CGD Policy Blogs

The Millennium Development Goal of universal primary-school completion has been successful. By 2011, 90 percent of countries had already met the goal; only 19 of 212 countries are unlikely to meet it by 2015.

Colleagues and friends of CGD:

This week I started leave from CGD for three-plus months, to teach at Williams College. For those of you from the US west coast and outside the United States, Williams is among America’s most selective (and expensive!) small liberal arts colleges.  It’s nestled in a tiny town in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts.

My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Justin Sandefur, a research fellow at CGD whose recent work has focused on education in Kenya. One study examines the returns of private schooling, while another looks at the effects of contract teachers on student test scores. The results of these studies highlight shortcomings in public education, including failures of accountability and a dense bureaucracy.

This post originally appeared on Owen Abroad.

George Bush famously asked, ‘Is our children learning?’. That’s also the question by Uwezo, a coalition of NGOs working in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Their report published today makes dismal reading about the quality of schools.

First, a word about the report. This is not a study by the World Bank, or a group of donors. It is a study by Uwezo, an East African initiative hosted by three NGO networks: TEN/MET in Tanzania, WERK in Kenya and UNNGOF in Uganda, with overall quality assurance and management support from Twaweza. They conducted their own survey (standardized across the countries) to test the literacy and numeracy of more than 100,000 children, the largest ever survey of its kind in the region. When citizens themselves are telling us about whether their public services work, we should be paying attention.