UNESCO
2002
This new report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reviews international readiness to attain the target of "education for all" that was set at a Dakar forum in 2000. That meeting produced a "framework" of six extremely ambitious goals for all the planet's countries to attain by 2015 (e.g. "comprehensive early childhood care and education," universal primary education "of good quality," a 50% gain in adult literacy, "especially for women"). This report doesn't actually report on progress since Dakar because 1999 or 2000 is the most recent available data for most of the indicators. Rather, it seeks (in 193 pages) to appraise the prospects of reaching those goals. The sobering if unsurprising bottom line: there's a big gap between the 83 countries (mostly wealthy) that are "on track" and the other 70 (nearly all poor) that aren't. (Some of the latter are actually regressing.) The reasons are numerous, often having to do with macro-political developments, war, and the general economic circumstances in which countries find themselves. One widespread education problem, however, is a big teacher shortage, with an estimated three million more instructors needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Like most UNESCO reports, this one calls for lots more foreign aid while staying pretty much "inside the box" in terms of education delivery systems. You will not, for example, find much here about the potential of low-cost private schools such as James Tooley has found in third-world countries [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=36#520], nor anything about how distance learning might jump right over the infrastructure problems associated with building and staffing thousands of rural and village schools. Particularly with the United States rejoining UNESCO, however, readers will want to reacquaint themselves with that organization's work in education, some of which is valuable - especially on the statistics front - but much of which is unimaginative. Download this report at http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/monitoring/monitoring_2002.shtml.
