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This page discusses the role of the U.S. Department, providing a brief history of the Department as well as a descrption of the Department’s mission and staffing.

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2. EVERYONE READ: Mission of the US Dept. of Education

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2. EVERYONE READ: Mission of the US Dept. of Education

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Mission of the U.S. Department of Education

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ED’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

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3. EVERYONE READ: The US Dept. of Education, Explained

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3. EVERYONE READ: The US Dept. of Education, Explained

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National Council of Teachers of English (P-12): All position statements

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National Council of Teachers of English (P-12): All position statements

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NCTE position statements aims to support its members as they navigate changes that bring the latest thinking and research for best practices.

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Position Statement on Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (IPOC) in English and Language Arts Materials

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Position Statement on Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (IPOC) in English and Language Arts Materials

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The following position statement on Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (IPOC) in English and Language Arts Materials is a revision of Non-White Minorities in English and Language Arts Materials (itself a revision of the Criteria for Teaching Materials in Reading and Literature). The original version was first accepted by the Executive Committees of the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1970. The revised statement was then officially adopted by the NCTE Board of Directors at the annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 26, 1978. Since this groundbreaking inception, some necessary changes have occurred. Specifically, within certain contexts, publishers have been intentionally inclusive with providing and producing various diverse materials and resources with their products and advertisements. Likewise, teachers have created spaces and opportunities for their students to learn from literature and scholarship that highlight the experiences of multiethnic individuals, communities, and organizations. Even with these advances, problems still remain that need to be further explored. This revision outlines existing problems and tensions while offering possible solutions. Both the original (1970) and revised (1978) statements were prepared by the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, directed by Ernece Kelly. We hope that you will share this newest version with others in your professional networks and beyond-teachers, students, artists, community leaders or organizations, librarians, scholar-activists, and other thought leaders. In doing so, you will be contributing to the humanizing practices of seeking to sustain more equitable and just practices within and across classroom and school contexts.
STATEMENT
Indigenous communities and People of Color in the United States, including Native Americans and Alaska Natives, Pacific Islanders, Asian Americans, Blacks, Chicanx, Puerto Ricans, and others, continue to suffer debilitating and systemic discrimination in jobs, housing, civil rights, and education. Part of this discrimination takes place in the form of erasure, and these communities continue to face a school curriculum that, for them, frequently downplays or does not include their communities' work and contributions. Ironically, it is also a curriculum which, in a different fashion, deprives white students and teachers by denying them opportunities to gain a more complete and accurate picture of the diverse and intricately connected constellations of histories and literatures of the United States. While some strides have been made, that work is incomplete, and the still-existing structural inequalities within education continue to make an impact on all students.

During the course of their education, students acquire more than skills and knowledge; they also find and continue to modify images of themselves, as they form attitudes toward other persons, races, and cultures. To be sure, the school experience is not the sole force that shapes self-images, nor does it totally influence one's attitude toward others. At the same time, research has demonstrated the substantial role that education plays in student self-perception in relationship to both their own race/culture/ethnicity and that of others. Therefore, to the extent that school does exert influence, it is essential that its materials foster positive student self-images deeply rooted in a sense of personal dignity. Additionally, school materials should also foster the development of attitudes grounded in respect for and understanding of the diverse cultures of American society. Classroom teachers are immediately responsible for continuing action to accomplish these ends. However, curriculum planners, textbook selection committees, local, state, and national education authorities, as well as designers of learning systems and publishers are equally responsible and obligated to ensure that more affirming and validating practices are represented in the work.
CURRICULUM CONCERNS
Unfortunately, the same problems which existed in the 1960s when ethnic studies movements began to challenge the instruction about and of IPOC in the United States still persist. Namely, the lack and misrepresentation of IPOC in US literature, particularly youth literature and culture, continue in the creation of materials today. Often, print materials (general anthologies, basal readers, language arts kits, etc.) and nonprint materials (slides, study prints, films, filmstrips, videos, illustrations in texts, etc.) used in English and language arts instruction are distorted by

a failure to account for the rich range of genres within IPOC traditions, including those generated by youth, such as storytelling, performance, poetry, novels, and zines.

misrepresentation of histories, knowledges, and lived experiences of IPOC communities because of tokenism, given inclusion and celebration of only popular works by a few "acceptable" nonwhite writers.

inclusion of demeaning, insensitive, or inaccurate depictions of marginalized and minoritized communities.

biased book reviews and sometimes even scholarship available to literacy educators resulting from inadequate inclusion of and teaching on IPOC literatures and communities in English departments and library and teacher education programs.

lack of complex understanding of the contributions of IPOC writers and cultural producers to US literary and cultural traditions.

RECOMMENDATIONS Book editors and publishers should make certain that

1. anthology editors should strive to include writing and authors that support a more holistic view of the Americas and the United States, specifically as an area affected by settler colonialism in which IPOC populations have long-standing literary and cultural traditions within and without US borders. Selective tokenism is no longer a relevant form of inclusion, and diversifying reading and classroom materials is necessary.

2. texts represent Indigenous peoples and People of Color in a fashion which respects their dignity as human beings and accurately mirrors their contributions to American culture, history, and letters, meaning that depictions of these communities should be balanced and realistic.

3. robust and appropriate contextual materials and resources are included and made easily available to educators and students.

4. illustrations and photographs of Indigenous peoples and People of Color accurately portray historical and socioeconomic diversity and do not play purposefully or inadvertently to stereotype.

5. dialect is realistic, consistent, and appropriate to the setting and characters.

6. editorial and critical commentary include the roles played by Indigenous and POC writers in literary developments.

7. texts include criticism by Indigenous and POC critics on the works of white as well as nonwhite writers.

8. historical commentary and interpretations include the range of minority perspectives on social and political history.

Teachers and administrators should ask whether

1. their English and language arts curricula include more than token representation of Indigenous and POC writers and/or critics.

2. efforts are consistently made in the classroom to encourage active use of materials which have more than a token representation of Indigenous and POC writers/critics.

3. efforts are consistently made to incorporate robust contextual materials that appropriately frame Indigenous and POC's contributions.

4. illustrations or photographs of Indigenous peoples and People of Color in the materials are nonstereotyped and unsentimental.

5. illustrations or photographs of Indigenous peoples and People of Color show them in a variety of roles, including positions of authority.

6. the dialogue of Indigenous peoples and People of Color is realistic (not exclusively stereotyped).

7. discussions of US literary, social, and political history examine the constellation of relationships between white, Indigenous, and POC communities.

8. discussions of US literary, social, and political history are also by Indigenous peoples or People of Color.

If teachers and administrators had to answer NO to one or more of these questions, the material being used probably conveys a distorted picture of the United States and its literatures. The NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English urges that such material be balanced by other materials that present positive images of Indigenous peoples and People of Color. When adopting new instructional materials, teachers are urged to use adoption criteria that will ensure that classroom materials accurately reflect the literatures of America.

Should teachers and administrators elect to replace their present materials, the Committee strongly urges them to write the publishers informing them of their reasons for doing so.
RESOURCES

1. https://www.reclaimingnativetruth.com/ for resources on research to dispel misperceptions of Indigenous communities and nations

2. First Nations Development Institute Resource for Allies: https://www.firstnations.org/knowledge-center/?search=&post-type=&pub-categories=reclaiming-native-truth

3. The interactive Native Land Map: https://native-land.ca

4. Debbie Reese's blog, American Indians in Children's Literature, with short essays on popular fiction and annual recommendations for all reading levels: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com

5. Indigenous comic books and video games: https://www.cbc.ca/parents/learning/view/how-the-comic-book-and-gaming-community-is-reclaiming-indigenous-perspectiv

6. An Indigenous game perspective on Oregon Trail-type games, "When Rivers Were Trails": https://www.wpr.org/when-rivers-were-trails-puts-indigenous-spin-oregon-trail

7. Resources on Native American boarding schools: https://www.boardingschoolhealing.org

8. Indian Education resource list and links, including pedagogy websites, Indigenous newspapers and magazines, and more: https://www.oregon.gov/ode/students-and-family/equity/NativeAmericanEducation/Pages/Indian-Education-Resources.aspx

9. On "Bioarcheaology, DNA, and Indigeneity" at https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/project-components/working-groups/bioarchaeology-genetics-and-ip-working-group/

10. All My Relations podcast, on topics ranging from fashion to mascots to DNA tests: https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com

11. On traditional and contemporary Indigenous foodways: https://toastedsisterpodcast.com

12. Project 562, a multiyear project to photograph contemporary members of the more than 562 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States: http://www.project562.com

13. Educator resources from the National Museum of the American Indian, including Native Knowledge 360: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360

14. Adrienne Keene's blog, Native Appropriations, for discussions on problematic use of Native American cultures and images: http://nativeappropriations.com

15. Teaching for Change: Caribbean Connections: Puerto Rico (book) https://www.teachingforchange.org/books/our-publications/caribbean-connections/puerto-rico

16. Sarah Park Dahlen, "Picture This: Reflecting Diversity in Book Publishing": https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing/

STATEMENT AUTHORS
This document was revised by an NCTE working committee comprising the following:

Raven Jones Stanbrough, Chair, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Marilisa Jiménez García, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

Lisa King, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

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Position Statement on Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (IPOC) in English and Language Arts Materials

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The following position statement on Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (IPOC) in English and Language Arts Materials is a revision of Non-White Minorities in English and Language Arts Materials (itself a revision of the Criteria for Teaching Materials in Reading and Literature).

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NCTE: select grade band, then select journal & pick 1 article

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NCTE: select grade band, then select journal & pick 1 article

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Find Resources, Communities, and Groups That Are Right for You:

Featured Topics of Interest

Featured Position Statements

NCTE and its constituent groups have developed position statements on a variety of education issues vital to the teaching and learning of English language arts.

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Council books, journals, meetings, and Web resources help provide professional support throughout the many stages of your teaching career.

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National Council for the Social Studies 

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National Council for the Social Studies 

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Request for Comments: Revitalizing Civic Education Position Statement

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Many prominent figures in American history, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Frederick Douglass, recognized that schools not only serve the public but also have a role in creating the public. Other educational thinkers like Benjamin Rush, Susan B. Anthony, Calvin Stowe, Horace Mann, and John Dewey have echoed this view.1 Therefore, the goal of education is not only an understanding of civic literacy but civic readiness itself. This readiness equips all learners with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for an active civic life in a democracy. Civic readiness is essential to preserving our system of self-government. To neglect civic readiness is to ignore a core tenant of American democracy. Our commitments to civic equality, democratic accountability, public deliberation, and political cultures based on shared values depend on deep civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The National Council for the Social Studies affirms this critical premise. It asserts that no other subject area is better aligned to achieve this essential goal in educational institutions than social studies.

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Social studies teacher (P-12) journal: 1 article

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Social studies teacher (P-12) journal: 1 article

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Whether for personal growth, new insights, or a different perspective on teaching, the award-winning publications offered by National Council for the Social Studies will help you explore the diversity of subjects and methods in your field.

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Whether for personal growth, new insights, or a different perspective on teaching, the award-winning publications offered by National Council for the Social Studies will help you explore the diversity of subjects and methods in your field.

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Science teacher (P-12) journal: pick 1 article

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Science teacher (P-12) journal: pick 1 article

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NSTA publishes four grade-range-specific journals (Science & Children, Science Scope, The Science Teacher, and Journal of College Science Teaching), as well as Connected Science Learning, which bridges in-school and out-of-school science teaching and learning.

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NSTA publishes four grade-range-specific journals (Science & Children, Science Scope, The Science Teacher, and Journal of College Science Teaching), as well as Connected Science Learning, which bridges in-school and out-of-school science teaching and learning.

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The Role of Research on Science Teaching and Learning

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Math teacher (P-12) journal: pick 1 article

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Math teacher (P-12) journal: pick 1 article

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National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Position statements

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National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Position statements

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NCTM Position Statements - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

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NCTM positions on math education issues and suggested courses of action.

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Social determinants of learning: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

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Social determinants of learning: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

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Article about school readiness & social determinants of health

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Article about school readiness & social determinants of health

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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

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Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world’s leading independent academic publisher.

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Look under menus for Topics or Resources

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Look under menus for Topics or Resources

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A Comprehensive Guide to the Evidence-Based Classroom

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If you're in search of groundbreaking insights on classroom management, grading, or student motivation, here's a collection of must-read resources to supercharge your teaching: A Comprehensive Guide to the Evidence-Based Classroom.

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024

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It’s that time again—our yearly review of the research you should read, from the sneaky ways that inattention can spread in your classroom to the promises and perils of AI.

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Addison County Grammar School & Female Seminary [1936 report]

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Addison County Grammar School & Female Seminary [1936 report]

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4. EVERYONE READ: What the US Education Dept does and doesn't do

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4. EVERYONE READ: What the US Education Dept does and doesn't do

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A guide to what the U.S. Education Department does (and doesn’t) do

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The department tracks student achievement, manages college financial aid and sends K-12 schools money to support students with disabilities and lower-income communities, among other things.

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5. EVERYONE READ: How is K-12 Education funded?

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5. EVERYONE READ: How is K-12 Education funded?

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Public schools for students in kindergarten through 12th grade are financed through a combination of local, state, and federal dollars in proportions that vary across and within states.

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6. EVERYONE READ: US Department of Education’s role in K-12 education, funding local schools

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6. EVERYONE READ: US Department of Education’s role in K-12 education, funding local schools

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ANN ARBOR-As federal policymakers consider the future of the U.S. Department of Education, a new interactive data tool from Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan shows the allocation of federal education funds to local school districts - making the data available by U.S. Congressional district for the first time.

Also, U-M experts are available to comment on the DOE's role in K-12 education and various methods of delivering federal funds to local schools.

A combination of federal, state, and local dollars funds traditional public schools and public charter schools. While the federal government is not the primary source of funding for public schools, federal education funds are earmarked for specific purposes, including:

Title 1 programs to support students from families with low incomes,

Child Nutrition Act programs that provide free and low-cost school meals for students from families with low incomes,

Special education services for children with disabilities, and

Vocational and technical education programs.

The Federal Education Funding Data Dashboard shows how much federal funding is allocated to each of these purposes for the 2020-21 academic year, which was the most recent data available when the data analysis was conducted. The funding allocations are searchable by state and U.S. Congressional district. Totals are based on the sum of federal dollars allocated to school districts and do not include dollars allocated to each state's department of education.

The dashboard also shows the total number of public schools and students in each state or Congressional district, plus how many of those students are living in poverty and how many were identified as experiencing homelessness.

By region, local school districts in the South received the largest amount of federal education funding ($33.9 billion) followed by schools in the Western United States ($25.8 billion). Looking at divisions within the broader regions, the Pacific division received the largest amount in federal education dollars to local schools ($18.8 billion) followed closely by the South Atlantic division ($15.2 billion) and the West South Central division ($13.1 billion).

The 10 Congressional districts with the highest percentage of funding for local schools coming from the federal government are:

1. Arizona Congressional District 2 (28.2%)

2. California Congressional District 42 (27.6%)

3. Mississippi Congressional District 2 (22.6%)

4. Kentucky Congressional District 5 (21.6%)

5. Michigan Congressional District 13 (21.1%)

6. Arizona Congressional District 3 (19.9%)

7. California Congressional District 43 (19.7%)

8. Montana Congressional District 2 (19.5%)

9. South Dakota Congressional District at Large (19.5%)

10. Florida Congressional District 2 (19.0%)

The U-M experts available for comment are:

Elizabeth Birr Moje is dean of the Marsal Family School of Education, the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture.

___________________________________________________________________________

Brian Jacob is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy, a professor of economics, and co-director of the Youth Policy Lab at U-M. He can discuss the role of the federal DOE in K-12 education.

Christina Weiland is a professor at the Marsal Family School of Education and co-director of the Education Policy Initiative at U-M. She can comment on the role of the federal DOE in early childhood education.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at Poverty Solutions, created the data dashboard and is available to comment on the data analysis.

Contact: jerbdown@umich.edu

Amanda Nothaft, director of data and analysis at Poverty Solutions, can comment on different federal funding methods like categorical grants, which are how federal education funding is currently allocated to local schools based on specific purposes; and block grants, which are distributed to states for broad, general purposes allowing state governments to decide how the money is allocated within the block grant purposes and constraints.

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" US Department of Education's role in K-12 education, funding local schools: U-M experts can discuss

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ANN ARBOR-As federal policymakers consider the future of the U.S. Department of Education, a new interactive data tool from Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan shows the allocation of federal education funds to local school districts - making the data available by U.S. Congressional district for the first time.

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7. EVERYONE Data tool: Look up at least 2 states

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7. EVERYONE Data tool: Look up at least 2 states

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» Federal Education Funding Data Dashboard

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Traditional public schools and public charter schools are funded by a combination of federal, state, and local dollars.

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VT recent school news: Governor's plan to restructure from 119 to 5 school districts.

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VT recent school news: Governor's plan to restructure from 119 to 5 school districts.

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11 things that would change for Vermont schools under Gov. Phil Scott’s education overhaul

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The far-reaching proposal would consolidate decisions about education in Vermont in the hands of state government and five large regional school boards.

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How does Vermont pay for schools? A video explainer and glossary of terms

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Education finance is notoriously complicated and full of weird jargon. We hope this helps.

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Learning for Justice: Several publications 

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Learning for Justice: Several publications 

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Our special publications address in-depth anti-bias strategies and best practices as well as critical topics such as school discipline, civil rights instruction and discussing race in the classroom. Browse, read and learn!

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Our special publications address in-depth anti-bias strategies and best practices as well as critical topics such as school discipline, civil rights instruction and discussing race in the classroom. Browse, read and learn!

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Ensuring food security for all children is a national responsibility that should cut across political divides.

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Ensuring food security for all children is a national responsibility that should cut across political divides.

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Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC)

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Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC)

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Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC)

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Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC)

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Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child is CDC’s framework for addressing health in schools.

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Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace schooling for all.

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How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

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How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

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Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace schooling for all.

Editor's Note: This article is part of " On Reconstruction," a project about America's most radical experiment.

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Before the Civil War, America had few institutions like Antioch College. Founded in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1850, Antioch was coed and unaffiliated with any religious sect; it was also the first college in the nation to hire a woman to serve on its faculty as an equal with her male colleagues. It was unquestionably progressive, and would not have been that way without its first president: Horace Mann.

Mann, the politician and education reformer from Massachusetts, sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive. For years, Mann had opposed slavery; he hoped his students would as well. He charged those he taught at Antioch to dedicate themselves to eradicating injustice with sedulous care. "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity," Mann told the graduating class of 1859.

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Mary D. Brice was one of Mann's students at Antioch, and she was a true believer in Mann's vision. In December 1858, alongside her husband, Brice traveled 900 miles to New Orleans, to teach.

Brice found a city that was like no other in the antebellum South. In New Orleans, a small class of free Black people lived and worked as citizens alongside white people; they owned businesses and, in some cases, plantations. And if they were wealthy enough to afford tuition, or light-skinned enough to pass for white, they could attend school.

Yet the free Black New Orleanians who were neither wealthy nor light enough had few options. In 1865, Benjamin Rush Plumly, a white abolitionist politician who'd joined the Union army at the outset of the war, and who would eventually lead the Board of Education for the Department of the Gulf, described the antebellum situation in the region bluntly: "For the poor, of the free colored people, there was no school."

Brice, a deeply religious person, believed that God meant for her to create one. She opened "a school for colored children and adults" in September 1860, at the corner of Franklin and Perdido Streets, near present-day city hall. The effort was short-lived. In June 1861, two months after Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Civil War, Brice was forced to close the school.

But the war could not stop Mary Brice. By November of that year, she had moved to Magnolia Street and reopened her doors. Again she was shut down, this time more forcefully. Confederates began a terror campaign against the school, leaving signs outside her home: Death to nigger teachers, they declared. So Brice began teaching in secret, sneaking to her students' homes under cover of darkness.

By the end of April 1862, Union troops had captured New Orleans. Brice was now able to conduct her work without the constant threat of violence. With funding from northern missionary associations, other private teachers began to travel to New Orleans. The poor Black people of the city-including the formerly enslaved-wanted an education.

The educators' efforts were slow and piecemeal at first, but eventually, with federal assistance, they helped create the infrastructure for public education in Louisiana. There, and across the South, education reformers and abolitionists like Brice carried out Mann's vision for schools that were free and universal. The existence of public education today in the South-for all children-is largely their doing.

In the early days of the republic, the Founders often wrote and spoke about the need for an educated population. Yet schooling was typically reserved for the elite. Wealthy families hired private tutors, and those in the middle class sent their children to subscription schools (parents paid only for the period of time their students attended), where they learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Higher education was rarer still: Even into the late 1860s, only about 1 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary schools. Before the Civil War, many children were limited to learning whatever their parents were able to teach them at home.

The idea of public common schools-that is, schools funded and organized directly by communities and free to most children-had been slow to take off, though Mann had been proselytizing for them since the 1830s. In time, his approach took root in the Northeast and crept into the rest of the country, but such schools were more typically found in cities than rural areas. White southerners, in particular, were skeptical of Mann's ideas. The contours of a slave society were fundamentally incompatible with widespread free education-public goods of many kinds were eyed with suspicion as potential tools of insurrection.
"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity," Horace Mann told his students. Mary Brice was a true believer in Mann's vision.
New Orleans, however, had a rich history of parochial schools. In 1841, the state legislature hoped to extend this tradition when it first approved funds for a public-school system in New Orleans, one of the oldest in the South. The schools there thrived-but they were available only to white students.

Education in the rest of Louisiana and the South was still rudimentary, even as the rest of the country made strides. In the years preceding the Civil War, Justin Morrill, a shopkeeper turned congressman from Vermont, tried to create a nationwide system for training workers by introducing a bill to give states land they could sell to fund colleges. The bill was opposed by southern congressmen wary of federal intervention in their states, and was ultimately vetoed by President James Buchanan.

After the war began, however, Morrill saw an opportunity. Southern lawmakers had been expelled from Congress for treason, and the nation was in need of skilled military minds. He reintroduced the bill in December 1861; the Morrill Act was signed by President Abraham Lincoln the following July. States in the North quickly began building land-grant universities.

Under the law, all southern states were barred from the program while in rebellion against the Union. But because New Orleans fell so early, the war presented an opportunity for the city. Major General Nathaniel Banks, the Union commander of the Department of the Gulf, issued General Order No. 38, which established a "Board of Education for Freedmen."

The smattering of schools that had been established for Black students by missionary associations and individual citizens, including Brice's, were quickly subsumed by this newly created board. The student rolls grew from an average of 1,422 in April 1864 to 9,571 by the end of the year. The board had established a foundation for education through a "unity of purpose and concert of action," Plumly, the chair of the board, wrote. "In nine months we have succeeded, against the grave obstacles incident to the beginning of so great an enterprise, in gathering under instruction half of the colored juvenile population in the State."

In 1865, Plumlyreleased a report on the state of education in New Orleans, trumpeting his board's success in expanding schooling through the example of Brice, whose school "continued to thrive" under his board, where she was known as "an efficient and honored principal." Plumly's report quickly spread across the nation, and after Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender in April 1865, it served as a model for those who hoped to establish public education in the South. The reunification of the country would be an enormous task, and no one knew what would become of the millions of Black Americans who were now free citizens-not to mention the masses of white southerners who would need to be reintegrated into the nation. Perhaps, the thought went, education could help make citizens of both the white and Black poor.

On April 3, 1865, the Chicago Tribune, opining about the New Orleans project, noted that although many of the teachers struggled "with every manner of difficulty-insufficient accommodations-leaky sheds with ground floors," they were heartened by the fact that the school system had grown at such a rapid pace. The editors thought that the project might serve as a model for children, both white and Black, across the entire South.

"This is ... but the beginning of a work which must spread over the entire Southern States, until both freed blacks, and the almost equally ignorant and even more degraded and vicious 'poor whites' have been brought within its christianizing and civilizing influences," the Tribune article read. The work of expanding the nation's schools no longer had to be "slow or tedious," it said, "but can be accomplished rapidly and encouragingly."

Outside New Orleans, however, there was less infrastructure for this kind of rapid transformation. Southern states were in the early process of being readmitted into the union, which required the states to disavow secession, repudiate war debts, and write new constitutions, and they could not yet access funds from the Morrill Act. If there was any hope for the sort of mass education that the Tribune editors believed was necessary, it would require private associations to step into the void. Groups such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the American Baptist Home Missionary Society began establishing primary schools and colleges, as well as schools to train teachers.

Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who became the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, was unsure that his agency had the authority or money to set up such institutions on its own. Yet he found the schools operated by military governments, such as Louisiana's under Major General Banks, to be a good model. "More than 200,000 people, old and young, in the insurrectionary states, have learned to read in the last three years," Howard wrote in a letter to the American Institute of Instruction. The letter was read aloud to the nearly 1,000 people who had gathered in New Haven, Connecticut, for a meeting of the group on August 9, 1865.

Howard worked to establish a network similar to Banks's, on a larger scale. Among the institutions founded in this effort were the Fisk Free Colored School, now Fisk University, and the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, Booker T. Washington's alma mater. Howard also personally helped create Howard University, named in his honor, and later served as its president.
Read: Why America needs its HBCUs
Because of its small budget, the bureau primarily operated in a supervisory role. Howard appointed superintendents to oversee the logistics of the schools, which included training and hiring teachers, ensuring that they had military protection to conduct their work safely, and providing schoolmasters with fuel and provisions.

Most of this work was conducted out of the public eye, with missionary organizations in leadership roles. Even so, the bureau's efforts ran the risk of vexing white southerners, many of whom simply opposed the idea of educating Black people at all. White objections to the involvement of the Freedmen's Bureau in southern affairs often mentioned reports of ineptitude, poor administration, or outright fraud in its operations. Certainly, the administration of these new public schools left much to be desired. As Plumly wrote in his report about local schools, 1864 was a year "of great financial delays and embarrassments in this Department." Teachers would routinely go months without pay-and although Plumly noted that the educators rarely complained, conditions wore on their morale.

But, in the main, the white objection to the bureau was still, simply, its existence. "Even the most friendly studies of the Bureau have exaggerated its weaknesses and minimized its strengths," the Reconstruction historians John and LaWanda Cox wrote in 1953. "At the vital core of the Bureau's activities was the explosive and still unresolved problem of the nature of race relationships that should follow the forcible destruction of slavery." And as prominent physical reminders of the bureau's presence, schools became a target.

Mobs routinely burned buildings and churches where classes were held. In some cases, teachers and agents of the bureau were murdered. According to James D. Anderson, professor emeritus of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at least 126 public schools in Louisiana overseen by the bureau faced closure from the combination of white terrorism, financial woes, and incompetence.

Still, the bureau's work improved the educational outlook for millions of people who'd previously had no access to formal schooling. According to records gathered by Kamilah Stinnett, a specialist with the Smithsonian's Freedmen's Bureau Project, many Black people felt empowered to shape their education themselves. On March 17, 1866, a school official in Louisiana wrote to the bureau that Black residents were requesting Black instructors because they "object to paying [white] persons who continually insult them." In 1868, the board of a "colored" school in Henderson, North Carolina, asked the bureau for $300 "for assistance in finishing our school house."

Soon the number of people in the South entitled to common education was expanded even further. In 1867, Louisiana held an election for its constitutional convention; ultimately, aided by votes from freedmen and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, 49 white delegates and 49 Black delegates were chosen. The constitution they produced guaranteed integrated public schools.

Across the South, state conventions established similar constitutional provisions, and states were subsequently readmitted to the union, which also allowed for the expansion of college access through federal programs such as the Morrill Act. By 1870, five years after the bureau was established, roughly 78 percent of children of all races between the ages of 5 and 14 were enrolled in public schools.

That would prove to be the high-water mark for most of the next century. When the bureau was dissolved by Congress in 1872, a large share of the federal government's oversight of common schools disappeared. Over the next decades, the educational foundation built by the Freedmen's Bureau endured a concerted assault from white supremacists. The so-called Redeemers, who sought to reclaim political power through coercion and violence, had objected to the Reconstruction constitutions from the beginning and fought to overthrow them. They also objected to integrated education. Faculty at the University of Mississippi revolted, arguing that they would rather resign and the university close its doors than educate a single Black student. State legislators in North Carolina went even further, stripping UNC of its funding and forcing it to close in 1871. When the university finally reopened in 1875, several avowed white supremacists sat on its new board of trustees, including one former leader of the state Ku Klux Klan.

That same year, members of Congress introduced legislation that would endow common schools via land grants, and expand Morrill's funding for land-grant colleges. Southern lawmakers helped kill the legislation, fearing that introducing additional federal money also meant introducing federal oversight of their activities. Such oversight of the public schools in New Orleans, for example, would have revealed that, in 1877, the state legislature reduced school-tax rates by 80 percent, dramatically cutting back resources for education.

Meanwhile, violent campaigns raged across the South. School buildings were once again burned. Educators were threatened. The network of common schools established by the Freedmen's Bureau remained, although diminished. Some struggled until they fell apart; others hobbled along, underfunded but resolved to continue the work of educating those who were being shut out of other institutions.

By 1890, Morrill had untethered his new bill to endow land-grant colleges from the common-school bill, and it passed-with a caveat. Colleges could not make a distinction of race in the admission of students; states could, however, operate separate colleges for Black students. They used a portion of the funds to endow schools born of necessity -Black colleges such as Tuskegee University, North Carolina A&T State University, and Langston University.
Adam Harris: The government finally puts a number on the discrimination against Black colleges
Six years later, after the mixed-race activist Homer Plessy sued for the right to ride Louisiana railway cars reserved for white people, the United States Supreme Court decided that state-mandated segregation laws did not violate the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson ushered in the era of formalized segregation in the South, but America's higher-education infrastructure had already taken to the idea. Soon, its common schools formally did so as well.

When Mary Brice moved from Ohio, she hoped that she might be able to bring education to Black New Orleanians-and, in the spirit of Horace Mann, win a victory for humanity. The Freedmen's Bureau helped expand Brice's vision to the entire South through federal intervention, providing what became the political and administrative scaffolding for all public education. But as remarkable as that achievement was, it could not withstand the extraordinary efforts by Redeemers to claim the benefits of such an education for white Americans and deny them to Black Americans.

On February 8, 1898, a group of white Louisiana Democrats gathered in Tulane Hall, in New Orleans, for a constitutional convention. The primary agenda item: to settle the question of whether Black men in the state should be allowed to vote. There was little question of what the convention's result would be.

The convention could not explicitly circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but Democrats got as close as they could. They established a poll tax and literacy tests, and required voters to own property. Ernest B. Kruttschnitt, the president of the convention, bluntly admitted the purpose of these laws. "What care I whether it be more or less ridiculous or not?" he said to applause. "Doesn't it meet the case? Doesn't it let the white man vote, and doesn't it stop the negro from voting, and isn't that what we came here for?"

This Jim Crow constitution worked as intended. There were 127,923 Black voters on Louisiana's rolls in 1888; by 1910, that number had dropped to 730. From 1896 to 1900 alone, there was a 96 percent decline in registered Black voters. When the convention ended, Kruttschnitt returned to his day job-leading the New Orleans school board.

With the Plessy decision propping him up, Kruttschnitt launched what Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, the authors of Crescent City Schools, called a "massive cutback in educational opportunities for black children." Under his leadership, the district cut public schooling for Black students down to grades one through five, and the board announced, as DeVore and Logsdon put it, "that they were giving up all pretense of creating separate schools 'identical with that of white schools.' " By 1920, there were about four times as many schools for white students as there were for Black students in New Orleans. The city's idea of a universal, free public-education system, established in large part to serve Black students, now only feigned doing so.

It would take 40 more years, another federal intervention, and the protection of U.S. Marshals before Ruby Bridges and the McDonogh Three would reintegrate public schools in New Orleans-schools that likely never would have existed in the first place if not for the work of the federal government and the Freedmen's Bureau.

For Black people who'd been emancipated, the full experience of citizenship that the Founders believed comes with education was short-lived. The country has been shaped in many ways by their subsequent exclusion. Even after court-mandated desegregation, educational opportunity has been highly stratified by race, and both educational attainment and quality in America as a whole have lagged relative to other wealthy countries. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, the most serious effort to date at realizing Brice's dream nationally. The history of the South illustrates that efforts to splinter or deny education on the basis of race will inevitably diminish even those who lead those efforts. "Create a serf caste and debar them from education, and you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from education also," Mann once argued. But the history also demonstrates the inverse: Making public education truly public and equal for all is the cornerstone of a nation.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline "The Black Roots of American Education." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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In most countries basic education is nowadays perceived not only as a right, but also as a duty - governments are typically expected to ensure access to basic education, while citizens are often required by law to attain education up to a certain basic level.

This was not always the case: the advancement of these ideas began in the mid 19th century, when most of today's industrialized countries started expanding primary education, mainly through public finances and government intervention. Data from this early period shows that government funds to finance the expansion of education came from a number of different sources, but specifically taxes at the local level played a crucial role. The historical role of local funding for public schools is important to help us understand changes - or persistence- in regional inequalities.

The second half of the 20th century marked the beginning of education expansion as a global phenomenon. Available data shows that by 1990 government spending on education as a share of national income in many developing countries was already close to the average observed in developed countries.

This global education expansion in the 20th century resulted in a historical reduction in education inequality across the globe: in the period 1960-2010 education inequality went down every year, for all age groups and in all world regions. Recent estimates of education inequality across age groups suggest that further reductions in schooling inequality are still to be expected within developing countries.

Recent cross-country data from UNESCO tells us that the world is expanding government funding for education today, and these additional public funds for education are not necessarily at the expense of other government sectors. Yet behind these broad global trends there is substantial cross-country - and cross-regional - heterogeneity. In high-income countries, for instance, households shoulder a larger share of education expenditures at higher education levels than at lower levels - but in low-income countries this is not the case. Malawi is a stark example: tertiary education is almost completely subsidised by the state, yet household contribute almost 20% of the costs of primary education.

Following the agreement of the Millennium Development Goals, the first decade of the 21st century saw an important increase in international financial flows under the umbrella of development assistance. Recent estimates show that development assistance for education has stopped growing since 2010, with notable aggregate reductions on flows going to primary education. These changes in the priorization of development assistance for education across levels and regions, can have potentially large distributional effects, particularly within low income countries that depend substantially on this source of funding for basic education.

When analysing correlates, determinants and consequences of education consumption, the macro data indicates that national expenditure on education does not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes. This is indicative of a complex 'education production function' whereby for any given level of expenditure, output achieved depends crucially on the input mix.

Available evidence specifically on the importance of school inputs to produce education, suggests that learning outcomes may be more sensitive to improvements in the quality of teachers, than to improvements in class sizes. Regarding household inputs, the recent experimental evidence suggests that interventions that increase the benefits of attending school (e.g. conditional cash transfers) are particularly likely to increase student time in school; and that those that incentivise academic effort (e.g. scholarships) are likely to improve learning outcomes.

Policy experiments have also shown that pre-school investment in demand-side inputs leads to large positive impacts on education - and other important outcomes later in life. The environment that children are exposed to early in life, plays a crucial role in shaping their abilities, behavior and talents.

Interactive charts on Education Spending

Historical perspective on financing education

Governments around the world are nowadays widely perceived to be responsible for ensuring the provision of accessible quality education. This is a recent social achievement. The advancement of the idea to provide education for more and more children only began in the mid 19th century, when most of today's industrialized countries started expanding primary education. The following visualization, plotting public expenditure on education as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for a number of early-industrialized countries, shows that this expansion took place mainly through public funding. Our entry on Primary Education and Schools provides details regarding how this expansion in funding materialized in better education outcomes for these countries.

Public schools in the US currently educate more than 90% of all children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools.

This is the result of a process of education expansion that relied heavily on public funding, particularly from local governments. The visualization shows the sources of revenues for public schools in the US over the last 120 years. As it can be seen, states and localities are - and have always been - the main sources of funding for public primary education in the US. In fact, we observe three broad periods in this graph: there is first a period of stable revenues until 1920, then a period of sharp growth and decline during the interwar years, and then a period of substantial growth since the second world war, slowing down in the 1970s. In all these periods, federal funding was always very small, as can be seen when changing the visualisation from 'absolute' to 'relative'. Disaggregated data from the last couple of decades gives further insights into the specific sources of local revenues for schools in the US: the largest part comes from property taxes (about 80% of local revenues came from property taxes in 2013), while only a very small part comes from fees and donations (private funding for public schools, which is considered a local revenue, amounted to less than 2% of total public school revenues in 2013). This heavily decentralised system relying on property taxes has the potential of creating large inequalities in education, since public schools in affluent urban areas are able to raise more funding from local revenues. Indeed, a significant part of the debate on education inequalities in the US today focuses on the importance of increasing progressive federal spending to reduce inequalities in public school funding.

The case of the US above shows that funding for public schools has been historically a responsibility of local governments. In other countries, such as France, the expansion of public education also took place initially with resources from local governments, but relatively quickly the fiscal burden was shifted to the national level. In France this transition was associated with a sharp jump towards universal access and a concomitant reduction in regional inequalities. The following visualization from Lindert (2004) provides evidence of the French experience. As we can see there are three distinct periods: education spending was initially low and mainly private, then in 1833 funding began growing with local resources after the introduction of a law liberating communes to raise more local taxes for schools, and finally in 1881 the national government took over most of the financial responsibility after the introduction of a new law that abolished all fees and tuition charges in public elementary schools. In the source book, Lindert (2004) provides further evidence of how this transition towards centrally funded public education reduced north-south inequalities in France.

A comparison of expenditure between public and private education institutions is helpful to contextualize the role the public sector played in the process of education expansion in industrialized countries. The following graph does this using data from the National Center for Education Statistics in the US. It shows that during the years 1950-1970 - a period of substantial growth in education expenditure in the US - expenditure grew specifically in the public sector.

The second half of the 20th century marked the beginning of education expansion as a global phenomenon. The visualization, using data from Szirmai (2005), shows government expenditure on education as a share of national income for a selection of low and middle-income countries, together with the corresponding average for high-income countries, for the period 1960-2010. As it can be seen, by 1990 government spending on education in many developing countries was already close to the average observed in developed countries.

It is important to point out that the remark above makes reference to convergence in expenditure relative to income. To the extent that low-income countries remain poorer than high-income countries, gaps in levels of expenditure per pupil are persistently large. Indeed, cross-country heterogeneity in education expenditure per pupil is currently much higher than heterogeneity in expenditure as share of GDP. One factor contributing to the slower convergence of expenditure per pupil in real terms is the fact that teachers' salaries - the main component of education expenditure - are much higher in high-income countries, because labour has a higher opportunity cost in these countries. In general, the opportunity cost of labour is a key variable that governments in developing countries should factor in when deciding whether to expand education now, rather than later.

An important consequence of the global education expansion is a reduction in education inequality across the globe. The following visualization shows this through a series of graphs plotting changes in the Gini coefficient of the distribution of years of schooling across different world regions. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality and higher values indicate higher inequality - you can read about the definition and estimation of Gini coefficients in our entry on income inequality. The time-series chart shows inequality by age group. It can be seen that as inequality is falling over time, the level of inequality is higher for older generations than it is for younger generations. We can also see that in the reference period education inequality went down every year, for all age groups and in all world regions.

Have gains from historical education expansion fully materialized? The breakdown by age gives us a view into the future: as the inequality is lower among today's younger generations, we can expect the decline of inequality to continue in the future. Thus, further reductions in education inequality are still to be expected within developing countries; and if the expansion of global education can be continued, we can speed up this important process of global convergence.

The experience of South Korea shows that it is possible to reduce education inequality rapidly across all levels of education. The following visualization show two graphs comparing the concentration of years of education in South Korean between the years 1970 and 2010. To be precise, each of these graphs shows an education Lorenz curve: a plot showing the cumulative percentage of the schooling years across all levels of education on the vertical axis, and the cumulative percentage of the population on the horizontal axis. As it can be seen, in 2010 education was much less concentrated than in 1970, not only because there was a smaller share of individuals without schooling (shown along the bottom of the chart), but also because there was a smaller share of individuals concentrating large proportions of school-years at higher levels of education. Indeed, in only 40 years South Korea was able to double the mean years of schooling (from 6 to 12 years) and at the same time get remarkably close to the 45-degree line marking the hypothetical scenario of perfect equality of schooling. In other entries we show that in this same period South Korea increased drastically its GDP per capita while significantly improving health outcomes, such as child mortality.

Financing of education across the world

The last two decades have seen a small but general increase in the share of income that countries devote to education. The following chart plots trends in public expenditure on education as a share of GDP. As usual, a selection of countries is shown by default, but other countries can be added by clicking on the relevant option at the top of the chart. Although the data is highly irregular due to missing observations for many countries - an issue we discuss in more detail in our section on Data Quality below -, we can still observe a broad upward trend for the majority of countries. Specifically, it can be checked that of the 88 countries with available data for 2000/2010, three-fourths increased education spending as a share of GDP within this decade. As incomes - measured by GDP per capita - are generally increasing around the world, this means that the total amount of global resources spent on education is also increasing in absolute terms.

You can explore the trends by education level in these interactive charts:

The above-mentioned growth in overall government expenditure on education as a share of GDP cannot be entirely attributed to a wide-spread change in the prioritization of education spending within domestic budgets. The following visualization shows government expenditure on education as a share of total government expenditure. In this case the available data does not suggest a discernible global pattern. For instance, of the 36 countries with available data for 2000 to 2010, only around half increased spending on education relative to the other sectors. The data does suggest, however, that there is large and persistent cross-country heterogeneity in the relative importance of education vis-a-vis other sectors, even within developing countries. For example, in 2011 education accounted for about 8% of government spending in the Central African Republic, while it accounted for about 30% in Ghana.

Generally speaking, countries that spend a large share of their income on education also tend to prioritize education highly within their budgets. The following visualization presents a snapshot of government spending on education around the world for the year 2016. Specifically, this graph plots government expenditure on education as a share of GDP in the vertical axis, and government expenditure on education as a share of total government expenditure in the horizontal axis. Each dot on this chart represents a different country, with the assigned colors denoting different world regions. As we can see, there is a positive correlation, but regional differences are stark: for almost every level of spending as a share of GDP along the horizontal axis, European countries (marked in light orange) spend a smaller budget share on education.

In comparison to countries where education started expanding later, European countries tend to assign relatively more of their government education budgets to the secondary and tertiary levels, while at the same time devoting relatively less of their general government budgets to education as a whole. This can be appreciated in the following visualization, where the priorization of primary education (i.e. the share of primary education within the education budget) is plotted against the overall priorization of education (i.e. the share of education within the entire government budget). It can be seen that European countries (marked again in light orange) are mostly located in the bottom-left. And there is a weak positive correlation between the variables, both across all countries and across European countries.

The following visualization shows the percentage of total education expenditures contributed directly by households in 15 high income countries and 15 low/middle income countries (most recent data available on 2014). The top chart in this figure, corresponding to high income countries, shows a very clear pattern: households contribute the largest share of expenses in tertiary education, and the smallest share in primary education. Roughly speaking, this pattern tends to be progressive, since students from wealthier households are more likely to attend tertiary education, and those individuals who attend tertiary education are likely to perceive large private benefits (more on this in our entry on Skill Premium). In contrast, the bottom chart shows a very different picture: in several low-income countries households contribute proportionally more to primary education than to higher levels. Malawi is a notable case in point - tertiary education is almost completely subsidised by the state, yet household contribute with almost 20% of the costs in primary education. Such distribution of private household contributions to education is regressive.

Recent funding structures in OECD countries

We have already mentioned that those countries that pioneered the expansion of primary education in the 19th century - all of which are current OECD member states - relied heavily on public funding to do so. Today, public resources still dominate funding for the primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary education levels in these countries. While in the last decade the share of public funding for these levels of education has decreased slightly, the broad pattern is remarkably stable. The visualization presents OECD-average expenditure on education institutions by source of funds. By clicking on the option labeled 'relative' you can see the corresponding share of each source: private funding went up from 7.9% in 2000, to 9.4% in 2012. The role of public funding for other levels of education is however quite different. At the tertiary level public sources account for less than 70% of funding on average (2012 figures). Below we provide evidence of the pre-school level.

High-income countries tend to have better developed pre-primary education systems than lower-income countries. However, within high-income countries there is substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which pre-primary education is publicly financed. The visualization presents expenditure on pre-primary educational institutions as a share of GDP across the OECD. As it can be seen, publicly funded pre-primary education tends to be more strongly developed in the European than the non-European countries of the OECD. In fact, the OECD reports that in Europe the concept of universal access to education for 3-6 year-olds is generally accepted: most countries in this region provide all children with at least two years of free, publicly funded pre-primary education in schools before they begin primary education.

The largest part of funding devoted to education in OECD countries goes to finance current expenditures, mainly compensation of staff - specifically, teachers. The following two charts, taken from the OECD's report Education at a Glance (2015), highlight the labour-intensive nature of education. In the lower levels of education (i.e. primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary) the share of current expenditure is very large and exhibits little cross-country variation - between 90 and 97 percent of total expenditure corresponds to current expenditure across all of the OECD countries. In higher levels of education (i.e. tertiary) there is more cross-country variation, but current expenditure still dominates by a large margin across all countries.

In the figures above we noted the importance of current expenditure in the production of education. The following table provides further details regarding the type of expenditures that comprise current spending. Specifically, this chart shows a breakdown of expenditure for tertiary-level institutions in the US (public and private), during the period 1980-1997. It shows that instruction accounts for almost half of expenditure; and while there are some small differences across sectors, there is a fair amount of stability in expenditures across time. This serves as a benchmark for lower education levels, where instruction takes an even larger share of expenditure.

Following the agreement of the Millennium Development Goals, the first decade of the 21st century saw an important increase in international financial flows under the umbrella of development assistance (often also called development aid, or simply 'aid'). The following chart shows total OECD development assistance flows for education by level, in constant 2013 US dollars, for the period 2002-2013. As it can be seen, there are two distinct periods: in 2003-2010 flows for education increased substantially, more than doubling in real terms across all levels of education; and in the years 2010-2013 funding for basic education decreased, while funding for secondary and post-secondary education remained relatively constant. For many low income countries, where development assistance contributes a substantial share of funding for education, this marked change in trends is important. As a reference, in 2012 development assistance accounted for more than 20 percent of all domestic spending on basic education in recipient low-income countries.

The recent reductions in development assistance funds for primary education have been coupled with important changes in regional priorities. Specifically, the share of development assistance for primary education going to sub-Saharan Africa has been decreasing sharply since the agreement of the Millennium Development Goals. The following chart shows this: sub-Saharan Africa's share in total aid to primary education declined from 52 percent in 2002 to 30 percent in 2013, while the continent's share in the total number of out-of-school children rose from 46 percent to 57 percent. This pattern is something specific to the education sector within the broader development assistance landscape: in the healthcare sector the overall slowdown of flows started a couple of years later, was less abrupt, and affected proportionally less the sub-Saharan countries. Indeed, recent studies further highlight that development assistance for education is significantly different to assistance for healthcare in other ways: the education sector attracts less earmarked funding through multilaterals, and includes a smaller proportion of resources that developing governments can directly control for programming.

You can read more about development assistance for healthcare in our entry on Financing Healthcare.

In the Historical Perspective section above, we mentioned that public spending on education has translated, in the long run, into lower inequality in education outcomes across most of the world. But for any given country, with a determined income distribution and demographic structure, the extent to which public spending on education contributes to reduce inequality depends crucially on the way in which spending is focused across education levels. The recent UNICEF report The Investment Case for Education and Equity shows that in low income countries, on average 46 percent of public resources are allocated to the 10 percent of students who are most educated - while this figure goes down to 26 and 13 percent in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries respectively. The following visualization shows further details on the concentration of public spending across different countries. The vertical axis shows the percentage of public education resources going to the 10% most educated or 10% least educated students - as we can see expenditure is heavily concentrated at the top in many low income countries.

The earlier remarks about trends in international education financing flows (namely that aid is very important in low-income countries, and that a relatively low and shrinking share of aid is going to primary levels), suggest that inequality in public spending will worsen in low income countries. Yet development assistance priorities have a scope for changing this.

What determines educational finance?

The big picture

One of the reasons to justify government intervention in the market for education, is that education generates positive externalities. This essentially means that investing in education yields both private and social returns. Private returns to education include higher wages and better employment prospects. Social return include pro-social behaviour (e.g. volunteering, political participation) and interpersonal trust. The following chart uses OECD results from the Survey of Adult Skills to show how self-reported trust in others correlates with educational attainment. More precisely, this chart plots the percentage-point difference in the likelihood of reporting to trust others, by education level of respondents. Those individuals with upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education are taken as the reference group, so the percentage point difference is expressed in relation to this group. As we can see, in all countries those individuals with tertiary education were by far the group most likely to report trusting others. And in almost every country, those with post-secondary non-tertiary education were more likely to trust others than those with primary or lower secondary education. The OECD's report Education at a Glance (2015) provides similar descriptive evidence for other social outcomes. The conclusion is that adults with higher qualifications are more likely to report desirable social outcomes, including good or excellent health, participation in volunteer activities, interpersonal trust, and political efficacy. And these results hold after controlling for literacy, gender, age and monthly earnings.

Education outcomes are typically measured via 'quantity' output (e.g. years of schooling) and 'quality' output (e.g. learning outcomes, such as test scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment - PISA). The following visualization presents three scatter plots using 2010 data to show the cross-country correlation between (i) education expenditure (as a share of GDP), (ii) mean years of schooling, and (iii) mean PISA test scores. At a cross-sectional level, expenditure on education correlates positively with both quantity and quality measures; and not surprisingly, the quality and quantity measures also correlate positively with each-other. But obviously correlation does not imply causation: there are many factors that simultaneously affect education spending and outcomes. Indeed, these scatterplots show that despite the broad positive correlation, there is substantial dispersion away from the trend line - in other words, there is substantial variation in outcomes that does not seem to be captured by differences in expenditure.

The following visualization presents the relationship between PISA reading outcomes and average education spending per student, splitting the sample of countries by income levels. It shows that income is an important factor that affects both expenditure on education and education outcomes: we can see that above a certain national income level, the relationship between PISA scores and education expenditure per pupil becomes virtually inexistent. Several studies with more sophisticated econometric models corroborate the fact that expenditure on education does not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes. You can read more about test scores and learning outcomes in our entry on Quality of Education.

The fact that expenditure on education does not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes is indicative of the intricate nature of the process through which such outcomes are produced. Borrowing the terms from the economics literature, the following 'production function' provides a conceptual framework to think about the determinants of learning outcomes:

where A is skills learned (achievement), s is years of schooling, Q is a vector of school and teacher characteristics (quality), C is a vector of child characteristics (including "innate ability"), H is a vector of household characteristics, and I is a vector of school inputs under the control of households, such as children's daily attendance, effort in school and in doing homework, and purchases of school supplies.

This conceptualization highlights that, for any given level of expenditure, the output achieved will depend on the input mix. And consequently, this implies that in order to explain education outcomes, we must rely on information about specific inputs. In the following sections we explore evidence regarding the returns to household inputs (i.e. different elements of Q) and demand-side inputs (i.e. elements of C,H and I).

School inputs

A vast number of studies have tried to estimate the impact of classroom resources on learning outcomes. The following table summarizes results from the systematic review in Hanushek (2006). In this table, the left-hand side summarizes results from econometric studies focusing on developing countries, while the right-hand side presents evidence from the US (where studies have concentrated extensively). We can see that for all listed inputs and across all countries, the share of studies that have found a positive effect is small - in fact, the majority of studies find either no effect, or a negative effect. This clearly does not mean that these classroom resources are not important, but rather that it is very difficult to know with confidence when and where they are a binding constraint to improve learning outcomes. A first conclusion, therefore, seems to be that context and input mix are fundamental to improving outcomes - even in developing countries where the expected returns to additional resources is large across the board.

Taking the ratio of positive to negative effects detected in the literature as a proxy for what tends to work best, we can derive a second conclusion from the table: spending more resources on better teachers (i.e. improving teacher experience and teacher education) tends to work better to improve learning outcomes than simply increasing the number of teachers per pupil. And this seems to be true both in developed and developing countries. This last conclusion is consistent with the main message from the OECD's report Does money buy strong performance in PISA?, which points out that countries that prioritised the quality of teachers over class sizes performed better in PISA tests.

And it is also consistent with a recent high-quality study on the impact of teacher quality on test scores using data from the US, which suggests that improvements in teacher quality can causally raise students' test scores (evidence from Chetty et al. (2014) - see our entry on Quality of Education for a discussion of their results).

Education in low-income countries is particularly difficult because there is substantial heterogeneity in the degree of preparation that children have when they enter school - much more so than in high-income countries. Recent evidence from policy 'experiments' in developing countries suggests remedial teaching, in the form of assistants teaching targeted lessons to the bottom of the class, can yield substantial improvements in learning outcomes. The following visualization summarizes the effects of four different policy treatments within the so-called Teacher Community Assistant Initiative (TCAI) in Ghana - this is an initiative that evaluated four different such remedial teaching interventions.

The units in this figure are standard deviations of test results. The first two sets of estimates correspond to the test-score impacts of enabling community assistants to provide remedial instruction specifically to low-performing children, either during school, or after school. The third set of estimates corresponds to test-score impacts of providing a community assistant and reducing class size, without targeting instruction to low-performing pupils. And the last set of results corresponds to testing the effect of training teachers to provide small-group instruction targeted at pupils' actual learning levels.

As we can see, while all interventions had a positive effect, the lowest impacts - across all tests - come from the non-targeted 'normal curriculum' intervention that reduced class sizes, and from the intervention that provided training to teachers on how to engage in targeted remedial teaching themselves. This suggests that the improvements in outcomes were caused by the combination of targeted instruction and TCAs who, unlike teachers, were specifically dedicated to this purpose. These results are consistent with findings from across Africa, suggesting that teaching at the right level causes better learning outcomes in a cost-effective way (see Glewwe and Muralidharan 2016 for further details on this evidence).

We have already made the point that the bulk of education expenditure goes specifically towards financing teachers. And we have also pointed out that improving teacher quality may be a particularly good instrument to improve teaching outcomes. This leads to a natural question: are pay-for-performance teacher contracts an effective instrument to improve learning outcomes? A growing body of literature in the economics of education has started using randomized control trials (i.e. policy 'experiments') to answer this question. Glewwe and Muralidharan (2016) provide the following account of the available evidence:

"Results suggest that even modest changes to compensation structures to reward teachers on the basis of objective measures of performance (such as attendance or increases in student test scores) can generate substantial improvements in learning outcomes at a fraction of the cost of a "business as usual" expansion in education spending. However, not all performance pay programs are likely to be effective, so it is quite important to design the bonus formulae well and to make sure that these designs reflect insights from economic theory."

The conclusion is that well-designed pay-for-performance contracts are a cost-effective instrument to boost test scores; but this does not mean that they are necessarily effective at achieving other - perhaps equally important - objectives of time spent in school. In simple words, it is possible that pay-for-performance yields 'teaching to the test'. Alternative incentive mechanisms, such as community-based monitoring of teachers, have been proposed as an alternative. Glewwe and Muralidharan (2016) also provide a review of the - somewhat limited - available evidence on such alternative incentive mechanisms.

Household inputs

Demand-side inputs are as important as supply-side inputs to produce education. Attending school and exerting effort are perhaps the most obvious examples: without these inputs even the best endowed schools will fail to deliver good outcomes. The table summarizes information on different demand-side investments that have shown to successfully improve quality and quantity outcomes. More precisely, this table gathers evidence from randomized control trials in developing countries, as per the review in Glewwe and Muralidharan (2016). The reported figures correspond to positive/negative significant/insignificant estimates across a set of available experimental studies (bear in mind some studies estimate more than one effect - e.g. by measuring outcomes at several points in time). As we can see, the evidence suggests interventions that increase the benefits of attending school - such as conditional cash transfers - are likely to increase student time in school. And those that increase the benefits of higher effort and better academic performance - such as merit scholarships - are likely to improve learning outcomes (see Glewwe and Muralidharan 2016 for further details on the underlying policy interventions, plus further evidence and discussion of results).

In many low-income countries, health problems are an important factor preventing children from attending school. The following visualization presents a comparison of the impact that a number of different health interventions have achieved in different countries - together with some non-health-related interventions that serve as reference. The height of each bar in this graph reflects the additional school years achieved per hundred dollars spent on the corresponding intervention; so these estimates can be interpreted as a measure of how cost-effective the different interventions are.

We see that treating children for intestinal worms (labeled 'deworming' in the chart) led to an additional 13.9 years of education for every $100 spent in Kenya; while a program targeting anaemia (labeled 'iron fortification') led to 2.7 additional years per $100 in India. These interventions seem to be much more cost-effective to improve test scores than conditional cash transfers, free school uniforms, or merit scholarships (further details on all interventions available from Dhaliwal et al. 2012). Of course, ranking these interventions is not trivial since most programmes achieve multiple outcomes - indeed, we have already discussed that remedial teaching is generally effective to increase test-scores, although here we see a particular instance where it had no impact on school attendance. Nevertheless, health interventions seem to be particularly interesting, since they lead to substantial achievements in both education and health outcomes (for a recent analysis of the literature on the impacts of mass deworming see Croke et al. 2016).

The environment that children are exposed to early in life, plays a crucial role in shaping their abilities, behavior and talents. To a great extent, this is what drives large and remarkably persistent gaps in the education achievement between individuals in the same country, but in different socioeconomic environments. Cunha et al. (2006) provide a detailed account of the theory and evidence behind this claim, and discuss its implications for the design of education policies. In the chart we see the impacts from the Perry Preschool Program - a flagship experimental intervention study, designed to test the impact of pre-school education on subsequent education outcomes. The chart shows disadvantaged children participating in the pre-school program (the 'treatment group') had higher grades and were more likely to graduate from high school than the reference control group. Moreover, they spent substantially less time in special education. Other programs have similarly shown evidence of very large and persistent returns to early education interventions.

Relationship between sources

The main source of data on international education expenditure is UNESCO's Institute for Statistics (UIS). The same data is also then published by the World Bank ( World Bank EdStats and World Development Indicators) and Gapminder. It is also the main source of education data for most UN reports - such as the EFA Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO), the Human Development Report (UNDP), the State of the World's Children report (UNICEF) and the Millennium Development Goals (UN).

The UIS database is produced mainly from yearly national reports, but it also relies on reports from international organizations.

Specifically, countries in the European Union, or members of the OECD, have richer data, since they collect information through the UIS-OECD-Eurostat (UOE) survey, which is more detailed than the UIS survey (see more at FAQ-UIS)

Another, related but different source of education expenditure data, is the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which publishes the Statistics of Public Expenditure for Economic Development (SPEED). This source relies primarily on data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Definitions

In the UIS database, government expenditure on education includes spending by local/municipal, regional and national governments, on public and private educational institutions, education administration, and subsidies for private entities (students/households and other privates entities). This information is then reported by level of education, and typically as a share of national income (GDP) or as a share of total public expenditure. In principle, expenditure on pre-primary levels as well as expenditure sourced with transfers from international sources to government, are included. In practice, however, many countries under report these specific figures.

Measurement limitations

The UIS has been maintained since 1999 with the intent of providing comparable expenditure figures across countries and time, and its estimates rely on reports submitted by ministries and national statistics offices. Since reporting is delegated typically to ministries of education, in some instances data on total public expenditure on education fails to represent spending by other ministries that also have budgets for education. Additionally, since not all countries have (or update) national education accounts, the UIS attempts to generate estimates and impute missing data using information from national publications, official websites and other sources. However, the UIS dataset has several missing observations, particularly for years prior to 2010.

To gauge the extent to which UIS data is reliable, the following visualization shows the proportions of regular and irregular data that countries make available (where 'Regular' means data is available at least once every 3 years; and 'Irregular' means data is available less frequently than every 3 years). As can be seen, the picture is not particularly encouraging: less than half of the countries reported regularly data on total government expenditure on education over the reference period.

Apart from the above-mentioned issues regarding the availability of data, comparing education financing between different countries can be challenging because the way that expenses are categorized is not always consistent. This can be particularly difficult when it comes to expenses that could potentially be classified as education or non-education-related, like teaching hospitals or transportation. While this issue is not as significant in other sectors like healthcare, it still presents some difficulties. For a further discussion of these issues see the UIS data collection manual .

Long-run estimates of education financing

As it has been mentioned, the earliest data on financing of education dates back to the late 19th century, when today's industrialized countries began expanding their education systems. The main sources here are academic publications.

Data Source: Lindert, Peter H. "The rise of social spending, 1880-1930." Explorations in Economic History 31, no. 1 (1994)

Description of available measures: Public Education Expenditure as percent of GDP

Time span: Selected years in the late 19th century

Geographical coverage: Selection of high-income countries

Data Source: Flora, Peter et al. 1983. State, Economy and Society in Western Europe, 1815-1975. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag

Description of available measures: Central government expenditure by sectors, as percent of GDP and as percent of total expenditure.

Time span: 1815-1975

Geographical coverage: Western Europe

Link: Available online from http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Government.htm/

Data Source: Tanzi, Vito, and Ludger Schuknecht. Public spending in the 20th century: A global perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Description of available measures:

Public Health Expenditure as percent of GDP

Health Insurance Coverage as percent of labour force

Time span: 1910-1994

Geographical coverage: Selection of high-income countries

Data publisher: Adam Szirmai, (2015) The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Development, www.dynamicsofdevelopment.com

Data source: Different sources, but mainly UIS after 2000, and selected UNESCO yearbooks prior 2000

Description of available measures:

Gross enrolment ratios by educational level, country and region

Net enrolment ratios by region

Highest diploma obtained (as percentage of 25+ age bracket)

Average years of education of the population of 25 years and over

Government expenditure per pupil in selected countries, 1965-2010

Government expenditure on education as a percentage of gross national product

Cognitive performance of developing countries

Illiterates as a Percentage of the Population of 15 years and over

Time span: Selected years in the second half of 20th century (periodic updates online)

Geographical coverage: Selected low and middle income countries

Long-run country-specific statistics on education financing

Country-specific statistics are another important source of long-run data on education spending. Two references we used in this entry are the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics.

Data Source: (a) Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970 (1929-1970); and (b) US Census Statistical Abstract 1990 (1970-1990). Both published by the US Bureau of the Census

Description of available measures: Total education expenditure, disaggregated by private and public spending, with further details on specific types of expenditure (figures mainly expressed in current prices)

Time span: 1929-1990

Geographical coverage: U.S.

Data Source: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) - Digest of Education Statistics

Description of available measures: Information on a variety of subjects in the field of education statistics, including the number of schools and colleges, teachers, enrollments, and graduates, in addition to educational attainment, finances, federal funds for education, libraries, and international education.

Time span: Since 1970

Geographical coverage: U.S.

Data Source: UIS based on reports from ministries, national statistics offices and international agencies

Description of available measures:

Out-of-school children

Entry

Participation

Progression

Completion

Literacy

Educational attainment

International student mobility in tertiary education

Human resources

Financial resources

School resources and teaching conditions (Africa only)

Adult education (Latin America and the Caribbean only)

Disparities in teacher's training, deployment, characteristics and working conditions at sub-national level (East and South West Asia only)

Time span: 1970-2015 for some variables, but most variables available since 1998

Geographical coverage: Global by Country

Link: http://data.uis.unesco.org

Another important source is the OECD - this is arguably the most comprehensive database in terms of variables and regularity of observations. This is the source used for the OECD's periodic report Education at a Glance.

Data Source: OECD based on reports from member countries

Description of available measures:

Graduation and entry rates

Graduates and entrants by field

Profile of graduates and entrants

Student-teacher ratio and average class size

Distribution of teachers by age and gender

Enrolment rate by age

Share of enrolment by type of institution

Share of enrolment by gender, programme orientation and mode of study

Share of international students enrolled by field of education

Share of international students enrolled by country of origin

Transition from school to work

Educational attainment and labour-force status

Educational finance indicators

Time span: 1960-2015 for some variables, though substantial missing values prior 1990

Geographical coverage: OECD countries

Link: http://stats.oecd.org

Yet another relevant source of internationally comparable expenditure statistics is IFPRI's Statistics of Public Expenditure for Economic Development. This dataset relies mainly on IMF statistics.

Data Source: IFPRI, from multiple dats sources, but mainly IMF statistics

Description of available measures:

Education expenditure in 2005 $ppp

Education expenditure in 2005 US$

percentage of education expenditure in total gdp

per capita education expenditure in 2005 $ppp

percentage of education expendtiure in total expenditure

Time span: 1980-2012

Geographical coverage: 67 countries across all continents

Link: https://www.ifpri.org/publication/statistics-public-expenditures-economic-development-speed

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How is education financed? How much do we spend on it? What are the returns?

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Literacy is a key skill and a key measure of a population's education. In this entry we discuss historical trends, as well as recent developments in literacy.

From a historical perspective, literacy levels for the world population have risen drastically in the last couple of centuries. While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed: only 14% of the world population, in 2016, remained illiterate. Over the last 65 years the global literacy rate increased by 4% every 5 years - from 42% in 1960 to 86% in 2015.¹

Despite large improvements in the expansion of basic education, and the continuous reduction of education inequalities, there are substantial challenges ahead. The poorest countries in the world, where basic education is most likely to be a binding constraint for development, still have very large segments of the population who are illiterate. In Niger, for example, the literacy rate of the youth (15-24 years) is only 36.5%.

Interactive charts on Literacy

Of the world population older than 15 years 86% are literate. This interactive map shows how the literacy rates varies between countries around the world.

In many countries more than 95% have basic literacy skills. Literacy skills of the majority of the population is a modern achievement as we show below.

Globally however, large inequalities remain, notably between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. In Burkina Faso, Niger and South Sudan - the African countries at the bottom of the rank - literacy rates are still below 30%.

Historical change in literacy

While the earliest forms of written communication date back to about 3,500-3,000 BCE, literacy remained for centuries a very restricted technology closely associated with the exercise of power. It was only until the Middle Ages that book production started growing and literacy among the general population slowly started becoming important in the Western World.² In fact, while the ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a fundamental reform born from the Enlightenment, it took centuries for it to happen. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that rates of literacy approached universality in early-industrialized countries.

The following visualization presents estimates of world literacy for the period 1800-2016. As we can see, literacy rates grew constantly but rather slowly until the beginning of the twentieth century. And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education.

The following visualization shows the spread of literacy in Europe since the 15th century, based on estimates from Buringh and Van Zanden (2009).³

As it can be seen, the rising levels of education in Europe foreshadowed the emergence of modern societies.

Particularly fast improvements in literacy took place across Northwest Europe in the period 1600-1800. As we discuss below, widespread literacy is considered a legacy of the Age of Enlightenment.

This chart shows historical estimates of literacy in England over the last five centuries.

The historical estimates are based on the percentage of men women who could sign documents, a very basic definition of literacy that is often used in historical research on education.⁴

The first observations refer to men and women in the diocese of Norwich, which lies to the Northeast of London. Here, the majority of men (61%) were unable to write their name in the late 16th century; for women it was much lower.

By 1840 two-thirds of men and about half of women were literate in England. The expansion of education led to a reduction in education gender inequality. Towards the end of the 19th century the share had increased to almost three-quarters for both genders.

As the center of the Industrial Revolution and one of the first countries that established democratic institutions, England was in important aspects the center of the development of modernity.

The data shows that improvements in literacy preceded the Industrial Revolution and in many ways the rise of living standards became only possible thanks to an increasingly better educated public. Economic growth is possible when we better understand how to produce the things we need, and translate these insights into technological improvements that allow us to produce them more efficiently. Both the development of new technologies (innovation) and their use in production relied on a much better-educated population.

Widespread school education and even basic skills like literacy are a very recent achievement that was enabled and at the same time required by the progress achieved in recent generations.

The visualization shows, in two panels, a side-by-side comparison of long-term trends in school attendance and literacy.

We can see that in 1870 only one in four people in the world attended school, and this meant that only one in five were able to read. And global inequalities in access to education were very large.

Today, in contrast, the global estimates of literacy and school attendance are above 80%, and the inequality between world regions - while still existing - is much lower.

We can see that two centuries ago only a small elite of the world population had the ability to read and write - the best estimate is that 12% of the world population was literate. Over the course of the 19th century global literacy more than doubled. And over the course of the 20th century the world achieved rapid progress in education. More than 4 out of 5 people are now able to read. Young generations are better educated than ever before.

The expansion of literacy in early-industrialized countries helped reduce within-country inequalities. In the preceding visualization we showed that England virtually closed literacy gender gaps by 1900. Here we provide evidence of literacy gaps across races in the US.

The following visualization shows illiteracy rates by race for the period 1870-1979. As we can see, in order to reach near universal levels of literacy, the US had to close the race gap. This was eventually achieved around 1980.

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over in the US who were illiterate by race, 1870-1979 - Our World in Data, with data from NCES⁵

As pointed out above, Europe pioneered the expansion of basic education - but global literacy rates only started really climbing in the second half of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. Here we present evidence of important recent achievements in Latin America, where literacy has dramatically increased in the past century.

As it can be seen, many nations have gained 40-50 percentage points in literacy during this period.

Despite these improvements, however, there is still a wide disparity between nations. Here you can see that, at the turn of the 21st century, half of the population in poor countries such as Haiti remains illiterate. This motivates the next visualization, where we discuss cross-country heterogeneity in more detail.

Literacy around the world today

Literacy by generation

To assess the extent to which progress can be expected in the years to come, it is convenient to break down literacy estimates by age groups. The following map, using data from UNESCO, shows such estimates for most countries in the world.

As it can be seen, in the majority of nations there is a large difference in literacy rates across generations (you can change the map to show literacy rates for different groups by clicking on the corresponding buttons at the top).

These large differences across generations point to a global trend: the high literacy rate among the youth indicates that as time passes, the literacy rate for the overall population will continue to increase.

World maps of the literacy rate by age group⁶

We highlighted above the fact that most low and middle income countries feature large differences in literacy rates across generations. The visualization shows specifically how remarkably large these differences are in Northern Africa and the Middle East. Using UNESCO data, these maps show that in many countries in these regions, only less than a third of the older generation is literate - while in contrast, more than 90% of the younger generation is literate.

The scatter plot emphasises the point already made. As you can see, younger generations are more likely to be literate than older generations around the world. And in some countries the gaps are dramatic. In Algeria, for example, the literacy rate among the youth (15-24 years) is close to 97%; while it is 28% among the older population (65+ years).

In the chart you can use the slider at the bottom to check how these generational gaps have been changing in recent decades. You can see that throughout Africa the changes have been mainly horizontal (i.e. gaps have been widening as there have been radical recent improvements specifically benefiting the younger population). This is in contrast to richer regions, such as Europe, where the expansion of education started earlier and as a consequence changes have been mainly vertical (e.g. in Portugal the literacy rate among the youth was already high in 1980; so continued education expansion has meant that literacy rates are today almost equally high across the entire Portuguese population).

Literacy by sex

The visualization shows that particularly in many poorer countries the literacy rate for young women is lower than the rate for young men.

This chart shows the literacy rate by sex over time.
This visualization shows the ratio of the literacy rate between young women and men around the world.

Numeracy is the ability to understand and work with numbers. The visualization shows how this basic ability became more common in populations around the world based on a very basic definition of numeracy, the ability to correctly state one's own age.

Compared to the data on literacy we have less information on numeracy skills in the world today. Some information comes from PIAAC, the OECD's survey of the skills of adults. A world map of these scores can be found here.

The scatter plot shows how adults in OECD countries scored in the literacy and numeracy dimension. We see that the two aspects are closely correlated, those countries that have high literacy also have high numeracy.

PIAAC is only available for the very recent past, but it can still give us some insights of how numeracy skills in the world have changed. If we compare the numeracy scores of the young cohort with the older cohort in a scatterplot we find that in most countries numeracy skills have recently increased.

Definitions & Measurement

Measurement today

In the chart we present a breakdown of UNESCO literacy estimates, showing the main methodologies used, and how these have changed over time. (To explore changes across time use the slider underneath the map.)

The breakdown covers four categories: self-reported literacy declared directly by individuals, self-reported literacy declared by the head of the household, tested literacy from proficiency examinations, and indirect estimation or extrapolation.

In most cases, the categories covering 'self-reports' (green and orange) correspond to estimates of literacy that rely on answers provided to a simple yes/no question asking people if they can read and write.

The category 'indirect estimation' (black) corresponds mainly to estimates that rely on indirect evidence from educational attainment, usually based on the highest degree of completed education.

In this table you find details regarding all literacy definitions and sources, country by country, and how we categorised them for the purpose of this chart.

This chart is telling us that:

There is substantial cross-country variation, with recent estimates covering all four measurement methods.

There is variation within countries across time (e.g. Mexico switches between self-reports and extrapolation).

The number of countries that base their estimates on self-reports and testing is increasing.

Another way to dissect the same data, is to classify literacy estimates according to the type of measurement instrument used to collect the relevant data. In the next chart we explore this, splitting estimates into three categories: sampling, including data from literacy tests and household surveys; census data; and other instruments (e.g. administrative data on school enrollment).

Here we can see that most countries use sampling instruments (coded as 'surveys' in the map), although in the past census data was more common. Literacy surveys have the potential of being more accurate - when the sampling is done correctly - because they allow for more specific and detailed measurement than short and generic questions in population censuses.

As mentioned above, recent data on literacy is often based on a single question included in national population censuses or household surveys presented to respondents above a certain age, where literacy skills are self-reported. The question is often phrased as "can you read and write?". These self-reports of literacy skills have several limitations:

Simple questions such as "can you read and write?" frame literacy as a skill you either possess or do not when, in reality, literacy is a multi-dimensional skill that exists on a continuum.

Self-reports are subjective, in that the question is dependent on what each individual understands by "reading" and "writing". The form of a word may be familiar enough for a respondent to recall its sound or meaning without actually 'reading' it. Similarly, when writing out one's name to convey written ability, this can be accomplished by 'drawing' a familiar shape rather than writing in an effort to produce a written text with meaning.

In many cases surveys ask only one individual to report literacy on behalf of the entire household. This indirect reporting potentially introduces further noise, in particular when it comes to estimating literacy among women and children, since these groups are less often considered 'head of household' in the surveys.

Similarly, inferring literacy from data on educational attainment is also problematic, since schooling does not produce literacy in the same way everywhere: Proficiency tests show that in many low-income countries, a large fraction of second-grade primary-school students cannot read a single word of a short text; and for very few people in these countries going to school for four or five years guarantees basic literacy.

Even at a conceptual level there is lack of consensus - national definitions of literacy that are based on educational attainment vary substantially from country to country. For example, in Greece people are considered literate if they have finished six years of primary education; while in Paraguay you qualify as literate if you have completed two years of primary school.⁷

Given the limitations of self-reported or indirectly inferred literacy estimates, efforts are being made at both national and international levels to conduct standardized literacy tests to assess proficiency in a systematic way.

In particular, large cross-country assessment surveys have been developed to overcome the challenges of producing comparable literacy data. Two important examples are the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which is a test used for measuring literacy mostly in rich countries; and the Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP), which is a household assessment aimed at measuring literacy skills in developing countries, while remaining comparable across countries, languages, and scripts.⁸

The LAMP tests have only recently been field tested in four countries: Jordan, Mongolia, Palestine, and Paraguay. The PIAAC tests, on the other hand, have been administered in about 30 countries, and the results are shown in the chart.⁹

We only have these tests for a few countries, but we can still see that there is an overall positive correlation. Moreover, we see that there is substantial variation in scores even for countries with identical and almost perfect literacy rates (e.g. Japan vs Italy). This confirms the fact that PIAAC tests capture a related, but broader concept of literacy.

Reconstructing estimates from the past

The UNESCO definition of "people who can, with understanding, read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life", started being recorded in census data from the end of the 19th century onwards. Hence, despite variation on the types of questions and census instruments used, these historical census data remain the best source of data on literacy for the period prior 1990.

The longest series attempting to reconstruct literacy estimates from historical census data is provided in the OECD report "How Was Life? Global Well-being since 1820", published in 2014. This is the source used in the first chart in this blog post for the period 1800 to 1990.¹⁰

How accurate are these UNESCO estimates?

The evidence suggests that the narrow concept of literacy measured in early census data provides an imperfect, yet informative account of literacy skills. The chart shows a good example: As we can see, already in 1947, census estimates from the US correlate strongly with educational attainment, as one would expect.

Importantly, the correlation between educational attainment and literacy also holds across countries and over time. The next chart shows this by plotting changes in literacy rates and average years of schooling. Each country in this chart is represented by a line, where the beginning and ending points correspond to the first and last available observation of these two variables over the period 1970-2010. (As we mention above, before 1990 almost all observations correspond to census data.)

As we can see, literacy rates tend to be much higher in countries where people tend to have more years of education; and as average years of education go up in a country, literacy rates also go up.

Countries with high literacy rates also tend to have higher results in the basic literacy tests included in the DHS surveys (this is a test that requires survey respondents to read a sentence showed to them). As we can see in the chart, there is obviously noise, but these two variables are closely related.

When census data is not available, a common method used to estimate literacy is to calculate the share of people who could sign official documents (e.g. court documents, marriage certificates, etc).¹¹

As the researcher Jeremiah Dittmar explains, this approach only gives a lower bound of the estimates because the number of people who could read was higher than the number who could write.

Indeed, other methods have been proposed, in order to rely on historical estimates of people who could read. For example, researchers Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden deduce literacy rates from estimated per capita book consumption. ¹² As Buringh and Van Zanden show, their estimates based on book consumption are different, but still fairly close to alternative estimates based on signed documents.

Data: Literacy rate for the entire population

Geographical coverage: Global - by country

Time span: 2011 or most recent earlier estimate (in some cases going back several decades)

Available here

Data: Literacy rate (for youths (15-24), adults (15+) and the elderly population (65+))

Geographical coverage: Global - by country

Time span: Since 1975 - scattered and far from annual data

Available at: It is online here, and it is visualized here.

The UNDP's Human Development Report data is here, and UNICEF publishes data on literacy rate here.

Older older publications including data on literacy rates are:
UNESCO (2002) - Estimated Illiteracy Rate and Illiterate Population Aged 15 Years and Older by Country, 1970-2015, Paris.
UNESCO (1970) - Literacy 1967-1969 Progress Achieved in Literacy Throughout the World. Paris (1970)
UNESCO (1957) - World illiteracy at mid-century - A Statistical Study, Paris.
UNESCO (1953) - Progress of literacy in various countries - A Preliminary Statistical Study of Available Census Data since 1900, Paris.

Data: Literacy rate

Geographical coverage: Global - by country (not by region). There are almost no data for rich industrialized countries - only for developing countries.

Time span: Since 1975 - scattered

Available at:

This data is taken from the UNESCO.

Data: Literacy rate

Geographical coverage: Mostly Western Europe

Time span: 19th and 20th century

Available at: Two important publications are: Peter Flora (1983 & 1987) - State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975: A Data Handbook in two Volumes. Frankfurt, New York: Campus; London: Macmillan Press; Chicago: St. James Press and Peter Flora (1973) - Historical processes of social mobilization: urbanization and literacy, 1850-1965. In S.N. Eisenstadt, S. Rokkan (Eds.), Building States and Nations: Models and Data Resources, Sage, London, pp. 213-258.

Data: Illiteracy rate (percent of adult population)

Geographical coverage: Latin American countries

Time span: Since 1900

Available at: Online here

Data: Measures of numeracy and literacy competence

Geographical coverage: 24 OECD countries

Time span: no time series dimension - only 2012

Available at: Online here

Presents the initial results of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)

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Being able to read and write opens up the world of education and knowledge. When and why did more people become literate? How can progress continue?

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Access to education is now seen as a fundamental right - in many cases, it's the government's duty to provide it.

But formal education is a very recent phenomenon. In the chart, we see the share of the adult population - those older than 15 - that has received some basic education and those who haven't.

In the early 1800s, fewer than 1 in 5 adults had some basic education. Education was a luxury; in all places, it was only available to a small elite.

But you can see that this share has grown dramatically, such that this ratio is now reversed. Less than 1 in 5 adults has not received any formal education.

This is reflected in literacy data, too: 200 years ago, very few could read and write. Now most adults have basic literacy skills.

International statistics often focus on attendance as the marker of educational progress.

However, being in school does not guarantee that a child receives high-quality education. In fact, in many countries, the data shows that children learn very little.

Just half - 48% - of the world's children can read with comprehension by the end of primary school. It's based on data collected over a 9-year period, with 2016 as the average year of collection.

This is shown in the chart, where we plot averages across countries with different income levels.¹

The situation in low-income countries is incredibly worrying, with 90% of children unable to read by that age.

This can be improved - even among high-income countries. The best-performing countries have rates as low as 2%. That's more than four times lower than the average across high-income countries.

Making sure that every child gets to go to school is essential. But the world also needs to focus on what children learn once they're in the classroom.
Read more:

There are still significant inequalities in the amount of education children get across the world.

This can be measured as the total number of years that children spend in school. However, researchers can also adjust for the quality of education to estimate how many years of quality learning they receive. This is done using an indicator called "learning-adjusted years of schooling".

On the map, you see vast differences across the world.

In many of the world's poorest countries, children receive less than three years of learning-adjusted schooling. In most rich countries, this is more than 10 years.

Across most countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa - where the largest share of children live - the average years of quality schooling are less than 7.

Globally, until recently, boys were more likely to attend school than girls. The world has focused on closing this gap to ensure every child gets the opportunity to go to school.

Today, these gender gaps have largely disappeared. In the chart, we see the difference in the global enrollment rates for primary, secondary, and tertiary (post-secondary) education. The share of children who complete primary school is also shown.

We see these lines converging over time, and recently they met: rates between boys and girls are the same.

For tertiary education, young women are now more likely than young men to be enrolled.

While the differences are small globally, there are some countries where the differences are still large: girls in Afghanistan, for example, are much less likely to go to school than boys.

Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2023) - "Global Education" Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/global-education' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-global-education, author = {Hannah Ritchie and Veronika Samborska and Natasha Ahuja and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser}, title = {Global Education}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/global-education} }

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See all our data, visualizations, and writing on global education.