The Fragility of the Norwegian Policy Response: How Relying on Digital Infrastructure and Local Autonomy Led to an Increase in Inequality in Education

Abstract

AbstractNorway is in a privileged position globally in the sense that the country is wealthy, the population is well educated, and the digital infrastructure is robust and accessible to the entire population. However, Norway has some painful lessons to learn when evaluating its response to the global pandemic. Key aspects addressed in this chapter are the lack of a national response other than keeping schools open as much as possible, and the results of requiring individual principals and teachers to define the content and form of remote teaching. The lack of a national response targeting remote learning resulted in increased variation—and inequality—in the education available to students in Norway during the school years 2020 and 2021. Students spent a significant amount of time alone and unaided as they worked on individual written tasks. Furthermore, the system’s heavy reliance on pre-pandemic solutions to new problems may have resulted in a failure to recognize that the label, “vulnerable student” may mean something different during a pandemic than it traditionally would. For example, high-achieving students with two high-earning parents who worked long hours as physicians may have also suffered from a lack of support when school relied so heavily on parental involvement and self-regulation. Toward the end of the chapter, I will highlight some silver linings.