Does Pluralism Matter for the Fulfillment of the Right to Education? Exploring New Indices

Abstract

There is not a lot of support in the international community today for the role played by the private sector, including faith-based schools, towards achieving the fourth sustainable development goal (SDG), which calls for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. Yet, education pluralism is called for in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a separate paper published in this journal, a measure of education pluralism was suggested to reflect this idea. In this paper, that measure is combined with data on educational outcomes to assess whether taking pluralism seriously may affect assessments of the fulfillment of the right to education.

Keywords:

• education pluralism
• Catholic education
• right to education
• faith-based schools
• sustainable development goals

Notes

1 On these approaches see, for example, OIDEL (2016) and RESULTS Educational Fund (2016).

2 This is the formula used since 2010. UNDP also publishes other measures.

3 This is known as a Cobb–Douglas function. When α + β = 1, the function exhibits constant returns to scale.

4 On out-of-school children, see UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2019) and UNESCO (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Quentin Wodon

Quentin Wodon is a Lead Economist at the World Bank. This paper was, however, written in a personal capacity as part of his volunteer work on Catholic education globally. The analysis and views expressed in this paper are those of the author only and may not reflect the views of the World Bank, its Executive Director, or the countries they represent.