Columns 
Originally published on the Ukrainian Weekly
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Since 2020, Ukraine’s children have been suffering from unprecedented disruptions in their education. Widespread school closures and a shift to remote learning began with the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued throughout the period of Russia’s barbaric full-scale invasion, during which one in seven Ukrainian schools have been damaged or destroyed. Some 900,000 Ukrainian kids still rely on remote learning, says Oksen Lisovyi, Ukraine’s minister of education.
In an interview with NV (The New Voice of Ukraine) earlier this year, Mr. Lisovyi described the loss of educational opportunities experienced by Ukrainian children.
As a result of prolonged online learning and the havoc caused by the war “we estimate the losses at an average of one and a half years, and we also have educational gaps, such as a noticeable difference in the quality of education in urban and rural areas,” Mr. Lisovyi said.
“Across the country, there is a significant lag in reading skills, both in understanding and analyzing text. We lag in science and math. In rural areas, these gaps are greater than in urban areas,” the minister said.
Studies by the Program for International Student Assessment published in 2018 and 2023 show that, in terms of educational attainment, rural school students in Ukraine, on average, have fallen behind their peers in urban areas by two and a half years or more.
Enter Teach for Ukraine, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization that has been addressing inequalities between students in rural and urban areas in Ukraine since 2017 and is part of the global Teach for All network.
To meet the challenge, the non-governmental organization recruits dedicated and motivated young people to teach in under-resourced small communities. It provides these fellowship recipients with stipends as a financial incentive for their two-year teaching commitment, during which they also organize community-based projects.
In an interview with The Ukrainian Weekly, Oksana Matiiash, the CEO of Teach for Ukraine, explained that these teaching fellows (more than 80 since the program’s inception) have been assigned to more than 40 partner schools primarily in five regions of Ukraine – Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. She said that, besides providing quality instruction, the fellows serve as an inspiration and as “role models” for kids in rural areas, adding that the schoolchildren “see young people leaving their communities, looking for better opportunities. And by getting these young people [from Teach for Ukraine] into villages and small towns we can show our children that there are many people who care about their future and their education.”
The program is mutually beneficial, Ms. Matiiash says, as it gives the fellows “an opportunity to contribute to something that is crucial for the future of Ukraine.”
In collaboration with the World Bank, Teach for Ukraine has been piloting a new approach to addressing the problem of learning losses caused by long-term online learning and the disruptions of war, namely through tutoring in small groups.
A review of the program has shown that this type of “intervention adds almost 14 months of extra learning for children in math and almost 11 months of extra learning in the Ukrainian language,” Ms. Matiiash says.
The program is known in Ukrainian as Educational Soup (Osvitniy Sup) – a witty wordplay on the term “education support.”
Ms. Matiiash was one of 12 non-profit leaders and social entrepreneurs from around the globe who spent the 2023-2024 academic year at Columbia University in New York City as an Obama Foundation Scholar. In addition to taking courses that could enhance her work at Teach for Ukraine, she said it was an “opportunity to advocate, of course, about Ukraine but primarily about our children – the [country’s] future human capital,” which she did during her interactions with practitioners from U.S. philanthropy, academia, business and politics.
And yes, that included former U.S. President Barack Obama, said the native of Ternopil, Ukraine.
“We had a private roundtable with President Obama. I was really struck by the fact that he was so well-prepared, he knew who we [the scholars] are, he learned a fact from our biographies so he knew that I was doing Teach for Ukraine. … And I know that before the Obama Scholars are selected President Obama approves the list of the finalists. So, it’s a huge acknowledgment of our work.”
Besides engaging with the former president, Ms. Matiiash also had the chance to talk with Hillary Clinton – a former U.S. Secretary of State who currently leads the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia – and thank her for her support of Ukraine.
“It was great for me to be able to tell her in person that this is so important for us back at home,” says Ms. Matiiash.
Beyond its teaching fellowship program, Teach for Ukraine continues to ramp up its emergency response to the war with the help of donor organizations and philanthropists. These efforts include online tutoring classes, safe learning spaces for displaced children, in-person summer camps and well-being programs, thus far providing more than 20,000 children with academic and psycho-social support during the war.
When asked about how she copes with the devastation of the war, Ms. Matiiash related the story of one of the Teach for Ukraine fellows, Yulia Zdanovska, a young, gifted and award-winning mathematician and computer scientist who was killed in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Ms. Zdanovska had been teaching math in the village of Yuryivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region but was back home in Kharkiv when the war broke out and decided to join local humanitarian assistance efforts. She was killed by a Russian missile while she was volunteering at the regional state administration building. Ms. Zdanovska died at the age of 21.
“She wanted to make every child in Ukraine fall in love with math, that’s how passionate she was about her subject,” the CEO of Teach for Ukraine said.
“After her death,” Ms. Matiiash says, “I, personally, and my team – we decided that we are staying in Ukraine to continue supporting the education of children, their mental health, their well-being, no matter what. And it helps when you have meaning in your day-to-day life, when the world around is falling apart. I mean the blackouts, the constant air raid sirens. … The most important thing is that we have an important mission that we are focusing on and I think that’s why it’s possible for us to cope.”
The Kyiv city council has renamed a street in honor of Ms. Zdanovska. It is adjacent to one of the campuses of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, her alma mater. Formerly named after 18th century Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, the street is now another emblem of Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian imperial world.