What do the U.S. presidential primary contests and the effort to build a realistic plan for universal quality education have in common? Hopefully not too much.
Sustainable Development Goal 4 — one of 17 SDGs finalized last year at the United Nations General Assembly — is ambitious by all standards. It zeros in on quality education for all and not simply on access to classrooms. But at the moment, there is no comprehensive plan to achieve the goal by 2030.
“There’s all of this excitement, but unless we’re able to pull this together into some type of credible plan moving forward, we run the risk of [getting to a point in 2030] where we make some progress but we’re still far below the goals that we set for ourselves,” Justin van Fleet, director of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity said Monday at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.