Towards a right to learn: concepts and measurement of global education poverty
Michelle Kaffenberger,
Lant Pritchett and
Martina Viarengo
Chapter 20 in Research Handbook on Measuring Poverty and Deprivation, 2023, pp 212-223 from Edward Elgar Publishing
Abstract:
The idea that children have a “right to education” has been widely accepted since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (United Nations, 1948) and periodically reinforced since. The “right to education” has always, explicitly or implicitly, encompassed a “right to learn.” Measures of schooling alone, such as enrollment or grade attainment, without reference to skills, capabilities, and competencies acquired, are inadequate for defining education or education poverty. Because of education’s cumulative and dynamic nature, education poverty needs an “early” standard (e.g., grade 3 or 4 or age 8 or 10) and a “late” standard (e.g., grade 10 or 12 or ages 15 and older). Further, as with all international poverty definitions, there needs to be a low, extreme standard, which is found almost exclusively in low- and middle-income countries and can inform prioritization and action, and a higher “global” standard, against which even some children in high income countries would be considered education poor but which is considered a reasonable aspiration for all children. As assessed against any proposed standard, we show there is a massive learning crisis: students spend many years in school and yet do not reach an early standard of mastery of foundational skills nor do they reach any reasonable global minimum standard by the time they emerge from school. The overwhelming obstacle to addressing education poverty today is not enrollment/grade attainment nor inequality in learning achievement but the fact that the typical learning profile is just too shallow for children to reach minimum standards.
Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Geography; Research Methods; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800883451/9781800883451.00032.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20574_20
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().