The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called "domains," and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this…

Achieving equal learning opportunities for all students is a major policy goal in all countries. All children have the opportunity to obtain high quality education. Teachers become a key element in improving the quality of primary and secondary education This paper is based on secondary data information collected from various sources, namely…

As one of the most extensive education systems in the world, Indonesia has achieved significant progress to improve the educational outcomes in the last two decades. The government has managed to increase school access, funding, and a high rate of school enrollment that in line with the government's policy on 12 years of compulsory education. Like…

US Agency for International Development (USAID) believes that education is a foundational driver of development and fundamental to achieving self-reliance. When children and youth attend school and build skills they can use in the workforce and to navigate life, they are able to build more hopeful and prosperous futures for themselves, their…

Poor people are most likely to be disabled, and the exclusion of disabled people from education means that they are also more likely to remain poor. Despite calls for better data to inform the extension of education for disabled children, data in this field remain weak. This paper asks whether a national survey of disability prevalence is the best…

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is one of the world's leading educational research centres. Since it was established in 1930, ACER has built a strong reputation as a provider of reliable support and expertise to education policymakers and professional practitioners. Each year, ACER is involved in a large number of research…

Rural subregions of the developing countries are suffering from many physical and socioeconomic problems, including scarcity of basic education institutions. The shortage of education institutions extended distance between rural localities and education institutions. Hence, to curb this problem, this research is aimed to deal with the basic…

Educational research from the developed world is often used as the basis for policies and programs in the developing world. However, local contextual factors should be taken into consideration in any transfer of research findings. This study examines associations that socioeconomic status (SES) and the home literacy environment (HLE) have with…

Drawing upon recent work for the Commonwealth Secretariat and our ongoing comparative research, this article focuses upon the nature, impact and implications of contemporary development challenges for education in small states. It is argued that the post-Jomtien era has been dominated by international goals and targets that have focussed…

In an earlier policy brief, "Where is the Learning? Measuring Schooling Efforts in Developing Countries," the authors drew attention to what was labeled "the global learning crisis." While tremendous progress has been made over the past couple of decades to get tens of millions of additional children to enroll in school, progress in improving…

Since the 1940s, the concept of community participation has framed, mobilized, and legitimated national development agendas in the Singida Region of rural central Tanzania. Based on 19 months of ethnographic and archival research, this study examines the forms of community participation elicited through state and international development…

Between 1960 and 2010, Singapore's real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita skyrocketed from $4,383 to $55,862, while Jamaica's barely increased from $6,417 to $8,539. It is plausible that differing rates of GDP growth are associated with differences in the development of education systems but causally the linkage is not well understood. Using…

The global spread of national assessment testing activities, and the growing pressure to move beyond basic measures of participation in educational monitoring, means that student achievement measures are likely to become increasingly relevant indicators of systemic progress in the developing world. Using data from the CESSP project in Cambodia,…

This paper explores changing patterns of access to basic education in six Sub-Saharan Africa countries using data from Demographic and Health Surveys at two points in time. In general the analysis confirms that participation of children in schooling has increased over the last decade. However, access to education remains strongly associated with…

Primary education is essential for the economic development in any country. Most studies give more emphasis to the final output (such as literacy, enrolment etc.) rather than the delivery of the entire primary education system. In this paper, we study the school level data from an Indian district, collected under the official DISE statistics. We…