Schooling and Learning Deficits: A Simple Unified Measurement Framework

Abstract

There exists no unified measurement framework that encompasses and integrates schooling and learning deficits – arguably the two most important education challenges in most developing countries. This paper offers a methodology that fills this gap. Using the notions of age-appropriate grade, actual grade, and effective grade for a school-age child, we develop an integrated framework offering a range of schooling, learning and education deprivation measures which also build in distributional considerations. The paper illustrates the value-added of the measurement framework for education policy and evaluation with an application to recent data for India.

Keywords: schooling deficit, learning deficit, education deprivation, India

JEL Classification: I2, O15