A Chance for Bush to Take School Reform Global

It’s deservedly a point of pride for President Bush that the American-led overthrow of the Taliban made education available to thousands of young girls in Afghanistan previously barred from school. “Thanks to the United States and our coalition,” he declared last week, “young girls now go to school for the first time.”

Now Bush has a chance to help open the schoolhouse doors on a much greater scale, for millions of young children denied education in the developing world.

Next week, Bush and the leaders of the major industrial nations meeting at the Group of 8 summit in Canada will consider a rising tide of requests from the World Bank and development advocates for a new global initiative to expand access to education.

If Bush and his fellow leaders have learned their lessons from Sept. 11, they’ll respond aggressively--out of self-interest as much as benevolence. The attack didn’t impose on America an obligation to be the world’s social worker. But it made painfully apparent that the discontent bred in failing countries can impose costs far beyond their borders. And while the priority for the U.S. was to reestablish fear in those who would do us harm, it’s clear that our long-term security interests are served by expanding opportunity and shrinking the pool of those open to demagoguery.

Education isn’t a foolproof vaccine against extremism; as a group, the Sept. 11 hijackers were well educated. But expanding access to education in the developing world, especially in public schools, is among the most effective tools for teaching tolerance and reinforcing social stability. As Gennet Zewide, the minister of education in Ethiopia, put it at a Council on Foreign Relations forum in Washington last week, education offers developing nations the best chance “to inculcate in our culture the idea of human rights and democracy.”

Expanding access to education offers more tangible benefits as well, particularly when school is made available to girls as well as boys. Studies show that more schooling for girls means fewer unwanted pregnancies, which makes it easier to control population growth. Likewise, infant mortality rates drop when the mother’s education level rises.

And though increasing the number of children who can read and write doesn’t guarantee that a poor country will grow richer, experts agree that a lack of education virtually guarantees that poor countries will stay poor.

“Whereas education is not sufficient to reduce poverty or achieve economic growth, without education you cannot achieve them,” says Ruth Kagia, the World Bank’s education director. Even subsistence economies benefit from more schooling: One study of 13 nations found that farm output rises along with average education levels, largely because literate farmers are more likely to adopt new technologies.

Through the United Nations, the world community in 2000 already committed to ensuring universal access to primary school education for boys and girls by 2015. But there’s a long way to go. The World Bank estimates today that a staggering 113 million children ages 6 to 11 are not in school. That’s about one-sixth of all school-age children in the developing world.

Even more discouraging, more than one-fourth of all children in developing countries fail to complete a primary school education--the measure of success that experts have come to recognize as the most meaningful. Given the sluggish progress, the World Bank recently projected that 89 of the world’s 155 countries aren’t on track to reach the 2015 goal of education for all.

Given the payoff, why has the world made so little progress at moving children into school? The answer is the same tangled knot of tradition, poverty and mismanagement that explains so many problems in needy nations. Desperately poor parents need the labor children provide, not only in the cash economy but at home. Cultural traditions, especially in rural areas, discourage the education of girls.

Many countries spend too little on education--India, with a third of school-age children out of school, and Pakistan, with more than a quarter, both spend twice as much on defense as education--and charge parents too much: Even small school fees for books, which are common in many countries, can become large impediments for families who barely earn enough to survive. Finally, in many places school quality is so poor, parents understandably conclude it isn’t worth the sacrifice. “In poor countries, there is school choice,” says Gene Sperling, a former top economic advisor to President Clinton who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The choice is, do you go to school at all?”

Amid the undeniable challenges, some encouraging signs are sprouting. At the forum last week, Zewide and colleagues from Ghana, Nigeria and Gambia shared promising strategies--such as home loans to attract better-qualified teachers to rural areas, subsidies to parents who keep their daughters in school, flexible rules that allow communities to restructure their school calendar around local labor needs--that have expanded participation and improved quality.

Such local reforms are probably the key to accelerating progress. But the developing world also needs more money for books, classrooms and teachers. The World Bank calculates that meeting the 2015 goal would require the rich nations to provide about $3 billion more annually in new education aid.

Bush has broadly urged a greater focus on education in foreign assistance. But he hasn’t signed on to this specific plan, largely because the administration believes the World Bank wants to subsidize too many countries that haven’t committed to internal reform.

Those are appropriate questions for the administration to ask. But it would be a mistake for Bush to get lost in these weeds now. The bureaucracies can negotiate the list of the deserving later. In Canada, the challenge for Bush is to rally the world as he did in the war against terrorism--this time for a global campaign to leave no child behind.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.