EFA report: Ch. 1, 2, 5

While the EFA report was a good awakening to realize that the Dakar Framework for Action targets and Millennium Development Goals were not going to be met by 2015, I am critical of its intentions. As with anything, it does not help much to point out imperfections if you're not going to back it up with solutions. The report does an excellent job of giving us tons and tons of negative statistics that shocked us while reading (such as the fact that 776 million adults in the world are still illiterate). Every once in a while it would also emphasize that there has been some positive growth (such as telling us that the global adult literacy rate increased from 76% to 84% over the past 15 years). However, given that its Recommendations section is only a couple pages (Chapter 5), I don't understand how the policymakers of developing countries are supposed to know what to do to fix the situation. Instead of simply giving us statistics of countries/areas that have experienced a positive change due to these initiatives, the EFA report should have specifically stated what it was that these countries did in order to achieve success. For example, in Chapter 5 one of the recommendations is, "Increase national education spending, especially in developing countries that chronically underinvest in education." To me this was quite obvious, but I asked myself, if developing countries don't have the money to increase spending on education, THEN what can they do? The EFA report should have come up with more tangible solutions that can actually be implemented based on past successful experiences.

I thought that one of the most important goals mentioned in this report was in order to increase quality of education, motivation of teachers must be increased. This was interesting to me because in my interview with a Nigerian student in the beginning of the semester, he talked a lot about how often class was cancelled because teachers didn't show up to school. He also said many times when teachers did not know about a subject they would make up things based on their own beliefs. It sounded like his education was negatively impacted simply because the teachers didn't care enough (most likely because their pay was low or nonexistent).