Jordan (10) y Luis (11), beneficiarios de ProFuturo en Cajamarca.
Five years from the horizon set by the 2030 Agenda, the global education balance sheet is hard to gloss over: none of the targets of the education Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) is on track to be met. The number of children and young people out of school has remained virtually stagnant for nearly a decade; minimum learning levels are not only failing to improve but have declined in numerous middle- and high-income countries; and inequalities—by social background, territory, or gender—continue to shape deeply unequal educational trajectories. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened this situation, but the data show that the problems are earlier and structural.
This scenario has fueled a certain fatigue with international agendas. Since the beginning of the century, education has been the object of increasingly ambitious global commitments, with results that have rarely lived up to what was promised. The repetition of the cycle is well known: lofty targets, monitoring reports, calls for urgency, and, after some time, a new reformulation of the goal.
However, the underlying question may not only be why we are failing to reach the goals, but how we are measuring progress. For years, international education monitoring has focused on measuring the distance of each country from common global targets, a logic that tends to offer a static and not very informative snapshot of processes of change.
The concept note of the Global Education Monitoring Report 2026 (GEM), published by UNESCO, proposes a shift in perspective: moving away from assessing progress solely in terms of what is missing and beginning to analyze the pace at which countries have improved over the past two decades, taking their starting points into account. The hypothesis is that observing who has progressed faster, and with greater equity, allows for fairer comparisons and, above all, more useful ones for understanding which decisions and conditions have made that progress possible.
An uncomfortable assessment: education in the 2030 Agenda
Beyond the diagnosis, the educational assessment of the 2030 Agenda raises an additional problem: what kind of reading the available indicators allow today. International monitoring has succeeded in significantly expanding the production of statistics on access, schooling, and learning, but this expansion has not always translated into a more nuanced understanding of processes of educational change.
Many global indicators provide aggregated snapshots that are useful for highlighting persistent deficits but limited in their ability to explain trajectories, efforts, or gradual transformations. In this framework, countries with sustained progress may appear to be lagging behind, while others with marginal improvements maintain relatively favorable positions. Comparison, rather than illuminating, tends to oversimplify.
This tension is also reflected in public debate, where data often fuel narratives of permanent urgency and standardized responses, without attention to the contexts in which change occurs. The result is an assessment that offers little guidance: we know what does not work, but we learn little about how and why some systems have managed to improve.
From “how far behind” to “who is moving faster”
The conceptual shift proposed by the GEM 2026 Report starts from the following premise: it is not enough to measure how far countries are from global targets if we do not analyze how and at what pace they have progressed over time. Rather than focusing exclusively on the distance separating each education system from the SDG 4 objectives, the GEM approach invites us to observe the speed of progress in comparable contexts.
This perspective introduces several relevant differences. First, it explicitly recognizes that countries start from very unequal initial conditions, in economic, institutional, and social terms. Comparing final outcomes without considering these starting points tends to penalize some and exalt others without truly explaining what has happened. Second, the approach avoids the “moral ranking” that often accompanies global indicators, in which countries are ordered as if they were competing in the same race. Instead, it proposes learning from real trajectories, observing which decisions, policies, and conditions have enabled sustained improvements in specific contexts.
To this end, GEM 2026 proposes analyzing long periods (between 15 and 20 years, including years prior to 2015) and comparing countries that have achieved rapid progress with others that have stagnated or regressed. The goal is not to identify “the best in the world,” but plausible cases of accelerated improvement given particular initial conditions. In short, it is about shifting the focus from formal compliance with targets to comparative learning: understanding why some countries have progressed faster than others and what can be drawn from these experiences without falling into universal prescriptions.
Access and equity: why start there
The GEM 2026 Report launches the Countdown to 2030 series with a deliberate focus on access, participation, and completion in education, analyzed from an equity perspective. This choice is not accidental. According to the concept note, these areas currently concentrate “the most robust and internationally comparable datasets,” making it possible to observe long-term trends more clearly and reduce ambiguity in the interpretation of results.
Unlike learning indicators—which are scarcer, more irregular, and methodologically fragile—data on schooling, dropout, and completion provide a relatively solid empirical base for identifying which countries have managed to expand their education systems more rapidly and which have stagnated. Moreover, these indicators make particularly visible the structural inequalities that cut across education systems: who enters, who stays, and who manages to complete each level.
Equity thus acts as a cross-cutting lens of the analysis. Gender is the best-documented dimension and allows for more precise observation of progress and setbacks, especially in the completion of secondary education. Other gaps (by territory, wealth, or disability) are harder to track over time due to limited data availability and comparability, but they remain central to understanding educational trajectories.
The report explicitly acknowledges these limitations: not everything can be measured well. But far from weakening the analysis, this methodological honesty strengthens its credibility and underscores a key idea: improving the monitoring of access and equity is an imperative condition for better-informed education policy decisions.
Learning without recipes: what the approach does (and does not) promise
One of the most relevant features of the GEM 2026 approach is its explicit renunciation of simple causal claims. The report does not seek to demonstrate that a specific policy automatically produces a given outcome, nor to establish linear relationships between intervention and effect. Instead, it proposes building plausible explanations of educational progress (or stagnation) by combining political, institutional, social, and historical factors, and by recognizing the complexity of long-term processes of change.
This caution contrasts with a frequent tendency in international debate: the search for “successful” policies that are easily transferable and presented as universal solutions. The “copy-and-paste” of reforms—whether a funding model, a scholarship program, or a curricular innovation—often ignores the conditions that made them work in specific contexts. The result is frequently an accumulation of formal reforms with little real impact.
Against this logic, the GEM seeks to identify normative principles that cut across observed trajectories of improvement, without turning them into closed prescriptions. Among these are redistributive financing mechanisms aimed at reducing inequalities between schools and territories; preventive policies against early dropout; second-chance systems for those who interrupted their educational trajectories; and forms of accountability compatible with a rights-based agenda rather than a punitive one.
In this context, learning across countries does not mean imitating models, but understanding how policies interact with institutions, resources, and social expectations. It also means accepting that educational progress is not accelerated by universal solutions, but by situated, sustained decisions assessed in light of comparative experience.
A post-2030 agenda that is less grandiloquent and more demanding
The proposal of GEM 2026 points to a deeper question running through international education debate: how to think about an agenda for after 2030 without repeating the inertia of the past.
In this regard, one key shift is the move from universal goals formulated at the global level to national objectives defined by countries themselves, in dialogue with common monitoring frameworks. This logic seeks to avoid both external imposition and the purely rhetorical use of commitments that rarely translate into sustained policies. A second shift accompanies this: from aspirational promises to ambitions anchored in real trajectories of progress, capable of recognizing gradual advances and not only final successes.
The GEM also proposes shifting the focus from formal compliance with indicators to the effective guarantee of the right to education. Within this framework, accountability ceases to be understood as a punitive mechanism and is instead conceived as a political commitment: the obligation to explain decisions, sustain priorities, and evaluate results in light of publicly defined objectives.
This approach raises the bar. A less grandiloquent agenda is, in fact, more demanding: it requires coherence between discourse and action, continuity beyond political cycles, and an honest reading of the limits and possibilities of each education system. As GEM 2026 suggests, ambition does not disappear; it changes form and is measured not only by what is promised, but by the capacity to learn from the past in order to guide the future.
Measuring better to decide better
With barely five years left until 2030, obsessing over targets does not seem particularly reasonable. The trajectory of recent decades has taught us that declared ambition does not guarantee progress, and that monitoring frameworks can become formal exercises if they do not help us understand what is working, where, and why.
By shifting attention from abstract compliance with targets to the analysis of real trajectories, GEM 2026 invites us to rethink the very meaning of international comparison. Instead of pointing to winners and losers, we seek to understand the rhythms of educational change, its conditions, and its limits—an approach that demands more rigor, more patience, and also greater political responsibility.
More than reaching a symbolic date or once again reformulating global commitments, we need to learn to look at progress differently: measuring better in order to decide better, and accepting that sustained educational improvement depends less on grandiloquent promises than on frameworks that allow us to understand, compare, and act with informed judgment.
