One hundred and eighty-nine countries have committed themselves to eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at eradicating extreme poverty and improving the welfare of their peoples by the year 2015. The second of the goals is: 'Achieve universal primary education, ' with the specific target of ensuring that, by 2015, boys and girls everywhere will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. This book assesses whether the Millennium Goals can be met. Specifically it asks: Where do we stand today in relation to the target of universal primary completion? Is universal primary...

This book is about the threats to education quality in the developing world that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews the observed phenomenon of service delivery failures in public education: cases where programs and policies increase the inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts - in schools and classrooms. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures across low and middle-income countries. And it further develops the conceptual model posited in the World Development Report 2004: that a root cause of low-quality and...

Over the past 15 years, Brazil has introduced a consistent program of reforms of its education system, progressively aligning the educational attainment of its labor force with that of other middle income countries and introducing advanced student assessment and monitoring systems.