Making progress on SDG 4: Lessons from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore and Thailand

• In Event: Counting down to 2030: Analyzing the achievements and challenges of the global education goal (SDG 4)

Proposal

Achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal – “Ensuring Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All” - animates global governance efforts to align educational systems with the full suite of Sustainable Development Goals. Monitoring advancements resulting from these efforts is challenging on several fronts: first, SDG4 encompasses multiple objectives of different orders, from those related to improvement in educational access and quality in the core subjects of the curriculum, to those related to increased relevance in domains previously under-addressed, such as global citizenship and education for climate change. Secondly, most metrics capture national efforts, averages, and are relatively insensitive to important variation across subnational efforts, reflecting initiatives of state or provincial governments.
Relying on several case studies, this presentation will examine these challenges of ascertaining the contributions of SDG4 in animating educational development in more established as well as more transformational domains, as well as explore progress at the national as well as subnational levels. The presentation will examine the interplay of national and subnational (state or provincial) efforts in mediating the influence of SDG4 in the policy agenda. The analysis of various education reform efforts over the last decade in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore and Thailand will examine how policies at the national and at the state level incorporated the core elements of SDG4, and will examine the programmatic implications of these priorities, and how those were implemented over time.
The findings of this analysis reveal that the influence of supranational goals such as SDG4 in education reform efforts is not uniform across various domains, and that it is not linear and is mediated by intra-government relations, institutional capacity and policy stability.
References:
Reimers, F. The Quest for Educational Equity in Mexico. Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fall 2024.
Reimers, F. (Ed). Audacious Education Purposes. How governments transform the goals of education systems. Springer. 2020
Reimers, F. and C. Chung (eds). Teaching and Learning for the twenty first century. Cambridge. Harvard Education Press. 2016.

Author

• Fernando M. Reimers, Harvard University