All accounts of success in basic skills and twenty-first century skills have stressed the major role of student performance. Rapidly expanding these skills to power learning societies in the age of disruption due to such things as the coronavirus disease pandemic will require increased attention to the importance of macro-level drivers of system performance that contribute to student learning. This chapter builds a picture of the connection between basic skills and the “learning crisis” in low- and lower-middle-income countries. The chapter echoes the Research on Improving Systems of Education call to examine the education system as a whole—analogous to a car with a motor, transmission, axles, and wheels—where all the pieces need to work together, as fixing one piece at a time sometimes would not make any difference to improving performance. © The Author(s) 2021.
Addressing the learning crisis: basic skills and 21st century skills