Factor 08 of 9
Educational factors
Whether children can attend school and whether they learn once there, from learning poverty to rigid gatekeeping.
Barriers within this factor
Each barrier has its own page with the evidence and sources behind it.
- 1Learning poverty
"Learning poverty" is the share of children who cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10.
Evidence and sources (4 evidence points, 3 experimental methods)
- 2Children out of school
Hundreds of millions of children and youth are out of school.
Evidence and sources (5 evidence points, 3 experimental methods)
- 3Disrupted schooling
Betthäuser, Bach-Mortensen, and Engzell (2023) pooled 42 studies from 15 countries on COVID-19 school disruptions.
Evidence and sources (4 evidence points, 4 experimental methods)
- 4Teacher quality
Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014) linked U.S. school records to adult tax records.
Evidence and sources (3 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 5Teaching above students' level
Many school systems teach to the curriculum for a child's grade, even when children are far behind it. Students who fall behind early may never catch up.
Evidence and sources (2 evidence points, 5 experimental methods)
- 6Rigid gatekeeping
Systems that require strength in every subject can screen out people with exceptional ability in one. Einstein failed an entrance exam because of languages and history, and Ramanujan lost his scholarship because he neglected non-math subjects.
Evidence and sources (4 evidence points, 4 experimental methods)
Evidence strength
Main findings behind this page, grouped by the strength ratings, from strongest to weakest. Each tier lists the findings that received that rating.
| Strength | Findings |
|---|---|
| Strong | Teaching at the Right Level. COVID-19 learning loss. |
| Moderate | Out-of-school counts. The 57% pre-pandemic learning poverty rate. Rigid gatekeeping (one long-run natural experiment, with short-run replications). |
| Limited | The 70% learning poverty figure (a simulation). Long-run effects of individual teachers. |
Actions that can reduce these barriers
Proven actions for the educational barriers have not yet been researched. Each barrier below lists proposed and experimental methods only, with the stage labels and ratings explained below.
Proposed and experimental methods
Each barrier also has a list of proposed and experimental methods. It covers methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places but not widely used, or tried and then failed or reversed, so readers can see what is being tested. Each method has a stage label and an evidence rating in parentheses. The stage labels are Theoretical (proposed but not yet tested as an intervention), Early trial (small or first studies), Large trial (large randomized or field trials), Approved but not scaled (legally approved or running in some places but not widely adopted), In wide use (widely adopted but newly tested or questioned), Sold commercially without trials (used for polygenic embryo screening), and Failed or reversed (tested and shown not to work, or adopted and then withdrawn). The word contested is added where the evidence is disputed. Failed, reversed, and unhelpful methods are listed last and begin with "Failed," "Reversed," or "Not shown to help." A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works, and the rating shows the strength of the evidence.
Ideal conditions that counter this factor
Early childhood and education
What the evidence shows
Early inputs strongly affect the productivity of later inputs (Heckman, 2006), and a 35-year follow-up of gifted students concluded that special educational opportunities enhance talent (Lubinski and Benbow, 2006). Later costs concentrate among children whose behavior problems persist, and they trace largely to early disadvantage (Caspi et al., 2016, and Rivenbark et al., 2018). Rigid gates nearly excluded Einstein and Ramanujan despite exceptional ability.
Ideal:
- High-quality early childhood programs, especially for disadvantaged children
- Free or low-cost books, courses, and advanced material
- Public libraries and shared access to books and tools
- Early, non-stigmatizing help for persistent behavior problems
- Early talent identification and advanced-pace learning
- Sustained support for high achievers from low-income families, because the income gap opens as low-income children fall behind (Bell et al., 2019)
- Flexible pathways and second chances instead of single high-stakes gates
- Affordable higher education, including access for low-income students to the most innovative colleges, where students from low- and high-income families patent at similar rates (Bell et al., 2019)
Evidence strength: Mixed. Early childhood returns are limited (the key trial is small and unreplicated, rated C), access is strong, gifted education models are limited (rated C for the claim that opportunities enhance talent), and the concentration of later costs is rated B. The interventions that reduce it have not been reviewed.
The growing burden of knowledge
What the evidence shows
Jones (2009) found that as knowledge accumulates, age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork all rise. Bloom et al. (2020) found research productivity is declining.
Ideal:
- Faster ways to bring learners to the frontier
- Structures that combine specialists
- Tools that shorten mastery time, where some researchers suggest AI may help, which is speculative
Evidence strength: Moderate. The trend is moderate to strong, and solutions are not yet established.
In the pioneer cases
Statements from the pioneer records that this site classifies under the educational factor. The classification is this site's.
| Pioneer | Effect | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Independence from authority. He disliked his rote Munich gymnasium and left it as a teenager. This skepticism later let him question absolute time. |
| Albert Einstein | Barrier | Entrance exam. At 16, two years below the usual age, he took the Swiss Federal Polytechnic entrance exam. He got the best results in math and science but failed languages and history. Contrary to a popular myth, he did not fail math. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Swiss Matura. He finished school at Aarau and passed the Swiss Matura in 1896 with a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematics. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Max Talmey lent him Aaron Bernstein's popular science books and a geometry textbook. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | The Olympia Academy. Einstein, Maurice Solovine, and Conrad Habicht met to discuss philosophy and spent weeks on Hume's critique of substance and causality. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | The Pestalozzi-inspired Aarau school, which encouraged independent and visual thinking. |
| Albert Einstein | Helped | Accessible institutions. The Polytechnic admitted foreign students and advised him how to qualify. Switzerland granted him citizenship in 1901. |
| Michael Faraday | Barrier | A poor family and schooling only until 13. |
| Michael Faraday | Helped | Access to books through work. Apprenticed to bookbinder George Riebau from 1805 to 1812, he read the scientific books that passed through his hands, with Riebau's encouragement. |
| Michael Faraday | Not overcome | He never learned advanced mathematics. Maxwell later formalized his ideas. |
| Marie Curie | Helped | Informal education at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University. |
| Marie Curie | Helped | A father who taught mathematics and physics. |
| Srinivasa Ramanujan | Barrier | Poverty, no contact with active mathematicians, and no degree. |
| Srinivasa Ramanujan | Helped | One book. At 16 he obtained G. S. Carr's Synopsis, about 5,000 theorems, and largely taught himself from it. |
| Srinivasa Ramanujan | Barrier | Parallel with Einstein. He neglected other subjects, lost his scholarship, and failed later exams. |
| Jonas Salk | Helped | Free public education at Townsend Harris High School and City College of New York. |
| Norman Borlaug | Barrier | He grew up on an Iowa farm during hard economic times, began school in a one-room rural school, and had no school bus to the high school 12 miles away. He left for college with $50 of his own and $11 from his grandfather, and worked his way through. |
| Norman Borlaug | Helped | Interdisciplinary teamwork across genetics, breeding, agronomy, soil science, plant pathology, and entomology. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | Tuberculosis at age 16 interrupted her schooling for two years. |
| Tu Youyou | Barrier | She had no doctorate, no training abroad, and no membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which led Chinese media to call her a "three noes" scientist. |
| Tu Youyou | Helped | Training in two traditions. Western-trained professors taught her pharmacy at Beijing Medical College. She then completed a government program in traditional Chinese medicine for scientists with modern medical training. |
| Percy Julian | Barrier | Born in Montgomery, Alabama, the grandson of enslaved people. Montgomery had no public high school for Black students, so he entered DePauw University inadequately prepared and started as a probationary student. |
| Percy Julian | Helped | Fellowships and study abroad. A fellowship took him to Harvard, and he earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1931, where he began working with plant compounds. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Barrier | Her family's fortunes were unstable. Her eldest brother, Edward, inherited directly from their grandfather and was the only child to receive a formal education. He became a lawyer, while she received little formal education. This inequality shaped her lifelong views on educating men and women. |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Helped | Self-teaching. She taught herself several European languages while reviewing and translating. |
| Baruch Spinoza | Barrier | At seventeen he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family business. |
| Phillis Wheatley | Helped | Education at home. The Wheatley family taught her to read and write. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Barrier | Limited schooling. He was one of seventeen children of a Boston candle and soap maker. He started grammar school at 8, and at 10 his father took him out to work in the family shop. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Helped | Books through his trade. His father chose printing for him because of his love of reading, which gave him daily access to printed material. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Helped | A network of peers. He formed the Junto, a discussion club of tradesmen of moderate means seeking self-improvement. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Note | A library. In 1731 he persuaded Junto members to pool their money for books none could afford alone, founding the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in America. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Note | An academy. His 1749 pamphlet Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth led to an academy that opened in 1751 to children of the gentry and working class alike, which became the University of Pennsylvania. |
| Gregor Mendel | Barrier | His parents were struggling farmers who could not pay for his studies. He supported himself by tutoring, and his sister Theresia gave up part of her dowry to help pay for his education. |
| Gregor Mendel | Barrier | He failed the teacher certification exam in 1850, and an examiner recommended further study in the natural sciences. At a second attempt in 1856 he fell ill and left without finishing, and he never became a certified teacher. |
| Gregor Mendel | Helped | A monastery that invested in him. Abbot Cyril Napp sent him to the University of Vienna from 1851 to 1853, where he studied physics under Christian Doppler and botany under Franz Unger. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | His early schooling was limited. His first school, for Black children in Neosho, had a teacher who knew little more than he did, and he moved through several schools in Kansas. |
| George Washington Carver | Barrier | Highland College in Kansas accepted him and then turned him away because of his race. |
| George Washington Carver | Helped | A college that accepted him. Simpson College in Iowa admitted him in 1890 after Highland had turned him away. He moved on to Iowa State in 1891, earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture in 1894 and a master's degree in 1896, and was its first Black student and first Black faculty member. |
| George Washington Carver | Helped | Booker T. Washington. Washington invited him to lead agriculture at Tuskegee, where he began in October 1896. |
| Yuan Longping | Barrier | From 1953 to 1971 he taught at a rural agricultural school in Anjiang, Hunan, rather than working at a research institute. |
| Yuan Longping | Barrier | His training followed the Soviet theories of heredity of Michurin and Lysenko, and he had to teach himself Mendelian genetics. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Barrier | She completed the coursework at the University of Pennsylvania's Towne Scientific School but in 1892 received a certificate of proficiency instead of a bachelor's degree, because the university did not grant degrees to women. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Helped | Supportive faculty. Penn professors used a rarely invoked university statute for "extraordinary cases" to admit her to graduate study, and she earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1895. |
| Mary Engle Pennington | Not overcome | Penn never awarded her the bachelor's degree she had earned, and her entry into federal service depended on concealing that she was a woman. |
| Fritz Haber | Helped | An academic base. He held posts at the Karlsruhe Polytechnic from 1894 to 1911 and became a professor there in 1906. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Helped | Training abroad. He studied with the geneticist William Bateson in Britain in 1913 and 1914. |
| Nikolai Vavilov | Note | In the autumn of 1948 alone, 127 teachers, including 66 professors, were dismissed, and genetics textbooks were destroyed (Strunnikov, cited in Borinskaya et al., 2019). |
Key figures
| Measure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Learning poverty, low- and middle-income countries | About 70% (57% pre-pandemic) | World Bank and partners (2022) |
| Learning poverty, Sub-Saharan Africa | About 89% | World Bank and partners (2022) |
| Learning poverty, Latin America and the Caribbean | Predicted to reach about 80%, up from around 50% before the pandemic | World Bank and partners (2022) |
| Projected lifetime earnings lost by this generation | US$21 trillion, about 17% of global GDP | World Bank |
| Children and youth out of school | 273 million in the 2026 estimate, about 1 in 6 of school age and up for seven years in a row. UNESCO's June 2025 estimate was 272 million, and conflict-affected countries add at least 13 million more who are not in the main count | UNESCO (2026, 2025) |
| Out-of-school rate by level, June 2025 estimate | 11% of primary-age children (78 million), 15% of lower-secondary-age (64 million), and 31% of upper-secondary-age youth (130 million) | UNESCO (2025) |
| Change in out-of-school numbers since 2015 | Fallen by less than 1% | UNESCO (2025) |
| Learning lost to COVID-19 disruption | About 35% of a normal school year. Losses were stable over time, larger for lower socioeconomic backgrounds and poorer countries, and larger in math than in reading | Betthäuser et al. (2023), 42 studies, 15 countries |
| Bottom-5% teacher replaced by average, per classroom | About US$250,000 lifetime income. A published comment found these long-run estimates sensitive to modeling choices, so the figure is uncertain | Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014), Rothstein (2017) |
| TaRL language gains | 0.15 SD (Haryana), 0.70 SD (Uttar Pradesh) | Banerjee et al. (2016), J-PAL |
| High-stakes exams and pollution, Israel | Israeli students scored lower on matriculation exams taken on days with more fine-particle pollution, and the same students had lower post-secondary attainment and earnings years later. Later studies found similar exam-day effects of pollution on China's College English Test and of heat on New York City exit exams, where hot exam days lowered scores by up to 13% of a standard deviation and reduced high school graduation | Ebenstein, Lavy, and Roth (2016), Yao et al. (2023), Park (2022) |
References cited on this page
- Ebenstein, A., Lavy, V., & Roth, S. (2016). The long-run economic consequences of high-stakes examinations: evidence from transitory variation in pollution. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 8(4), 36-65. DOI
- Yao, Z., Zhang, W., Ji, X., & Weng, W. (2023). Short-term exposure to air pollution and cognitive performance: new evidence from China's College English Test. Environmental and Resource Economics, 85(1), 211-237. DOI
- Park, R. J. (2022). Hot temperature and high-stakes performance. Journal of Human Resources, 57(2), 400-434. DOI
- World Bank and partners (2022): 70% of 10-year-olds now in learning poverty
- World Bank: Foundational learning brief (2025)
- UNESCO (2026, March 25). More children out of school for the 7th year in a row, 273 million (2026 Global Education Monitoring Report)
- UNESCO: 272 million out-of-school children (June 2025)
- UNESCO: Out-of-school rate
- Betthäuser, B. A., Bach-Mortensen, A. M., & Engzell, P. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(3), 375-385. DOI
- Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the impacts of teachers II: teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2633-2679. AEA
- Banerjee, A., Banerji, R., Berry, J., Duflo, E., Kannan, H., Mukerji, S., Shotland, M., & Walton, M. (2016). Mainstreaming an effective intervention: evidence from randomized evaluations of "Teaching at the Right Level" in India. NBER Working Paper 22746. IDEAS
- J-PAL: Teaching at the Right Level
- Rothstein, J. (2017). Measuring the impacts of teachers: Comment. American Economic Review, 107(6), 1656-1684. AEA
Sources for the actions
- Angrist, N., Evans, D. K., Filmer, D., Glennerster, R., Rogers, H., & Sabarwal, S. (2025). How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric. Journal of Development Economics, 172, 103382. link B Moderate
- Evans, D. K., & Loureiro, A. (n.d.). From bad to best: How one state and one municipality in Brazil are eradicating illiteracy and innumeracy. World Bank. link C Limited: (B for ranking facts)
- Gray-Lobe, G., Keats, A., Kremer, M., Mbiti, I., & Ozier, O. (2022). Can education be standardized? Evidence from Kenya (BFI Working Paper No. 2022-68). Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, University of Chicago. link B Moderate
- International Finance Corporation. (2024, March 14). IFC Board approves action plan in response to CAO investigation [Press release]. link B Moderate
- Lautharte, I., de Oliveira, V. H., & Loureiro, A. (2021). Incentives for mayors to improve learning: Evidence from state reforms in Ceará, Brazil (Policy Research Working Paper No. 9509). World Bank. link B Moderate
- Piper, B., DeStefano, J., Kinyanjui, E. M., & Ong'ele, S. (2018). Scaling up successfully: Lessons from Kenya's Tusome national literacy program. Journal of Educational Change, 19(3), 293-321. link B Moderate
- Romero, M., & Sandefur, J. (2022). Beyond short-term learning gains: The impact of outsourcing schools in Liberia after three years. The Economic Journal, 132(644), 1600-1619. link B Moderate
- Romero, M., Sandefur, J., & Sandholtz, W. A. (2020). Outsourcing education: Experimental evidence from Liberia. American Economic Review, 110(2), 364-400. link B Moderate
- Aurino, E., Gelli, A., Adamba, C., Osei-Akoto, I., & Alderman, H. (2023). Food for thought? Experimental evidence on the learning impacts of a large-scale school feeding program. Journal of Human Resources, 58(1), 74-111. link B Moderate
- Duflo, E., Dupas, P., Spelke, E., & Walsh, M. P. (2024). Intergenerational impacts of secondary education: Experimental evidence from Ghana (NBER Working Paper No. 32742). National Bureau of Economic Research. link B Moderate
- Marquez-Padilla, F., Parker, S. W., & Vogl, T. (2025b, April 29). Rolling back Progresa: What happened when Mexico's landmark cash transfer programme ended. VoxDev. link B Moderate
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- Angrist, N., Ainomugisha, M., Bathena, S. P., Bergman, P., Crossley, C., Cullen, C., et al. (2023). Building resilient education systems: Evidence from large-scale randomized trials in five countries (NBER Working Paper No. 31208, revised June 2025). National Bureau of Economic Research. link B Moderate
- Angrist, N., Bergman, P., & Matsheng, M. (2022). Experimental evidence on learning using low-tech when school is out. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(7), 941-950. link B Moderate
- Angrist, N., Cullen, C., Ainomugisha, M., Bathena, S. P., Bergman, P., Crossley, C., et al. (2023b). Learning curve: Progress in the replication crisis. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 113, 482-488. link B Moderate
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- Dee, T. S., & Wyckoff, J. (2015). Incentives, selection, and teacher performance: Evidence from IMPACT. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 34(2), 267-297. link B Moderate
- Fryer, R. G. (2013). Teacher incentives and student achievement: Evidence from New York City public schools. Journal of Labor Economics, 31(2), 373-407. link B Moderate
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- Clotfelter, C. T., Ladd, H. F., & Vigdor, J. L. (2015). The aftermath of accelerating algebra: Evidence from district policy initiatives. Journal of Human Resources, 50(1), 159-188. link B Moderate
- Duflo, A., Kiessel, J., & Lucas, A. (2020). Experimental evidence on alternative policies to increase learning at scale (NBER Working Paper No. 27298, revised May 2022). National Bureau of Economic Research. link Published as Duflo, A., Kiessel, J., & Lucas, A. M. (2024). Experimental evidence on four policies to increase learning at scale. The Economic Journal, 134(661), 1985-2008. link B Moderate
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- Pritchett, L., & Beatty, A. (2015). Slow down, you're going too fast: Matching curricula to student skill levels. International Journal of Educational Development, 40, 276-288. link C Limited
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- Bennett, C. T. (2022). Untested admissions: Examining changes in application behaviors and student demographics under test-optional policies. American Educational Research Journal, 59(1), 180-216. link B Moderate
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