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The Long Walk to School: International education goals in historical perspective

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Author Info
Michael A. Clemens (Center for Global Development)

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Abstract

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly-changing parental education levels determine children's school enrollment to a greater degree than education policy interventions. A succession of international meetings has nevertheless adopted a litany of utopian international goals for universal school enrollment and gender parity in education based on the idea that a correct education policy backed by sufficient cash could achieve the goals in short order. The latest of these, the Millennium Development Goals, call for universal primary schooling and full gender parity by 2015. This work quantifies how long it has taken countries rich and poor to make the transition towards high enrollments and gender parity. There are three central lessons. First, there is a remarkable uniformity of experience in the rates of enrollment increases, a reality from which which the various rounds of goals appear entirely detached. Second, many countries that have not raised enrollments fast enough to meet the goals have in fact raised enrollments extraordinarily rapidly by historical standards and deserve celebration rather than condemnation. The very few poor countries that have raised enrollment figures at the rates envisioned by the goals have done so in many cases by accepting dramatic declines in schooling quality, failing large numbers of students, or other practices that cast doubt on the sustainability or exportability of their techniques. Third, aid- supported education policies can help within limits, and their performance should be judged in the context of country-specific, historically-grounded goals. But a country's broader development strategy outside the classroom matters much more than education policy.

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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Development and Comp Systems with number 0403007.

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Length: 74 pages
Date of creation: 23 Mar 2004
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Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpdc:0403007

Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 74. Adobe Acrobat 5.0 PDF, 430K
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Related research
Keywords: schooling; education; millennium; development; goals; history; human; capital; structural; long; gender; africa; targets;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
N30 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Income, and Wealth - - - General, International, or Comparative
O19 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - International Linkages to Development; Role of International Organizations

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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Charles Kenny, 2009. "There's more to life than money: Exploring the levels|growth paradox in income and health," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(1), pages 24-41. [Downloadable!]
  2. Cynthia B. Lolyd, 2004. "The Changing Transitions to Adulthood in a Comparative Perspective: the Case of Pakistan," The Pakistan Development Review, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, vol. 43(4), pages 441-467. [Downloadable!]
  3. Michael Clemens & Charles Kenny & Todd Moss, 2004. "The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success," Development and Comp Systems 0405011, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Sun Go & Peter H. Lindert, 2007. "The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools," NBER Working Papers 13335, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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