| Title | Addressing the learning crisis: an emergent consensus |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Lant Pritchett (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.31389/lsepress.tlc.l |
| Landing page | https://doi.org/10.31389/lsepress.tlc.l |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Publisher | LSE Press |
| Published on | 2025-10-16 |
| Short abstract | Success can make a previous consensus not so much wrong as just irrelevant. The Washington Consensus joined in a broader consensus that governments need to spend on education in order to reach universal schooling to create human capital. But ‘spend to expand access’ has been so successful there is less and less space for additional improvements in education outcomes – the skills and competencies children need to acquire in school – through ‘access’. Global, national, and local actors agree on the need to increasingly focus on improving learning outcomes. Moreover, there is an emergent consensus that improving learning will require much more than just ‘more spend’ and that a substantial re-alignment of education systems from ‘expansion of access’ to ‘increased learning’ is needed. And, while there is not yet a consensus on the granular details (and may never be as success tends to be home-grown and adapted to context), there is increasing agreement around a set of principles that will drive sustained gains in improving learning outcomes. This chapter includes responses to Lant Pritchett by Pedro Carneiro and Miguel Urquiola. |
| Long abstract | Success can make a previous consensus not so much wrong as just irrelevant. The Washington Consensus joined in a broader consensus that governments need to spend on education in order to reach universal schooling to create human capital. But ‘spend to expand access’ has been so successful there is less and less space for additional improvements in education outcomes – the skills and competencies children need to acquire in school – through ‘access’. Global, national, and local actors agree on the need to increasingly focus on improving learning outcomes. Moreover, there is an emergent consensus that improving learning will require much more than just ‘more spend’ and that a substantial re-alignment of education systems from ‘expansion of access’ to ‘increased learning’ is needed. And, while there is not yet a consensus on the granular details (and may never be as success tends to be home-grown and adapted to context), there is increasing agreement around a set of principles that will drive sustained gains in improving learning outcomes. This chapter includes responses to Lant Pritchett by Pedro Carneiro and Miguel Urquiola. |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Lant Pritchett is a development economist from Idaho. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 and received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1988. He worked for the World Bank from 1988 to 2007, living in Indonesia 1998–2000 and India 2004–07. He taught at the HKS from 2000 to 2019, and from 2018 to 2023 he was the Research Director of the Research on Improving Systems of Education Programme at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He is currently a Visiting Professor at LSE in the School of Public Policy and the co-founder and Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships. His work spans a range of development topics including basic education, economic growth, state capability, labour mobility, development assistance (and more).
Pedro Carneiro is a Professor of Economics at University College London (UCL) and an economist in the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap). His research interests include development economics, labour economics, the economics of education, and microeconometrics. In the past he has examined issues such as the returns to education, human capital policy, and labour regulation in developing countries. He has studied poverty and education programmes in several countries in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Miguel Urquiola is Dean of Social Science and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has chaired Columbia’s Department of Economics and its Committee on the Economics of Education. He is also a faculty member at the SIPA, where he served as vice-dean. Outside Columbia, Urquiola is a Research Associate at the NBER and has held appointments at Cornell University, the World Bank, and the Bolivian Catholic University. He is a member of boards, such as that of the SSRC. Urquiola’s research is on the Economics of Education. It focuses on understanding how schools and universities compete and how educational markets differ from other markets economists study. He has written numerous journal articles on these issues and a book on why American universities excel at research: Markets, Minds, and Money (Harvard University Press, 2020).