Every book has to have a story, a simple story that tells why the author wrote the book, why people should read it, and what the book says. Here is my book’s story. In 2006 I was living in New Delhi, working for the World Bank. I had occasion to take an overnight train to eastern Uttar Pradesh to visit an education project that was being run by Pratham, an Indian NGO that works on improving learning of the basics; the program was undergoing a rigorous evaluation by researchers from MIT. The Pratham team would visit a village and do...

The goal of education is to equip children to flourish as adults—as parents and caregivers to the next generation of youth, as participants in their communities and societies, as active citizens in their polity, and as productive workers in their economy. The challenge of formal education is to supplement what parents can provide and, in a few formative years, build the foundation for a long and successful lifetime. The fundamental measure of success of any system of basic education is whether each successive cohort of children emerges from childhood equipped with the skills and capabilities for the world it...

The easiest thing for any successful social movement to do is to ask formore,especially more of the same. More of the same provides more to existing interests without demanding anything new. As public schooling has been one of the most universally successful social movements in history, it is tempting to try to solve the problem of too little learning by asking for more schooling.

The beauty of a universalschoolingtarget is that more is an answer. Once a school has just been builthere,replicating it—its building, equipment, and staffing—overthereis the obvious next...

It would be nice (and easy) if the goal of universal education could be met in the same way as the goal of universal schooling: apply more of the same, and eventually children will be equipped for the twenty-first century. If this were so, then the same coalition of advocacy, altruism, and self-interest could segue from a schooling goal, like the Millennium Development Goal, to learning and education goals without innovation, disruption, or change from the existing “access axis,” which has been successful in putting together a powerful coalition for expanding schooling. But a wish is not a plan, much...

But it will dosomegood, and what harm can come of it? This is the common reaction to the arguments of chapter 2 and chapter 3 that just expanding years of schooling and education management information systems (EMIS)– visible inputs alone will do little to raise student learning. Once the problems of learning achievement are recognized, the instinct is to dosomethingto address the problem, and expanding inputs is readily at hand and easy to adopt asthesolution. Arguments against input expansion are seen as pessimistic and fatalist: “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

Doing the seemingly...

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Chapter 3 argued that “more of the same” is not on track to reach meaningful learning goals. Chapter 4 argued that the existing large, top-down, input-oriented ecosystems of schooling (metaphorical “spider” systems) present solutions as problems and hence bring as many problems as solutions. But this leaves the question of why countries have the school systems they have. Before entertaining notions of sweeping systemic reform, we ought to have a good account of why things are the way they are. In Voltaire’sCandide,Dr. Pangloss’s narrative—that things are the way they are...

Our lives have been transformed by two different logics that have brought starkly different outcomes: Moore’s law and Baumol’s cost disease.

We are today awash in computing power, electronic memory, and communication bandwidth. The typical American teenager plays games with more computing power than NASA used to send a man to the moon—and back (which was the impressive part). Cell phones have penetrated the planet; at their peak expansion more cell lines were added each month in India than the total number of landlines available in 1994. The bandwidth to share text, images, and video is nothing short of...