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Leaps or One Step at a Time: Skirting or Helping Engage the Debate? The Case of Reading

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Policy Debates in Comparative, International, and Development Education

Part of the book series: International and Development Education ((INTDE))

Abstract

In a paper that deserves a wider recognition, Deon Filmer, Amer Hasan, and Lant Pritchett (2006) call for a “Millennium Learning Goal” as a way to focus the international community’s attention on quality in education. They call for indicators that could do for quality what access and completion indicators have done for the access. The international community is responding, gradually. Three years after this paper’s appearance, the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) appears to be the first major international entity to have declared something like a set of international quality goals (The EFA-FTI Secretariat 2009, 11). In the meantime, attention to quality issues seems to have increased at UNESCO as well. In 2008, UNESCO launched an initiative called “Learning Counts” aimed at, among other things, producing a set of indicators to focus attention on the quality issue in the same way that the EFA and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) access and completion indicators focus attention on those issues.1

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© 2011 John N. Hawkins and W. James Jacob

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Crouch, L., Gove, A.K. (2011). Leaps or One Step at a Time: Skirting or Helping Engage the Debate? The Case of Reading. In: Hawkins, J.N., Jacob, W.J. (eds) Policy Debates in Comparative, International, and Development Education. International and Development Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339361_9

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