The coming global testing

It’s a stark numerical conundrum: there are only so many standardized tests that boys and girls in the United States can be made to take. If only there were children in some other part of the world who could benefit from a diet rich in assessments and robust in metric… Great news, reader! The hundred of millions of children who live in developing nations, including the world’s poorest countries, represent the next great testing boondoggle frontier of measurability. Inhabiting a little known region known as the *global data gap,* we’ve never before known what they don’t know. But that’s about to change.

There will be a test

This ambitious
marketing planresponse to the global measurability crisis is the product of something called the Learning Metrics Task Force, which is itself a product of the Brookings Institute and the UNESCO Insitute for Statistics. Also somewhere high up in the mix: the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons. The full report is available here, but read carefully as you will be tested—along with all of the children in the world.

The global data gap

As with so many looming crises we don’t yet know just how large this one looms because we lack the kinds of robust measures that would allow us to measure the crisis. Got it? Learning Metrics Task Force: take it away.