NPR – Marc Silver
“It seems like a simple goal: All kids should go to primary school. People began talking about it in the 1960s. And they kept talking about it. “Everyone thought it was pretty doable, it wasn’t too big of a deal,” recalls Aaron Benavot, director of UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report. But for lots of reasons — cutbacks on government spending, no schoolhouse within an easy commute — it just wasn’t happening. So in 2000, 164 nations got together and pledged “Education For All” by 2015…Today, the report card came out. According to the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 58 million children do not attend primary school. As the BBC put it: “World fails to reach millennium education targets.”…Maybe it’s better to say: Let’s use a yardstick to figure out how much progress has been made. Has the pace of change accelerated from the 1990s to the period after 2000? And we have many instances where the evidence suggests the pace of change has quickened. Many countries have made substantial progress even if we haven’t reached targets.”(more)