Education stakeholders from around the world gathered on Zoom this week for a two-part online panel series focused on education leadership against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Titled, “Education Reimagined: Leadership for a New Era,” the conference was hosted by the nonprofit Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha and the Salzburg Global Seminar, with Diverse as a media partner.
“Will the COVID-19 generation, as many are calling today’s youth, be one of lost potential?” said WISE CEO Stavros Yiannouka. “Will the youth of today matriculate in a world of missed opportunity and stifled growth, or … like the generations that emerged from past crisis, will this be a generation that defies expectations and reshapes our world for the better? And an important follow-up question to that would be, what can we as a global education community do to make sure that it is in fact the latter that takes place and that we do not lose this generation?” 
Two panels focused on equity and how education leaders worldwide can bridge gaps in student success exacerbated by the pandemic.
This is an “inflection point in the history of humanity,” said Dr. Anthony Jackson, head of the Asia Society’s Center for Global Education. “… What we are witnessing is the fact that previously functional operating paradigms are really now totally dysfunctional – and that includes certainly in education but also elsewhere – and frankly if we do not change, our very existence as a species is at risk. So, when we think about leadership in kind of this perfect storm of issues coming together this year, I think we really have to ask the question, leadership for what?”
He sees this as the moment for a “whole-scale systems change” for education, which currently “benefits a few to the detriment of many.”
As education gaps widen, Dr. Miron Bhowmik, assistant professor of education policy and leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong, stressed the importance of an intersectional approach to studying existing disparities.
