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Review of Lant Pritchet's The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning
The second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of achieving universal primary education by 2015 has largely been accomplished. Only about fifty-five million of one billion school-aged children worldwide are not in school. However, poor educational quality means that many students in developing countries are entering the workforce at a disadvantage and governments are unable to realize the productive potential of their populations. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 250 million children are failing to "make it to grade 4 or do not reach the minimum level of learning."1 This is a "stylized fact" according to Luis Crouch, who prefers the more accurate statement: "At minimum 200-300 million children [are] in school but learning almost nothing."2 In any case, it is time to shiftour focus from universal schooling to universal education.
In his book The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning, Lant Pritchett lays out the evidence that in many countries, students in school are simply not learning. He cites data from the 2009 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) showing that in India, of five students who enter the fourth grade not knowing how to read, only one will learn that year.3 At a meeting of parents and educators that Pritchett attended in Uttar Pradesh in 2006, a father accused his son's school principal of betrayal: "Without school, I had no skills other than those of a donkey. But you told us that if I sent my son to school, his life would be different from mine. ...Only now I find out that he is thirteen years old and doesn't know anything. His life won't be different. He will labor like a brute, just like me."4 In Malawi, 83 percent of children have completed primary school but only 34 percent of children are actually numerate. 5
Pritchett argues that these dismal learning figures exist-and are allowed to persist-because of the structure of education systems. He adapts the "spider versus starfish" metaphor for organizations from Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's 2006 work, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.6 In spider systems, "all information created...