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The Puggle: January & February 2025 edition

/ Dana Schmidt / The Puggle / March 11, 2025

It’s been an eventful couple of months in the development space, with many governments and organizations reeling from American, Swiss, Dutch, and UK aid cuts. The effects are already devastating, including the lost opportunities for education. This crisis has the potential to kickstart an end to aid dependency. 

In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that students continue to struggle with learning. In both reading and math, fourth graders and eighth graders alike still have not caught up to pre-pandemic levels. Worse still, girls in the U.S. have sustained larger learning losses than boys. We don’t know why, but it could be because girls took on more caregiving or household responsibilities.

Unfortunately, this trend is not isolated to the U.S. alone. Research out of the University of Arkansas analyzing the latest TIMSS results shows that girls’ learning has taken a bigger hit than boys’ across 70 countries.

Luckily, there’s more promising news out of India. The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), released in January, found that learning levels climbed back to pre-COVID levels. Gains have been especially pronounced in government (as opposed to private) schools: reading levels in government schools are at the highest levels since ASER began 20 years ago.

That does not mean all is well — 51% of children in fifth grade still cannot read a second-grade text, and 45% cannot do simple 2-digit subtraction problems — but it does mean that efforts to improve foundational learning are starting to bear fruit. It might also mean that past efforts to educate girls are also bearing fruit. Rukmini Banerji argues that “a new generation of mothers who went to school now want their children to not just go to school but thrive there. It is these mothers, she says, who demand higher standards from schools and Anganwadi centres. They hold the future of their children, and the country, in their hands.”

There is also some intriguing new evidence that assessments like ASER might not capture the full range of math abilities some children possess. Children with experience selling goods in markets are facile at mental arithmetic but perform poorly on written math problems. (The opposite is true of children without market-selling experience.) If schools could bridge the applied understanding children have to formal math instruction (and build that intuitive understanding for children who don’t have it), imagine the mathematical talent it might unleash!

Here’s another unexpected insight: the antidote to the fadeout of preschool impact might be universal access to preschools. Researchers have documented the huge effects that early childhood interventions have on children’s cognitive skills. Unfortunately, learning gains tend to fade out in higher grades of school (even if the positive lifelong impacts on income and other factors remain strong). But this research finds that if enough of a child’s peers have also had access to preschool, the fade-out effect, well, fades. Because learning “is inherently a social activity…early education programs…deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs [emphasis added].”

Hence, as governments make difficult choices in a constrained resource environment, they should consider shifting public spending to early childhood. Despite the huge longterm returns to early childhood investments, “For every dollar spent in Africa on a 1-year-old, governments spend almost 16 times as much on a 15-year-old.”

Turning to other ways governments can make the most of their education investments, check out the latest research on teacher development. A new research synthesis on the effectiveness and scalability of teacher professional development offers 5 key features of effective teacher professional development: (1) a focus on both curriculum content and pedagogy; (2) active adult learning strategies; (3) peer collaboration and peer-to-peer learning; (4) expert support; and (5) sustained duration.

Another study offers causal evidence on the importance of practice-based teacher education. The study finds that when student teachers engaged in video analysis and peer rehearsal they were better able to respond to students than when they just did more traditional reading and reflection exercises.

When it comes to girls’ education, how deep are policymakers’ commitments? It seems that they overwhelmingly support the idea that schools should promote gender equality. That said, they are not always onboard with the idea that girls should “grow into women with the same opportunities as men.” It’s a good thing, then, that UNGEI is finding that it doesn’t take generations to change mindsets about gender norms and stereotypes. (Also, check out their white paper on prevention of sexual violence in education settings.)

We started our note with the rapid, unsettling changes we’ve already seen in 2025. What else might be in store for us? The OECD takes a look at trends shaping education in  2025, “exploring the social, technological, economic, environmental and political forces transforming education systems worldwide.” The report explores questions like what role education can play in fostering social cohesion; how to “address both foundational and more complex sets of skills in a way that complements rather than compromises one for the other”; and “With less time spent in direct human contact, can education help maintain a sense of community and foster socio-emotional learning and well-being?”

As we look to the future, we’d like to end on this note from Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka: “Progress demands courage and the ability to dream beyond what feels possible.” May we all summon our courage and continue to dream.

If you’re looking for a few resources as you do so, check out:


Dana Schmidt author