From the Editor

• Author: Laura Wallace
• Position: Editor-in-Chief

Five down, ten to go

In 2000, the global community pledged at the UN Millennium Development Conference to achieve universal primary education (UPE) by 2015-one of eight goals that would represent a comprehensive reduction in global poverty. Five years later, only East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean are close to achieving the UPE goal, and sub-Saharan Africa, home to many of the world 's poor, lags far behind. What's holding up progress? This issue of F&D takes stock of the enormous gains on the educational front over the past century and examines what needs to occur now for education for all to become a reality.

We begin with the results of a just finished multi-year project for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on universal basic and secondary education. The project co-directors, Joel Cohen (Rockefeller and Columbia Universities) and David Bloom (Harvard University), consider the additional cost of reaching UPE by 2015-estimates range from $6 billion to $35 billion per year- not only affordable but essential for providing economic benefits, building strong societies and polities, and improving health. They also emphasize that reaching UPE is about a lot more than money: many of the chief obstacles lie in the political, cultural, informational, and organizational domains. And they insist this goal isn 't ambitious enough. "The world should aim for, and can achieve, high-quality, universal secondary education, possibly by 2015 but certainly by the middle of the 21st century."

F&D's education issue also looks at the importance of achieving high-quality education for future economic and social gains-although the rate of uptake of well-established ways of improving schooling remains uncomfortably low. And we explore the successes emerging from...