patrinos (00:38.484)
Yeah, so it was a long time ago. I spent 30 years at the World Bank. I actually came as a graduate student, still in school, working summers and then extended for a while. It was a great time back in the 90s. The World Bank had rediscovered its mission as poverty reduction, poverty alleviation as it was called.

lent itself to investing in education and that really took off at the bank. We went from doing very little to quite a bit on education and that's how I pivoted. I came to work on poverty and ended up working for more than 30 years on education programs. I was

came in as a researcher and moved to operations soon after that. We did a lot of policy work, made the case for education, and then were able to implement some great programs with our country clients all around the world.

Lucas Clarke (01:49.816)
And so as you're kind of making that case for education, is like, what is, is there resistance to that? Like what would have been the resistance that you would have had to like negotiate that conversation with?

Harry Patrinos (02:02.942)
Right. So the first kind of structural barrier is that the World Bank was set up post World War II to help mostly Western Europe recover from the war. So it was a very heavy infrastructure focused institution, rebuilding roads, bridges and the like.

And when education entered, the idea was build schools because we build things. So we did a lot of school buildings, which was fine in the beginning because schools were lacking.

So that was a useful endeavor. But then soon people realized that it's not the school that creates the human capital, the learning, it's the teaching and the processes. So we started shifting more towards supporting the education inputs for lack of a better term. But since we were an infrastructure...

bank and we were thinking of investments, paying for things like teachers or textbooks was seen as a recurrent cost. We don't finance recurrent costs, we were told. So that was another barrier. So we have to make the case that actually when it comes to education, it's the

Lucas Clarke (03:17.868)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (03:24.616)
recurrent costs that are the investment. So investing in better teachers, better textbooks, that's what leads to learning not having a nicer building per se.

Lucas Clarke (03:27.67)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (03:37.682)
Yeah, one of the words you mentioned there is human capital. And I remember when I used to live in Alberta up in Canada, I remember specifically the conservative government mentioned something about like, growing the human capital of basically the learning in our schools. And I remember hearing a lot of backlash on that term, like you're kind of

Harry Patrinos (03:44.128)
you

Lucas Clarke (04:01.145)
putting like a measurement of value on like the human being. So I guess, can you tell us a bit about like what human capital is and like how you try to grow it with education?

Harry Patrinos (04:10.47)
Right, simple concept invented by economists a long time ago in order to bring education and investments in people into the same ballpark with the bridges and roads and the like by talking about capital because in the other sectors it was all about capital. So if we don't have an analogous term then it's hard to

to be in the same room. So human capital is really the investments in people's skills, capabilities, attitudes, whatever it takes to improve their well-being. So what happens in schools, people come in, they learn something, they built up that capital, but they've made an investment, right? So if I decide to go to college rather than work, I'm giving up.

a salary to learn something in the university. So that foregone earnings is part of my investment and whatever I pay to go to college. And you hope that once you come out that you've improved somehow. And one way to measure, one easy way to measure it is the salary, right? You may have other things that you value, that's your utility. And you could decide that, yes, I'm better off because I'm better

Lucas Clarke (05:23.746)
Hopefully.

Harry Patrinos (05:35.112)
musician or whatever it is that you that you studied but a common measure and easy one is how much more you're earning now compared to what you would have been earning if you didn't invest in this example college. So that's the human capital argument. It really is nothing other than you know the time it takes to

to invest in building those skills and what you get in return for making that investment.

Lucas Clarke (06:07.67)
Yeah, you're kind of investing in people so that they can actually have a higher earning output as they continue to grow. Obviously, the theory is the more you make, the more you're underpaying in taxes, serving the society, etc. So yeah, I do think that's just a good thing to clarify, because I think once you can start kind of putting that number on people's people start to like back away in education, they kind of start to get like, that's not what we're here for. But that can kind of be a bit of a point of contention. But

Harry Patrinos (06:27.444)
Yeah.

All

Lucas Clarke (06:33.75)
So throughout your time, obviously like we can't cover 30 years at the World Bank here in one episode, but as you are working, are you traveling into any of these kind of countries? Like which ones are you going into and which ones were kind of the most surprising in terms of the education they already had available?

Harry Patrinos (06:54.42)
Yeah, good question. As is typical for people at the World Bank, I traveled about a third of the year. Some people are actually based in other countries. They go there for three or four years and come back or go somewhere else. I was based in Washington, D.C., in our headquarters, but I traveled, like I said, about a third of the year. And that didn't change until the pandemic. it was, but I...

Lucas Clarke (07:03.16)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (07:23.156)
but 100 days per year. What we typically did, we either were invited to come and talk to government about their investment programs, how they could make better investments in people, in my case, in education.

or we were helping to design a project. The projects are government owned and implemented. We help on the financing. We help on the supervision and advisory role. Or the other kind of visit would be to look into the

into the project, how it's going, report on that, help bring it back on track if it needed, or in some cases, restructure the project to make sure that we're doing what we want to do. We did a lot of restructuring during the pandemic as countries focused from investing in their systems to trying to maintain the system during the massive.

lockdowns. I would say the work with the country clients and the people, the teachers, the students we met, parents, is probably the most fulfilling, enjoyable part of the experience. sometimes it's frustrating. You feel like you didn't get what you wanted, but you learn something in every case. I think the

The biggest surprise for me traveling early on is that you kind of assume that people have the same motivations and goals and see the world in the same way. And you quickly realize it's not like that. People do have different views and perspectives. And you've got to respect that, otherwise you won't make any progress.

Lucas Clarke (09:10.611)
Good

Lucas Clarke (09:20.672)
And so is there an example you can kind of give of one of those aha moments for that that you can share? You don't have to any names or anything, but.

Harry Patrinos (09:25.382)
Yeah, sure, sure. think my first really important operational travel was to Indonesia. And I remember going to meetings.

sharing views with officials and they seemed to agree. And I would go back to the office or the hotel that day and think, wow, they agreed to all those things that was suggesting. And then I found out that it's impolite in their culture to say no to people. So they tend to agree or say nothing. And I didn't know that at first I thought, wow, I'm really persuasive.

Lucas Clarke (10:04.28)
I am making crazy traction here.

Harry Patrinos (10:10.184)
So then you have to learn to follow up your questions, to give them the opportunity to politely say, you know, that's a great idea, but we don't want to do that. So that was a skill you had to learn. But that was a, I'm glad I learned that early in my career.

Lucas Clarke (10:20.12)
You

Lucas Clarke (10:27.512)
Yeah, it's a good lesson to learn early on. But yeah, because I guess I had to kind of deal with all these different views. It's definitely something that would be hard to navigate. were there any times, again, I'm not trying to get you in trouble here by any means, but like, was there ever a situation when you had to like withdraw funding, like where like projects just started, but like, maybe even with authoritarian regimes, where you start to see like, things are kind of going awry in that regard.

Harry Patrinos (10:58.164)
I think we don't withdraw funds. Countries may decide to cancel a project for whatever reason. And it could be natural disasters. COVID was probably the most recent example where you had to usually restructure your project. So I wasn't really withdrawing it. Sometimes they...

Lucas Clarke (11:07.629)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (11:12.332)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (11:24.54)
they seemed to achieve what they wanted before the project ended. So it ended early, there was funding left over. Or we would have cases where there was some kind of fiscal situation beyond the scope of the project, but affected their ability to.

Lucas Clarke (11:28.78)
Okay.

Harry Patrinos (11:45.254)
absorb and repay funds. So that was not in the project hands, that was more of a macro issue with senior management. sometimes we did have to delay projects, postpone them. Cancellations are quite rare. It takes so long to develop the relationship and to process the project that by then you're pretty clear what you want on both sides and we don't have

Lucas Clarke (12:04.5)
Okay.

Harry Patrinos (12:13.896)
many of the cancellations. I think the most frustrating thing is when you've done a lot of work, government changes, they had an election or something, new government comes in, they've got different perspectives, they want to do something else and things are abandoned. That's kind of...

frustrating then you have to start all over again. that's, mean, it's their project, their fun. of course we respect that, but it can be something that makes it difficult for us to work through in the short term anyways.

Lucas Clarke (12:48.418)
Hmm. And so, and so it is in a lot of ways, like a transfer, like how does, do countries kind of seek out help in the World Bank? Do you kind of do this like targeted research and kind of like who starts the relationship? I guess is kind of what I'm asking.

Harry Patrinos (13:04.316)
Right, so the World Bank is pretty much made up of most of the countries that are in the UN system. Some of those countries are donor countries that supply funding. Others are recipients and the main recipients are borrowing, borrowing at market rates. I would say for the most part,

Lucas Clarke (13:13.879)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (13:33.17)
And then we do have a share of funding that's for lower income countries that's highly concessionary, so akin to grants or very long term loans with favorable interest rates that is meant to help bring needed capital to lower income countries. And then in recent days, we have many more countries that are either

going through conflicts or have just come out of conflicts and still rebuilding don't have a fiscal economic base to be solved at the time and they're getting definitely grants through donors and the World Bank is simply...

helping implement or design projects and supporting the supervision in those cases. But our typical historic clients have been middle-income countries and lower middle-income countries that are borrowing at market rates. And how did they come to us? Sorry.

Lucas Clarke (14:39.64)
Okay, so there's still definitely... sorry, go ahead.

Harry Patrinos (14:43.096)
And how do they come to us? There's already agreements at a very high level about how much aid a country is going to get, how much from the World Bank, and then the negotiations between the governments and the World Bank on which sectors they want to invest in with us.

what kind of support they want from us. And then we have a program, it's usually three years, sometimes renewed, and we start focusing. And it could be very broad strokes, investing in the, you know, renewable resources, investing in human capital, and then it's up to the professionals, the technical people at the World Bank, technical people in the government to decide what exactly are the priorities in those countries.

Lucas Clarke (15:36.906)
And like you've mentioned the word project a lot. so when you're like, let's just say you have a middle income country. What kind of project are you actually working on? Like what is kind of the, like how are you targeting the goals to kind of meet with a project?

Harry Patrinos (15:55.808)
Sure. I'll give you an example from a country I spent a lot of time working on in Mexico. was fortunate to be part of the team when the government changed in 2000.

and they were quite ambitious on many things, including education. And we had several projects at the same time. We worked in basic education, we worked in higher education, we worked on infrastructure, we worked on teachers, the whole gamut. One project that I worked on was helping schools in...

disadvantaged areas throughout the country to get the minimum standards to achieve what the national goals were. So if it was infrastructure, if it was more teacher training, if it was funds that would come directly to the school to take on little projects, that's what it supported.

That was a homegrown project that the government designed, invited us to help implement it. We did help on the financing, part of the financing. Most of it was government funds.

Lucas Clarke (17:07.489)
Okay.

Harry Patrinos (17:17.394)
And the value added for the government was twice a year we would come and do what we call supervision missions, see what progress was being made, how we could help move it along if necessary. And then we did some evaluations on specific elements of the program. And that project was a little different because it had a

every three years we get a phase and the first phase would inform the second phase. We would do some evaluations, we would share results, we'd have discussions and we decide where the funds would go. And over time we realized that supporting the parents and teachers through this dedicated fund that came to the schools

one of the was one of the most effective components of this project. So that was ramped up. Other things were, you know, allowed to to end. we supported that. And we managed to get most of those schools from well below national standards in whatever measure infrastructure attendance, even learning outcomes up to the national average. So that was that was the kind of project where we added

the most value and had government, of course, in the driver's seat, but with support as needed from us.

Lucas Clarke (18:49.016)
So it does sound a lot like countries that are reaching out already kind of have the problem, they kind of are aware of the issues. This is kind of what we want to work on and kind of bring in that higher kind of expertise. not like it's not the US coming in, it's not Canada coming in. It's actually more of an impartial group for consultation. Is that kind of more so what the role would have been, you think you would say?

Harry Patrinos (19:12.35)
Yeah, I think the World Bank realized early on that if the project was kind of imposed and maybe it works in infrastructure, maybe there's only so many ways that you can build a bridge and you can actually bring the same technology and know how and it would work. when it comes to investing in people, there needs to be ownership.

Lucas Clarke (19:26.732)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (19:41.17)
So if it isn't designed by government, chances are when the project ends, it's not going to be continued. And that's not good. Unless it wasn't a good project and it shouldn't continue. But if it was a good project, you'd want to see that continue and expand, right? You want to see those things scale. So you want ownership. You want the people to understand the project and be supportive of it. Because if you think about it, if you're investing

Lucas Clarke (19:50.007)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (20:10.617)
in the project I mentioned at the school grants, that means you're not doing something else. So somebody needs to understand that we're not doing the other thing because this one's more effective. So there has to be buy and buy.

Lucas Clarke (20:15.648)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (20:22.792)
the population as well, otherwise they won't support those kinds of reforms. So having a greater say is important. And I think that's one reason why education projects and maybe health and social protection

tend to take longer to implement and to succeed than big, I would say infrastructure projects where maybe it's easier to know what you're building, what you're supposed to get. So we tend to have in education longer periods of implementation and the project takes off a little slower than in other sectors.

Lucas Clarke (21:06.348)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (21:09.876)
the success has been on par with what we do in other sectors. It's going to take a little longer before you start seeing the results materialize.

Lucas Clarke (21:22.744)
Yeah, I do think there's a tendency to become impatient in education with some of the programs and the role. It's like if you're not seeing this automatic growth within three months that kind of like a private corporation would kind of look at an issue. There's this urge to cancel and restart. But yeah, I love what you're saying about the World Bank there. It's great information. And I guess, was there anything about, we've talked about differences of worldview.

Harry Patrinos (21:36.319)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (21:52.908)
But was there any way that a certain country had their education system kind of shaped that was very alarming to you ever? Like that was just like, whoa, this is something I'm not used to at all.

Harry Patrinos (22:05.152)
I think the thing that shocked me and continues to worry me is that too many systems, education systems, don't have good information bases. And what I mean by that is if you go to a country, a state or a city, an education authority, and they don't have good information, they tend to ask for things that

you wonder, know, why do you think you need that? Did you hear about that somewhere? Did a vendor tell you about it? You start becoming suspicious. But then when you go to a system that has good information about how many teachers they have, what shortages exist, what the learning outcomes are, what the graduation rate is, the questions you get there are much more informed and more related to what they want to achieve. So I've had...

Lucas Clarke (23:02.776)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (23:04.006)
meetings where I've met with school principals and teachers and they're asking me, know, our math scores aren't as high as the national average. What programs can you suggest that would help improve math instruction? Those are the kinds of

questions that suggest that there is a good information base and people are looking at data and trying to make decisions based on evidence. But too many systems are flying blind, I would say, and not knowing where students are. And I still wonder, like, how do you make a decision to allocate funding if you don't know what is happening? And we saw that in the pandemic.

Lucas Clarke (23:23.554)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (23:47.764)
most of the information we collected in the early months of the pandemic was coming from projects that happened to measure student outcomes or NGOs that were collecting data.

Very little was coming from governments that tended to suspend testing of students during the pandemic, never really went back to it. And then when they did, they kind of inflated the test scores. We didn't really have a good picture of where students are. eventually the schools open, you have the students going through the system. They're going to go to high school, they're going to go to college, and they don't know where they are.

Lucas Clarke (24:10.988)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (24:32.242)
and you're going to make them write a very difficult selection exam to move to the next level and they weren't supported all these years. That's the thing that worries me the most is when information is lacking and how do you manage that? If I don't know how I'm performing, how do I know what I need to work on? What do I make my investments? So I think that's my...

my pet peeve going forward is the lack of information and how important it is to get back on track with that.

Lucas Clarke (25:10.082)
Absolutely, and I think we're going to move into a bit more of the COVID writing that you've kind of been involved in over the past few years. And even for myself, I've only been teaching for about five years, so I'm still very early on in my career. But in the early stages, I did teach in Alberta and Canada. And when I was a student there, when I was younger, our grade 12 exams were worth 50 % of our final grade. So we had like a very rigorous

50 % exam that was worth half of our grade. And then as time went on, that went down to 30%. And then when I was teaching, I actually went back and taught the same social studies courses. So I've learned about, or taught about the World Bank, hence kind of my interest here. And then they brought it down to 10%. And so you started to see a lack of...

engagement and motivation from the students for actually seeing that as being something worth studying for. I feel like you need a little bit of that healthy fear to be able to actually learn and study. feel like that's pretty, it definitely comes up in universities. so I guess knowing what we know now, COVID was happening very quickly. Everything was changing day to day, even myself teaching. was like week to week. had students in class, we had them out of class. Everyone was kind of just responding. So

What would you say was the most common mistakes made by countries like reopening and walking back?

Harry Patrinos (26:44.576)
I think the biggest mistake was schools were closed for too long in most places. And I know there were lot of debates in the US and Canada about different locales, but we were working in countries that were closed for two, sometimes three years. without a very good response in the meantime, The online learning was...

Lucas Clarke (26:49.879)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (27:06.006)
Wow.

Harry Patrinos (27:12.504)
I would say it was emergency remote teaching in North America. It was almost nonexistent in the rest of the world. So close too long with no real alternative for countries. And they also kind of stepped back on the investments you need to make. I think part of the reason why the US, Canada, Western Europe,

seems to have recovered so quickly from the pandemic was that they actually increased spending on programs like education. Most middle and low-income countries reduce spending on education during and even more importantly after the school closures. So, and they've never really recovered.

So it's putting them way back on this. So the lack of spending, the lack of data collection during the pandemic, the lack of alternatives during the school closures were the biggest mistakes, I would say. And I think the countries that

closed for a short period of time and then reopened safely. I think maybe Denmark might be the best practice case that they closed for a few weeks and then they reopened slowly and monitored the infection rates and once they got and they prioritized teachers and once they got the vaccines, they started to get back on track. And throughout that time,

Lucas Clarke (28:50.647)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (29:00.756)
continued to monitor student performance and to supplement those students that were falling behind. One of the, I'm sure you know this, one of the things that suffered during the pandemic is that people weren't reading, students weren't reading as much as they were when they were in school. And you start to lose those skills, especially if you're very young. And that's something that Denmark,

that did was supplement the reading instruction. Many other countries did that as well. But those are sort of responses that I think were best practice and that not best practice was staying close too long, not offering alternatives to students, and reducing spending both during and after the pandemic.

Lucas Clarke (29:50.626)
Well, yeah, because even right now I live in New Brunswick in Canada now. So, excuse me. And one of the, position I'm currently working in, they've just, there's always been like resource teams and like people in charge of individual program plans and those types of teachers at every school pretty much as a norm. But there's, kind of created a new branch of the resource team called like the academic support teacher where I don't necessarily work with tier three students, kind of like your.

like special needs students but I'm more so who is the kid in your grade eight class that's still at a grade four or five reading level who's kind of just like kept going and I like what you said there about just because they could read at a grade two level when COVID started doesn't mean that they just resumed back there they probably may have even lost some of those skills so just to assume that you pick up where you left off and now you're teaching them

like formal paragraph and essay structure in grade eight, but they can actually not even spell any words properly. Like that's something that we are all struggling with in terms of the differentiation has kind of been a norm, I would say in education for the past 10 to 15 years as like a common practice, but it almost seems like you're not making three or four anymore. It's almost every single student needs that.

one-on-one support so much more. And even though there's only one kind of AST for a school of 300 students, it can still be very hard to kind of navigate that like learning loss. So I guess what measures have you seen schools or systems take to like directly intervene to that learning loss?

Harry Patrinos (31:31.924)
Yeah, great question, Lucas. And I'm glad to hear about the Academic Support Center that you have in New Brunswick. I think there were some very good lessons during the pandemic, and a lot of them have to do with what you call differentiation, what we call at the World Bank teaching at the right level. So meeting students where they are and making sure that they're moving up.

towards the standards at the pace that makes sense for them. And I think we saw examples in low income countries. We saw this in Sub-Saharan Africa where technology was used, even low tech telephone calls to parents reminding them to read to their students. Those were found through rigorous.

impact evaluations to be quite effective just with the phone call. If you supplemented that with some resources as well that the parents could use, then the results were even more significant. We saw examples of online tutoring in Italy, in Spain, and then we replicated this in Ukraine during the war.

So just having the tutoring online, which is much lower cost in person, of course, and would have been impossible during the severe lockdowns in Italy or the war in Ukraine, those programs are just as effective as having the in-person tutor. So that's something that can work. It meets the student where they are.

and you can differentiate. And I think with technology, with AI, as you know, this is probably going to be the biggest value added. This is that it will allow us to have the differentiated learning, the mastery learning, and support those students that are falling behind or not on course.

Harry Patrinos (33:42.468)
to meet the standards to catch up. And it will probably free up the time of teachers to focus where they can add the most value. I think that was a very important lesson during the pandemic is that we can use technology to help differentiate learning.

I also think that bringing more people into the classroom, and maybe that's what you do with the academic support centers, is quite effective. I saw school outside of Cape Town where the students are doing their lesson online, but in the classroom. And in addition to the teachers, there's two other teaching aides that are roaming.

Lucas Clarke (34:11.896)
you

Harry Patrinos (34:30.408)
the classroom and supporting students that are falling behind. And by having the being in person, but also online, allows you to have differentiated learning for those students that are moving ahead. And you can do the remedial for those that are not and do this at the same time. It's a very effective approach and highly cost effective from what we see.

Lucas Clarke (35:00.024)
Yeah, because even like at my older school, like right now we're at about a one to two ratio of like tech per student. So still only at about half for the number of students that we have in our building. But so would you say one of the main things a school or district should try to do is achieve kind of that one to one tech per student ratio as kind of just like an immediate like again, it's not.

It's not relatively as expensive as some of these other major investments, right? Is that something that you would kind of encourage?

Harry Patrinos (35:29.716)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. think from what I've seen, a few examples, having the device one per student will make a big difference, make life easier for teachers as well, and allow you to exploit. Because when this started, I mean, it was too expensive to do that. And I think we never mastered that. And we also didn't have the software that made it effective. Now you've got that.

I think it's a matter of time, but I would definitely go for one to one. I also think that in some circumstances, even the phone.

the smartphone could be useful. We did the tutoring experiment in Ukraine and the students may have been using a phone, not a laptop, and it seems to be just as effective. And in some countries, even the phone call seems to be useful in some cases. You have to supplement it, but even that...

seems to pay off. But I do think that having the device, given what's going to happen with AI, will make these highly, highly effective instruments for us.

Lucas Clarke (36:46.722)
Yeah, because that's kind of where I wanted to move us to next is I've really thought a lot about as I kind of continue my own learning of just seeing what Magic School AI has done in the past three years of just you can enter, like it can create lesson plans for you, it can do report cards for you. Like obviously with some oversight from yourself as to making sure it's accurate for everything, but.

It seems like there's going to be a growth in tools that we have at our disposal to kind of take care of the more mundane things that we kind of associate as being the tasks of a teacher. But where do you see a need for the future of educational research outside of just artificial intelligence? Like where are we still kind of lacking and like what are we still debating in education for the most part?

Harry Patrinos (37:41.202)
Right, good question. I would go back to reading. I mentioned reading. you want to be able to get the students on track early on their reading because I do think it's such a fundamental foundational skill and gateway to everything else that we want to do.

do we know enough about reading instruction to get people on track? I think we've concluded as a profession that science of reading seems to be the way to go. I still think there's more to do for those students that are experiencing the difficulties for whatever reason. do think we still have COVID.

Lucas Clarke (38:16.812)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (38:29.972)
the after effects of the lockdown and people's behaviors and just what I'm hearing and I'm sure you're experiencing at the different kinds of problems that are coming into the classroom. And I think a lot of it has to do with the pandemic experience. if this is diverting teachers and schools from the instruction, how can we help improve reading instruction and to what extent is...

perhaps technology going to help. I think maybe one side benefit of better technology would be that as those more advanced students are progressing on their device, the teacher can spend more time with those students that are falling behind. So I think a more professional approach on this is important. I also think

We need to think about making it cost effective. But also, I don't want to end up where we're choosing things because they're less expensive. I think this is why I continue to work on expounding on the value of education, because I don't think there's anything else that will give us the returns. Not just monetary, but everything else that we want.

in order to progress and I think we should be spending more on education for things that work but we have to raise our standards right I mean we can definitely spend less and have lower outcomes for everyone but I'm not sure that's what we want as a society I think we want higher standards and let's pay for them because the returns are just immense.

Lucas Clarke (40:23.45)
yeah, that's, I get it. I'm still kind of learning this new system in the new province that I'm in, but from my old, like so Alberta and New Brunswick, it's always the classic conservative and liberal divide as I'm sure you're very well versed in right now with the US election just taking place last week. But more conservative provinces generally tend to.

spend less but also have like a much more of an emphasis on standardized testing. And then the kind of more liberal left-wing kind of minded countries provinces from my perspective are usually a bit more emphasis on spending and classroom reducing class sizes and increasing teacher salary but lowering that emphasis on standardized testing and more project-based stuff.

What are your thoughts on that degree to which, because you're using the word standards a lot and I've actually become a bit more of a, I guess, promoter of standardized testing in a lot of regards to not to add to my popularity by any means. It's not the most popular choice in lot of circles, but where I'm living now from what I understand.

to exit high school, like the only mandatory exam is like a 20 question multiple choice test. So there's not even actually a requirement of writing to leave high school and to be considered a graduate. So I guess, what are your thoughts? I guess maybe to add into a more specific to your location question, I saw on education week, there's rumblings that like the new Trump administration may potentially.

like remove the Department of Education in a in an effort of like downsizing their bureaucracy. But in Canada, we don't have a National Education Association anyway. So it's like, it's not like to me, that doesn't strike me as end of the world if it's more of a up to the state. But how would you approach that balance between standards and where do we use our money most effectively, I guess?

Harry Patrinos (42:31.712)
Yeah. Thanks for that Lucas. I should have told you I'm also Canadian. So I know what you mean. I've been away for a long time, but I know what you mean. And I like the way you categorized the spending and testing. I'm somewhere in between. I'd like to see more spending and more testing. I also believe in more autonomy for

Lucas Clarke (42:38.282)
okay, didn't know that. Interesting.

Lucas Clarke (42:53.666)
Mm. Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (43:00.24)
for schools, but with accountability and good assessment system. So I'd like to see that kind of mix. I there's some kind of coalition at some point that sees the benefits of spending more and testing more. So I'm always happy to provide the autonomy, but you've got to take the accountability as well.

Lucas Clarke (43:03.32)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (43:29.696)
I'm with you on the standardized testing. It's the only thing that we have that will give us some level of information so that you as a teacher, that an administrator, that a policymaker, that a funder can see where things are going and to take action.

I would divide between assessments that are meant to be information for teachers and for others and those that are for selection. So the end of high school or the college entry examination, those are selection high stakes assessments. I do see the value of those. I am worried about lowering standards because I think that disadvantages

the people that are already disadvantaged. If I lower standards, for many people, we're not going to relax it. For our kids, we'll make sure that they're pushing themselves and getting the support they need to be successful. But if you lower standards for other groups, then they have nowhere else to go to get these, and then they end up...

Lucas Clarke (44:36.525)
Mm-hmm.

Harry Patrinos (44:53.948)
not entering college or entering but then quickly dropping out and that could be the worst thing that happens to you is to enroll and then drop out. So I believe in raising standards and giving support so that those groups can be successful through high school.

and not go to college and end up doing remedial work, getting frustrated with that and then dropping out. That's not a good use of their time or state resources. So where that needs to happen, I think has to be at the local level. So it really doesn't matter if you don't have a national...

Lucas Clarke (45:27.052)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (45:42.812)
education ministry like in Canada where the decisions are provincial and I would say local.

and having that information base and support, it has to be local. People want to know how their school is performing, how their kids are performing, and how are they performing compared to others. I don't know, I've been out too long, but in the US, we get our energy bill with the consumption specified, then it tells you, your neighbors are consuming this much.

Lucas Clarke (46:19.278)
Harry Patrinos (46:19.392)
If you're doing more than your neighbors, you kind of feel like, I don't want to be that outlier. Right. So it actually is a result of a.

Lucas Clarke (46:23.192)
I don't want to that guy.

Harry Patrinos (46:29.512)
of an experiment so that if I send you your bill and show you that you're consuming more than your neighbors, the next month you're going to consume less because you don't want to be the person that over consumes. And I think that same thing happens with achievement results. If people can see that, you know, here's your grade and here's the grade of the school, you know, in the next district.

you feel like you need to improve because you don't want to be falling behind. So I think information, a little competition is good. As long as we can also support the schools and the districts with the resources to actually make up for where they're lacking. And again, it's information and resources. So standards and more spending, I would say should go hand in hand.

Lucas Clarke (46:58.584)
Yep. A little competition is good. It is good, yeah.

Yep.

Lucas Clarke (47:26.136)
I don't mean to jump around too much on some of the subjects here, but for the COVID part specifically, we talked about schools keeping the, sorry, areas keeping their schools closed for too long as kind of being the major issue. Are there any other kind of mistakes or areas of debate in terms of responding to COVID that are outside of that?

Harry Patrinos (47:50.472)
Yeah, think we learned, I mentioned that these online tutoring programs worked quite well during the pandemic. And of course, we knew before that the tutoring for those students that are falling behind has been effective. It was very expensive. If it's one-on-one, face-to-face, it's very expensive. Online reduced the cost.

Many jurisdictions are offering tutoring in person or online. The take-up has been very low post pandemic, which is quite quite surprised. I don't.

know why the take up is so low. Is it people aren't getting information? Are they tired of COVID talk? I don't know. But it is worrying that the one thing that seems to work very well in terms of recovery is getting such a low take up even when the resources are there. So I've seen this in Maryland where I used to live. We're seeing it in Arkansas where I am now. I don't know the situation in Canada, but I know that around the world,

the tutoring programs are not getting the take up that they should be getting. I think that's the so-called high dosage tutoring, very effective. We can do it online. It's been proven around the world.

Lucas Clarke (49:04.184)
you

Harry Patrinos (49:14.072)
that's something that can be done and implemented. And there are alternatives to this and maybe what you're doing in New Brunswick with the academic support center is doing some of that. So there are other kind of variations on that which are targeting students. But the take up has been low. I think it needs to be pushed a little bit more and maybe you got it right in New Brunswick with these.

academic support staff. I'd like to see more of those kinds of programs.

Lucas Clarke (49:46.328)
Well, yeah, because I was actually I had never been exposed to this type of position before, and I'm still very new, still learning a lot of that going from teaching grade 12 to teaching kind of grade five to seven little reading is a very different ball game. So I'm still kind of learning to lay the land on that. But at the elementary schools where I am.

they actually have two ASTs per school, one for K to two and one for three to five. So like to me, and now they've moved them into the middle school and eventually they're gonna have one for both math and science and for the humanities as an AST in their high schools here. So it seems to be an emphasis on support.

for teachers that doesn't actually involve a teacher being in front of 38 students anymore. It seems like society is starting to accept this. okay, maybe we can start to use teachers in different ways, in different roles and actually do a lot more co-teaching in groups of 10 to 12. Like you can make a group of 10 to 12 for a pullout without actually making class sizes 15, if that kind of makes sense. Like there's ways to kind of work around adding that support without spending too much money. Because obviously money is only...

There's only so much of it exists and you wanna use it as best as you can. So I don't wanna keep you too much longer here, because it's already been fantastic, but maybe somewhere down the road we'll have another podcast, but I have a couple of quotes I usually end my episodes off with and they're kind of more leaving it up to you, but more open-ended. So the first one is, do not let school get in the way of your education.

So I guess for someone like yourself, a very long successful career working in international education, now as a professor, I guess, what are kind of the character attributes that you feel like you've learned that have helped you be successful that you can't necessarily learn in a classroom?

Harry Patrinos (51:43.82)
Good question. I would say keep learning. I never consider myself an expert. I feel like every new study, every new project, every new country I went to was another learning experience. So be open to ideas. I've changed my mind over the years on different things, but have an open mind and keep learning. School gives us the tools to do that, but it's not the end. think education is a lifeline.

lifelong endeavor and keep and you can always keep learning.

Lucas Clarke (52:18.434)
Beautiful. And so I have one more quote to finish this off. Kind of similar ball game, but it's education is what remains once we forget everything that we've learned in school. So I guess, what is it that you want people that are working with you or students that are learning from you to take away from their time with you that they won't get from anyone else?

Harry Patrinos (52:44.532)
Yeah, I think one thing I've come to appreciate post, especially post pandemic is when the lockdowns began, the schools were closed. A lot of us expressed concern if it went too long, what it would do to students. And some people thought, well, there's very little learning going on. So it's not going to hurt, right? Which I resent at the time, I resent even more now.

because we have seen that even in the lowest performing systems, there was learning loss. So obviously something was happening. So if we ever needed an experiment to show us that the teaching has an effect, was the lockdowns, right? Once we took schooling away, we see how valuable it was. So I'd like to say the value of

teachers has never been more important. And if people didn't believe it, they can see it now because the pandemic exposed us to this. And I like to believe that we're going to continue to value teachers, value them more. I didn't mention this, but in East Asia, in the high performing countries, Singapore, Korea, Japan,

there was no learning loss. They continued to improve. I think we need to look at those countries closely again. I think what they have in common is teachers are highly valued. We need to do that here. We need to support them and we need to give them the resources and hold them accountable to achieve better results.

Lucas Clarke (54:35.586)
So I hate that that just sparked another question for me. I read an article a bit of it recently. was like teachers in the Western world are kind of increasingly morose and they're a bit more like burnt out, more commonly feeling like their work isn't valued by society. That's clearly not consistent throughout the world. Like you're saying that there's so, and so I guess how do we...

Mediate that.

Harry Patrinos (55:04.308)
Yeah, that's the big question. We've been struggling that for a long time. When we point to East Asia, say, that's different, a different culture. They can do things or Singapore's too small to compare as well. Look at Korea then, look at Japan. think...

I think we do need to pay attention to those systems because they're doing a few things very well and by elevating the role of the teacher. We can't replicate cultures but we can copy what seems to work.

simple things. Can we recognize good teachers, have teacher awards? Can we give them more support to do their job? Clearly we can. And you mentioned one program in New Brunswick, are others that are supporting teachers. And we need to make it attractive for people to enter the teaching profession because if they keep hearing, know, if graduates or potential graduates keep hearing, you know, that the teachers are quitting, yeah,

Lucas Clarke (56:13.592)
If everything sucks, don't do it.

Harry Patrinos (56:17.074)
That narrative's got to change somehow and we need to find out what it is that will make this a more attractive position and make sure that people are happy to come into it.

Lucas Clarke (56:19.575)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (56:31.638)
Hey, teaching's not that bad. You go through your week helping students and then Saturday mornings you can do a podcast. anyway, thank you so much Dr. Petrinos for coming on today. I really appreciate your time.

Harry Patrinos (56:36.724)
Yeah.

Harry Patrinos (56:42.346)
Thank you, Lucas. Great talking to you.