Publication

This paper quantifies how long it has taken countries to make the transition toward high school enrollments and gender parity. The author notes a remarkable uniformity of experience in the rates of enrollment increases, that many countries that have not raised enrollments fast enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals have raised enrollments extraordinarily rapidly by historical standards and that aid-supported education policies should be judged in the context of country-specific, historically-grounded goals. The author insists that a country’s broader development strategy outside the classroom matters much more than education policy.