Enrollment without learning: Teacher effort, knowledge, and skill in primary schools in Africa

摘要

School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills (Hungi et al. 2010; PASEC 2015; ASER 2014)—a state of affairs that UNESCO (2013) dubbed the "global learning crisis." For example, after more than three years of compulsory language teaching, four out of five students in Mozambique and Nigeria cannot read simple words of Portuguese and English, respectively. Only one-quarter of Indian students in grade four can manage tasks—such as basic subtraction—that are part of the curriculum for the second grade. Roughly half of the students in Uganda, after three years of mathematics teaching, cannot place numbers between 0 and 999 in order (Bold et al. 2017a; ASER 2013).