The last half-century has been pretty good for children. A child born today is likely to live a longer, healthier life than her forebears, and unlike them, she will probably go to school — and not just for a year or two before returning to a life of manual labor. In 1960 an average adult in a developing country had just 1.6 years of education, but by 2000 it was 5.4 years. A child born today, even in one of the poorest countries in the world, can expect to attend nearly nine years of school.

Where her grandparents were often illiterate, she will learn to read and write. Where accessing information was once impossible in poor and remote regions, she will be able to use the internet and better integrate into a global economy. Where a generation before struggled to access the labor market beyond their hometown, many of today’s youth will seek greater opportunities in the world beyond.

This is an accomplishment for which the world can be justly proud. There are still failings — 60 million students who should be in primary school are not — but by and large the fight for universal education has been won. A world in which only a privileged few received an education has become, in half a century, a world in which almost everyone does.

So what’s the problem?

That rosy story is more complicated than it first seems. More students are attending school, but it’s not clear that more students are learning. Some evidence even suggests the opposite — that students learn less even as they receive more years of schooling. And despite the enormous investment in education over the past few decades, when we dive into the numbers, that’s roughly where our evidence on the impacts of education ends. We lack strong data to show that increased schooling leads to key life outcomes — for example, increased earnings. So what’s going on in schools in the developing world? And can we even agree on the outcomes we want? 

So what’s the current state of affairs in developing-country schools?

It is very clear that more children are going to school. As recently as 1991, only half of primary school-aged children in sub-Saharan Africa were in school; by 2009, 75% were. That number has continued to rise since — even in some of the world’s poorest countries, some 80-90% of kids start school. The number of children out of school and the number of people with no education at all are falling dramatically.

Governments and parents alike have put tremendous effort into making this happen. In sub-Saharan Africa, government expenditure on education rose from 2.6% of GDP in 2000 to a peak of 3.8% in 2017 (though it has since fallen). This compares to perhaps 5% in high-income countries — and these countries face far starker tradeoffs with health and other departments. ¹ Parents, too, make significant sacrifices to give their children the best shot at a better future. The average Ugandan spends more than 10% of their income on sending their child to school. Some 60% of Liberians and half of Zambians name paying for school fees as their largest financial worry.

Unfortunately, what they are getting for their sacrifices can be pretty grim. Developing-country schools are not simply worse-funded versions of developed-country schools.

Consider perhaps the most basic measure of a functioning school: that there are teachers in the school teaching classes. On any given day, nearly a quarter of teachers in rural India simply do not show up. And when they do turn up, they’re often not teaching. A World Bank report found that even when Kenyan teachers were present, they were absent from their classrooms 42% of the time.

Students, too, are regularly absent. In Kenya, one in ten students skips school on any given day; in India, it’s one in three; in Mozambique, it’s over half. And there’s a very real chance these numbers are underestimates; students and parents claim that they show up ² more often than unannounced spot checks would suggest.

OK, but when both students and teachers are there, kids are learning, right? Well…

There are, of course, more resource constraints in low-income countries than in rich-country classrooms; class sizes are bigger, air conditioning is rare (so students are still trying to learn when it is 40 degrees), ³ and textbooks are often shared and out of date. Some students attend school simply because they will be fed there — but hunger still keeps students out of school in countries without school feeding programs. These are not problems unique to poor countries, of course, but they are vastly exacerbated in settings where per-pupil education spending is only $50 a year.

Even if we ignore these constraints, developing-country schools struggle with ineffective curricula and overly prescriptive pedagogy. National curriculums rarely meet students where they are, and few students are at “grade level,” but teachers are still instructed to teach as if they are. Instruction consists largely of memorization. Rather than foster critical thinking, teachers effectively train students’ ability to repeat back what the teacher wants to hear. And perhaps worst of all, students are often taught in a language they don’t even speak.

Parents want their kids to learn English. ⁴ This is logical; in most countries, the best jobs go to English speakers. But teaching kids in a language that neither they nor their teachers speak does not lead to better outcomes — or even a working knowledge of English. Instead, it results in students learning neither English nor their native language.

For instance, in Rwanda, English is the official language of instruction across all grade levels. Yet just 38% of teachers have a working command of the language, and so Rwandan schools end up as a comedy of errors. Teachers who don’t speak English attempt to teach children who also don’t speak English in English, out of English language textbooks. ⁵

Perhaps unsurprisingly, students in these circumstances learn little of the basic skills required for further educational success. Somewhere between 70-80% of children in primary school in a low-income country cannot read a simple story. More than half will still be unable to read by age 10. In a sample of 51 developing countries, about half of women will leave school unable to decode a sentence like “parents love their children.” In some countries, it is substantially worse: 75% of children in second grade in Malawi aren’t able to recognize the local word for “mother” and less than 10% of young women in Nigeria or Sierra Leone can read a sentence like “farming is hard work.”

And it’s not just that teachers simply don’t focus on reading but do impart other skills. Up to 70% of rural Indian third graders cannot subtract, and 70% of fifth graders cannot do division. Just 18% of children in third grade in the median low- or middle-income country have foundational numeracy skills. One might imagine that schooling would allow children to grow into adults who might operate a small business or improve their farming techniques, but neither seems terribly likely when they have not mastered arithmetic.

It’s possible this is just temporary. It is difficult for school systems to go from serving under half the population to trying to enroll all eligible children while maintaining quality at scale. But the problem seems to be getting worse, not better — the quality of education in developing countries is declining over time, ⁶ particularly over the last couple of decades. The likelihood of a fifth grader being literate has actually decreased in a vast majority of developing countries — by 8.5% on average — despite the chance of that fifth grader being in school having increased.

So what are parents (and students) getting for 10% of their income? Well, it’s a bit unclear. Students likely learn something at school, but systematic data is hard to come by. Still, it’s probably better to be in school than not, right? 

Most parents aren’t really interested in their children learning for the sake of learning, though. School fees are an investment. When parents in Nepal, Bangladesh, Zambia, and Uganda were surveyed about the benefits of education, the most common answer in all countries was that school leads to better jobs. And if one’s ultimate goal is higher wages for students in developing countries, we simply do not know that learning more academic skills is the key.

Most research suggests that students who attend more school make more over their lifetime, but the evidence base isn’t strong enough to demonstrate those gains come from learning per se. It might be that kids who stuck through more school were always going to do better in the labor market, that it is not the schooling that earns them higher wages but that the type of student who enjoys school also enjoys work. This is statistical selection — the students who go to school and the students drop out differ in important ways, and that is what drives the difference in wages, rather than the experience of school.

This is at least somewhat true. Students whose parents went to school and students whose parents earn more than average are much more likely to continue in school than students without those advantages. Those advantages are also correlated with lifetime earnings, so school attendance will end up correlated with lifetime earnings.

When economists attempt to control for every possible observable variable they can easily measure, attending more school does still seem to lead to higher earnings. The current best guess from cross-sectional data is that going to school for an extra year (in a developing country) boosts your lifetime earnings about 9%.

But the gold standard of evidence isn’t controlling for more variables; it’s a randomized control trial — preferably many of them. And the limited RCT evidence on schooling in sub-Saharan Africa suggests little to no wage benefit from attending more school (though there are substantial health benefits). It is within the range of possibilities — and even supported by existing evidence — that parents are sacrificing 10% of their income on an investment with no wage returns.

Even in the rich world, there is some disagreement about the purpose of education. Is school really just for the monetary returns? Maybe — or maybe it’s to develop the student as a whole person. Maybe education is a “search for the truth,” acquisition of knowledge about the world. But if it is, then what knowledge should one acquire and for what purpose? Perhaps schools should be focusing on teaching character and resilience, or maybe they should instead focus on “real-world skills.”

Policymakers in developing countries tend to believe the primary purpose of schooling is none of these. Instead of focusing on either economic returns or personal development, they would prefer schools to create dutiful citizens.

In a discrete choice experiment in which bureacrats in education ⁷ were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. ⁸ For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.

This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.

In 1899, the U.S. commissioner of education, William T. Harris, said exactly this. He wished U.S. schools had the "appearance of a machine," one where the goal was to teach students “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others." At that time, emphasis was considerably more on the “dutiful” part of “dutiful citizens.”

Developing-country schools are trying to achieve much the same ends. Students learn to memorize, to obey, and to not question — but they do not particularly learn to read or write. But then again, that was never the goal — developing countries are following the path trod on by developed countries. Just like developed countries, they will try to “teach ordinary people obedience, respect for the law, [and] love of order.” ⁹

This is, of course, not bureaucrats’ only goal in education; few people believe schools should be entirely tools of state propaganda. The same study suggests that policymakers’ second priority is to shepherd pupils through secondary school. This, too, they are making progress on. ¹⁰ As noted earlier, expansion of access is the great success story of education over the last half-century.

It is in their third priority — literacy — where developing-country schools still struggle. And given budget constraints in public school systems around the world, it’s perhaps not surprising that this has become a “nice to have,” rather than an essential.

After all, two out of three ain’t bad; it is easy to see why bureaucrats with these priorities would look at their schools and think that things are going pretty well. Kids are in school, they are following instructions, access to “free and equitable education” ¹¹ can be checked off the list, and bureaucrats can move on to other problems. 

But country bureaucrats and parents are not the only people who care about schooling outcomes. International donors are major players in the education world, and they care about learning far more than they care about citizenship.

Again, one can see their point. In the developed world, it almost goes without saying that you go to school in order to learn academic skills. These skills — referred to as “cognitive skills” in the academic literature — are a major determinant of what you earn as an adult. The more you learn, the more you earn. This is true even holding the absolute level of education constant; even if you have the same level of education as someone else, if you know more, you are likely to make (quite a bit) more money. The labor market in rich countries really rewards cognitive skills.

If school is the primary place people gain those skills, the purpose of school is then to impart as many cognitive skills as possible. Learning is the entire purpose of schooling — not indoctrination, not mere attendance, but learning.

And there is at least some good news there: We largely know what developing countries could do to remedy their dismal learning levels.

The first — and perhaps most obvious — thing to do is teach children where they are. In developing-country classrooms, it is common to teach according to a standard curriculum — all second graders learn the same thing, all third graders learn the same thing, and so on. But learning levels vary a lot within classrooms in the developing world, and it’s relatively common for one class to contain many grade levels worth of variance in terms of what students know. It’s not that helpful for a student still struggling with simple sentences to be handed a chapter book or for one still learning addition to be asked to do division. Mostly, students just tune out the things they don’t understand.

Targeting lessons to what students know — rather than what their official grade level is — is considerably more effective. This has been shown to be successful at scale in India. In one case, students learned as much in a 10-day Teaching at the Right Level “learning camp” as they would have in four years of “regular school.” It’s harder to implement TaRL across entire school systems, but some governments have had success in limited roll-outs. When Botswana tried implementing it in schools, the percentage of students who could add and subtract increased seven-fold — and they expect to implement TaRL programming in all their primary schools by 2025.

But this is difficult. TaRL requires restructuring the classroom entirely. One no longer has a third-grade class full of students the same age; now, you may have children of very different ages trying to learn together, and that can be difficult to manage. If that isn’t practical, a better curriculum is easier, and that, too, helps. Providing some of the resources rich-world country teachers take for granted — like prewritten lesson plans, exams, and assignments — to teachers in developing countries can improve the quality of teaching and the amount of learning happening in the classroom.

It’s not quite as easy as it sounds, as these lesson plans do have to be appropriate for the context. But when done well, they can reduce the burden on teachers and can result in much better learning outcomes. 

Bureaucrats want students to become good citizens. International donors want them to learn. And their parents just want them to lead better lives. Even if school does help children earn more, though — and as we've seen, that's a big if — it's also not clear how much learning plays a role. International donors might be focusing on the wrong set of metrics entirely.

Wages might be primarily driven by increases in cognitive skills, and thus, increasing learning levels would also increase wages. But much of the evidence of high returns to learning — and thus the emphasis on learning as a way to increase incomes — comes from rich countries. An American who is one standard deviation above average at math will make 28% more over their lifetime, but the labor market for a math whiz in rural Kenya is quite different from the one faced by a New York City math genius. It’s not clear that the high returns to numeracy in New York necessarily apply in Garissa County.

Wages could be driven by so-called noncognitive skills, otherwise known as “soft skills.” They may involve motivation (e.g., turning in your homework on time), integrity (e.g., not cheating on exams), or interpersonal interaction. In the developed countries, these skills may matter even more than cognitive skills — and the returns are rising over time.

If noncognitive skills matter more than cognitive skills, developing-country schools look quite a bit better. Attendance is up, after all, and attendance might be enough to impart noncognitive skills.

For many students, attending school is their first interaction with the state, and for some, it will even be their first substantial interaction with people outside their family. Even if students aren’t learning much reading or writing while they’re there, students are likely learning how to play well with others, how to share, how to follow directions, and how to interact with authority figures. Donor-favored learning interventions don’t particularly focus on those skills, so it’s likely they wouldn’t have significant impact on other outcomes if noncognitive skills are what really matter.

Most likely, both cognitive and noncognitive skills matter at least somewhat to your lifetime earnings. Grit and ingenuity are probably valuable — but so are reading and writing. How much does each type of skill matter in developing countries? It’s unclear; there are no randomized control trials that tease the two apart. We’re lacking credible causal evidence on how much — or if — learning more in school impacts your later wages in low- and middle-income countries. ¹²

We can try to make guesses based on developed-country data, but this isn’t great; Uganda’s job market is very different from Sweden’s. We can also try to get at the question with cross-sectional data, ¹³ but this, too, has flaws. It is very hard to control for noncognitive skills when considering the returns to cognitive skills, and vice versa.

So, really, we just don’t know what you get from education in a developing country. We don’t know how much more you are likely to earn if you stick through high school. We don’t know if you’ll even make any more money. If you do make more money from going to more school, we don’t really know why. It could be that you just came from a family that was always going to use their connections for you. Or it could be because you’ve learned to read and write. Or it could be because you’ve learned to manage your own time and cooperate with others.

All are plausible, but we don’t know which one is true — or if all of them are a little bit true. We can’t know if we’re succeeding unless we understand what success means.