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Despite great progress around the world in getting more kids into schools, too many leave without even the most basic skills. In India's rural Andhra Pradesh, for instance, only about one in twenty children in fifth grade can perform basic arithmetic.The problem is that schooling is not the same as learning. In The Rebirth of Education, Lant Pritchett uses two metaphors from nature to explain why. The first draws on Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom's book about the difference between centralized and decentralized organizations, The Starfish and the Spider. Schools system

Irresistible forces for increased labor mobility -- The fifth irresistible force : ghosts and zombies -- Immovable ideas : myths and truths -- Accommodating forces and ideas to achieve development-friendly labor -- Mobility -- Conclusion : let their people come

Abstract
A substantial expansion of migration and labor mobility in the rich industrial countries currently seems outside the Overton window, the range of acceptable political discourse. If anything, the general political mood seems to favor even greater restrictiveness of immigration. I argue that five trends that are already well underway could, within a decade or less, bring much larger flows of migrants and labor mobility—including a major expansion of time-limited labor mobility—squarely onto the domestic political agenda in rich industrial countries.

My argument is that while enormous progress has been made during the post–World War II "development era" during which there was substantial multilateral and bilateral development cooperation, or "foreign aid," that era is coming to a close. The main driving forces of the end of the relevance of development cooperation to the overall development endeavor is that the politics of the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries has shifted such that the broad development agenda of interest to the leaders (and citizens) of the "recipient" countries can no longer muster support. Instead, the mainstream, legacy development organizations supported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (e.g., the World Bank) are caught in a cycle of increasing irrelevance and decline, and I argue that both the external political and the internal organizational dynamics of development organizations are past the point of no return.

The incredibly low levels of learning and the generally dysfunctional public sector schooling systems in many (though not all) developing countries are the result of a capability trap (Pritchett et al. 2010). Two phenomena reinforce persistent failure of schooling systems to produce adequate learning outcomes. One is the mismatch between system design - the allocation of activities across organizations and mechanisms of accountability - and the insights of the 'new institutional economics' from principal agent models and contract theory. In particular, many education systems attempt to manage teaching and learning as a 'thin' or 'logistical' activity that can be managed with top-down control and an emphasis on compliance. The reality is that teaching is a 'thick' or 'implementation intensive' activity that performs better when teachers and operators of schools are given performance standards, have multiple in-depth accountability channels, and are given greater autonomy. The second phenomena that facilitates persistent failure is global isomorphism on enrollment and inputs (Meyer et al. 1977; Boli et al. 1985; Meyer et al. 1997). That is, the field (in the sense of Bourdieu 1993) of global education has produced a near exclusive emphasis on enrollments and duration in school, adequacy of physical inputs, and formal qualifications that allowed, perhaps encouraged, national systems to ignore completely performance on child-learning (of any type, measured in any way). I conclude with a comparison in India of the national governments recent efforts in basic education which have been almost exclusively isomorphic.

La nouvelle stratégie de gestion du secteur public de la Banque mondiale doit être évaluée au regard de l'ampleur des problèmes auxquels elle est confrontée. Deux de ces problèmes concernent la question de savoir ce qu'il faut faire des États en déroute ( failed states ) et en voie de déliquescence ( failing states ), ainsi que face à la stagnation des progrès dans les États qui « battent de l'aile » ( failing states ). Sur ces deux fronts, la différence entre ce que veut le monde de l'action (un plan d'action réalisable pour faire face aux problèmes difficiles, comme l'Afghanistan) et ce que la stratégie de PSM produit (et peut très probablement produire) est grande. Dans le présent article, nous proposons une « analyse itérative axée sur les problèmes » en vue de combler cet égard.

The new World Bank strategy on Public Sector Management (PSM) has to be judged against the magnitude of the problems it faces. Two of these are what to do about failed and failing states and what to do about the stagnation of progress in 'flailing' states. On both of these fronts the gap between what the world of action wants – an implementable action plan to tackle tough problems like Afghanistan – and what the PSM strategy does (and quite probably can) deliver is wide. This article proposes 'problem-driven iterative analysis' as one way of bridging the gap.

When the World Bank dreams of 'a world free of poverty,' what should it be dreaming? In measuring global income or consumption expenditure poverty, the World Bank has widely adopted the $1 a day standard as a lower bound. Because this standard is based on poverty lines in the poorest countries, anyone with income or expenditures below this line will truly be poor. But there is no consensus standard for the upper bound of the global poverty line: above what level of income or expenditures is someone truly not poor? This article proposes that the World Bank compute its lower and upper bounds in a methodologically equivalent way, using the poverty lines of the poorest countries for the lower bound and the poverty lines of the richest countries for the upper bound. The resulting upper bound global poverty line will be 10 times higher than the current lower bound and at least 5 times higher than the currently used alternative lower bound of $2 a day. And in tracking progress toward a world free of poverty, the World Bank should compute measures of global poverty using a variety of weights on the depth and intensity of poverty for a range of poverty lines between the global lower and upper bounds. For instance, rather than trying to artificially force the global population of 6.2 billion (a billion is 1,000 million) into just two categories 'poor' and 'not poor,' with the new range of poverty lines the estimates would be that 1.3 billion people are 'destitute' (below $1 a day), another 1.6 billion are in 'extreme poverty' (above $1 a day but below $2 dollar a day), and another 2.5 billion are in 'global poverty' (above extreme poverty but below the upper bound poverty line).