The quality of education at the beginning of the 21st century

The paper works on the assumption that basic skills in literacy and numeracy are to be seen as core targets of education for all in the 21st century. The emphasis will be on primary schooling. A broad perspective will be taken in defining educational quality, in which questions on "doing the right things" in education as well as "doing things right" have a place. In the sequel the focus will be on a combination of instrumental effectiveness and equity as the most fruitful perspective in further delineating both the issue of measuring quality and the issue of improving quality. In the section on “lessons learned” the state of the art in educational effectiveness research will be reviewed, leading up to a discussion on mechanisms for improving the quality of education. Of these alternative mechanisms the evaluation-feedback mechanism will be discussed in somewhat more detail for its potential of becoming an institutionalized basis for “permanent” quality improvement in education of developed and developing countries. In the final section the position that basics in education should be measured on globally comparable criteria is defended as a starting point for defining universal standards, followed by a brief discussion as to whether certain teaching methods to attain these universal standards could likewise be propagated universally.