How long must we ask the same questions about education?

Recently, The Daily Star published an article titled “Why Bangladesh’s children are in school but not learning”, written by John Richards and Shahidul Islam, who cited data showing a sharp decline in enrolment in government schools and evidence from national and international assessments that many children complete primary education without acquiring foundational literacy and numeracy skills. They identified the reasons behind this debacle: a historic class bias in society, poor-quality professional preparation of teachers, very low public investment in education, corruption and mismanagement, and “incoherent” school management. Noting a similar pattern in other large-population South Asian countries, they expressed the hope that the new government in Bangladesh would help break this pattern.

Over the years, countless op-eds, editorials, and research reports have been written about “schooling without learning” or aspects of it in Bangladesh and South Asia. The standard opening words of such an article have more or less followed the same refrain: that remarkable progress has been made in enrolling students in school, but serious problems remain in improving the quality of education. Why have low quality and poor learning outcomes persisted for all these years?

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The two writers, Richards and Islam, and I collaborated on a book titled The Political Economy of Education in South Asia: Fighting Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. As the title suggests, our premise was that a country’s education system becomes relevant and purposeful when it contributes to mitigating poverty, inequality, and exclusion in society. Ensuring that education serves this purpose, however, depends on the dynamics of political choices made in a country.

The premise about the purpose of a nation’s education system has specific implications for system governance and school management, public investment and accountability, teacher preparation, ensuring acceptable quality for all children, and management at the school level. It also has implications for a common core curriculum and learning content for all children, as well as assessment systems that provide a credible picture of what children learn.

Defining and clearly articulating the purpose and outcomes of education for society as a whole, and for individual learners, are not merely technical problems. Similarly, designing and managing a system that achieves these outcomes are not just tasks for education experts and authorities. They are also matters of political choice, decision-making, and consensus-building. We found that this is where Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan have faltered. The failure in education has ultimately been a failure of political resolve and of political dynamics that have prevented necessary decisions from being made.

We emphasised in our book the critical importance of synergy between political choices and technical solutions relating to pedagogy and system/school management, as well as strong administrative backing for implementing those solutions. These ideas resonated with academics and researchers in the countries concerned. Unfortunately, we cannot say that they penetrated the policymaking sphere beyond academic discourse. Bridging the communication gap between academia and policy-level political and administrative actors has been a long-standing problem that persists to this day.

Five years on, while working on a second edition of the book, we find that the education scenario and the political environment for policymaking have not changed much in South Asia. Sri Lanka maintains its outlier position in basic education achievements. In India, Kerala is far ahead of other states, while some states such as Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu perform better than others that continue to struggle to show sustained improvement. Political and administrative synergy at the state level, ensuring coherence in policy formulation and implementation, has made the difference. Pakistan’s overall public education system is in the doldrums, while some creative non-state initiatives can reach only limited numbers.

What can be said about Bangladesh, after two years of an interim government of “hand-picked elites”, and with a newly elected government installed in February 2026? The student-led mass uprising had raised expectations of a new beginning in education reform, but the interim government did not fulfil this expectation. Since the inception of the BNP government, top officials have spoken about the poor state of the nation’s education and the need for transformative change. A positive signal has been given in the 2026-27 national budget by reversing the downward trend in public education spending. It has been raised to 2 percent of GDP, with a promise to increase it gradually to 5 percent.

The steps taken and plans announced so far have raised expectations but also generated debate over whether a path of meaningful reform will be really charted. Basic education—from pre-primary to pre-tertiary levels—is the foundation of human resource development and, as pledged under Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), must be of acceptable quality, universal, equitable, and inclusive. Bangladesh and most of South Asia are clearly not on track to reach these targets by 2030. We do not even have a time-bound overall plan for verifiable progress towards this goal.

A fragmented approach to school education continues, divided into primary, secondary, and higher secondary jurisdictions under two ministries. This structure was initiated in the 1990s, when education only up to class 5 was regarded as a universal entitlement. A highly centralised and top-down school governance and management structure remains intact. Differences in core curricular content, pedagogy and teachers’ skills, infrastructure standards, classroom practices, student assessment, and costs to parents reinforce and maintain class divisions in schooling: madrasahs for the poor, mainstream Bangla schools for low-income families, and English-medium schools for the privileged. School teaching remains a profession of last resort for college graduates. A “whole school” approach—with the leadership of the head of an institution mobilising and inspiring teachers, parents, and the community to ensure that children learn and thrive—remains the exception.

It is not expected that total transformative reform in education will happen all at once. Such an attempt would risk creating disruption and chaos. But piecemeal, fragmented, or uncoordinated “symptomatic treatment” is not the solution either. Education analysts and researchers have long advocated a comprehensive approach, with short-, medium- and long-term actions identified within a strategic framework to guide thinking and action. A five-year education sector development plan and a 10-year perspective plan could be the outcome. A mechanism for such an initiative could be a high-level education development taskforce. But again, it will work only if the taskforce comprises dedicated people with the necessary expertise and receives support from the highest political and administrative levels without partisan considerations.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed is emeritus professor at BRAC University, chair at Bangladesh ECD Network (BEN), and adviser to Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE). Views expressed in the article are his own.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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