From International Legal Instruments to Local Outcomes: Closing the Gap on Universal Primary Education

• In Event: 511 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Paper Session. Human Rights or Civil Rights? How Changing the Conversation Matters for Changing the World

Abstract

In 1989 the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) called for universal primary education. Similarly, in 2000 the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) had explicit calls for universal primary education for both boys and girls. Expanding ideas from Beth Simmons’s (2009) chapter titled “The Protection of Innocents: Rights of the Child,” the main question in this paper is whether two relevant international legal instruments arose concomitantly with and possibly foreshadowed the expansion of youth access to primary education at the state level. To examine this, data from The World Bank and the United Nations was combined to form a dataset for 57 countries spanning the 45 years from 1970 to 2014. Employing Haglund and Stryker’s (2015) theoretical framework for rights construction, I argue that there were viable mechanisms, actors, and pathways that expanded rights-consciousness with regard to universal primary education. In a longitudinal model, adoption of these treaties were found to have a significant association with increased access to primary education among middle and low-income states. Educational access for girls and boys differed by treaty: following the MDG the rate of educational enrollment of girls increased, somewhat closing the gender gap.

Author

• Anita L Rocha, Unviersity of Washington