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Blog Post
August 07, 2023
As Lao Tsu put it a couple of thousand years ago, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” One of those single steps in the journey towards a quality education—the goal of the fourth Sustainable Development Goal—is children simply attending school. While attending school regularly ...
Blog Post
August 01, 2023
There’s a lot out there on how to improve educational outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. On the one hand, one may be tempted to lean into Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg’s critique: “There are so many ‘facts’ now available about how to fix education, that anyone…can easily gravita...
Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...
Blog Post
July 11, 2023
There is no substitute for an effective teacher. Great teachers make an enormous difference in their students’ learning outcome s: in Ecuador, teachers who had higher quality interactions with their kindergartners improved their language and math skills. Just as importantly, great teachers help stud...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
The global debate around high-stakes exams is strongly influenced by research from high-income countries. That research emphasises who gets sorted into the “best” schools. An alternative perspective that hasn’t received enough attention takes exams as artificial bottlenecks that prevent many childre...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
UNESCO tells us that only one in seven low- and middle-income countries knows how much learning has been lost due to COVID school closures. Where there has been no measurement, simulations of learning loss are beginning to take the place of empirical facts. Yet countries examine millions of kids eac...
Blog Post
June 20, 2023
This is the third of our biennial updates on global education aid finance. In these posts we examine aid data from the OECD, analysing how much aid is going to education, where it is allocated, by who, and through what channels. The latest available data, which we use for this analysis, is from 2021...