By 2015, the universal primary education Millennium Development Goal (MDG) will be met in nearly all countries. However, millions of students still finish formal schooling without mastering basic literacy and numeracy. Schooling doesn’t necessarily produce learning or education. In this paper, we measure the observed annual pace of progress for developing countries in three cross-nationally comparable assessments that have been repeated over time: TIMSS (mathematics and science), PISA (mathematicsand reading), and SACMEQ (mathematics and reading).The pace of progress is very slow. At “business as usual” progress, it would take a century or more for developing countries to reach current OECD assessment levels. Slow progress is not universal—some countries are making sustained progress and thus accelerating the pace of learning progress is not impossible. However, setting overambitious learning goals may be counterproductive. Sustained progress faster than four points a year (on this scale) seems unlikely.