How Did Vietnam’s Schools, Parents and Students Respond to the School Closing in February – May of 2020? Results from School Principal and Parent Phone Surveys, and from Student Assessments

<p dir="ltr"><i>The global Covid-19 pandemic that spread throughout the world in 2020 disrupted the </i><i>education of over one billion students. This disruption continued into 2021, when hundreds of </i><i>millions of students were still not in school, although almost all countries had reopened their </i><i>schools at some point in 2022. Yet even after students had returned to in-person learning in their </i><i>schools many had lost many months of in-person learning, and attempts to implement strategies </i><i>for students to learn and study while their schools were closed varied widely across countries.</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>The global cost of reduced learning from the Covid-19 pandemic is still being calculated. This </i><i>paper focuses on one country, Vietnam, to assess the impact of Covid-19 on education in that </i><i>country, using data collected in the summer of 2020.</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>The first case of Covid-19 in Vietnam was detected in late January of 2020. This was </i><i>near the beginning of the Tet (lunar New Year) holiday of that year, and during that holiday </i><i>schools typically are closed for one or two weeks. To contain the spread of this virus, the </i><i>government of Vietnam directed all schools to remain closed after the Tet holiday, yet at the </i><i>same time the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) instructed school principals to </i><i>implement several strategies to continue instruction while the schools were closed. Due to </i><i>Vietnam’s unusually successful control of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, schools were </i><i>reopened about three months later, around May 4, 2020. Vietnam’s schools stayed open a few </i><i>weeks longer than normal, ending instruction for the 2019-20 school year at the end of June or in </i><i>early July of 2020.</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>This paper uses data collected in 2020 to examine three questions regarding the impact of </i><i>Covid-19 on education in primary schools in Vietnam in that year:</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>1. What did primary school principals and teachers do to maintain student learning when </i><i>schools were closed for three months (February, March and April) of 2020?</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>2. What did parents do to support their primary-school-age children when their schools were </i><i>closed?</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>3. What effect did the school closure have on Grade 3 students’ learning of mathematics and </i><i>Vietnamese (literature) during the 2019-20 school year?</i></p><p dir="ltr"><i>We find that the vast majority of primary schools undertook a wide variety of actions to </i><i>provide instruction to their students during the three months that the schools were closed, and </i><i>that more than half undertook activities more than once per week. Most parents report that their </i><i>children were able to benefit from the instruction provided by the schools, but this was less </i><i>common for students from poorer families. The evidence on student learning indicates that the </i><i>younger cohort of students (those who started grade 2 in the 2018-19 school year) appear to have </i><i>performed as well as the older cohort of students (those who started grade 2 in the 2017-18 </i><i>school year), which implies that the Covid-19 pandemic did not result in any “learning loss” in </i><i>Vietnam in the first half of 2020.</i></p>