As Yogi Berra said, “It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” It is true some things are hard to predict, even as they are about to happen: few in 1988 predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall; few in 2009 saw the Arab Spring coming; few in the midst of the Cultural Revolution predicted the incredible economic rise of China. But we do know something about the quite distant future. We know exactly the state of basic education of the future generation. Why?
A new working paper from the RISE Indonesia Country Research Team has the incredible benefit of having panel data on learning—tracking the same children on what they know over time—a rarity in the development space.
Source: Luis Crouch, using data from EGRA learning assessments and other publications, and taking a stylized average across sets of countries.
On the eve of the 2015 United Nations conference on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of us (Eric Hanushek) wrote an article in Foreign Affairs giving the Conference some unsolicited advice. The article, “Teach the World,” urged that the global education goal, this time, focus on the right outcome.