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Children around the world largely rely on the formal education system to teach them foundational mathematics and reading skills. The inability of an education system to do so may indicate it has structural constraints. In this paper, we use three rounds of a nationally representative government-run household survey to examine trends in the mastery of foundational mathematics and reading skills among grades 4–10 students between 2003 and 2019 in the Philippines. We find that not all higher-grade students master the skills that are taught by grade 3. Comparing between cohorts, we find that foundational mathematics skills continued to decline between the 2003 and 2019 cohorts. Foundational reading skills, however, trended up among the early grades between 2013 and 2019 after stagnating between 2003 and 2013. The latter is suggestive evidence that major educational reforms implemented by the Philippine government since 2012 may have successfully improved reading skills but not mathematics skills. We also find that inequality in foundational skills by sex and wealth has decreased. Overall, the Philippine basic education system, building on its success in ensuring virtually all children attend elementary schools, still has ample room to ensure all students master foundational mathematics and reading skills. • We examine foundational skills among Filipino students over 19 years. • We find a significant decline in foundational mathematics skills. • Foundational reading skills in early grades significantly improved. • Gaps between sex, wealth quartiles, and language diversity declined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study quantifies a year's worth of mathematics learning in South Africa (0.3 standard deviations) and uses this measure to develop empirically calibrated learning trajectories. Two main findings are (1) only the top 16% of South African Grade 3 children are performing at an appropriate Grade 3 level. (2) The learning gap between the poorest 60% of students and the wealthiest 20% of students is approximately three Grade-levels in Grade 3, growing to four Grade-levels by Grade 9. The paper concludes by arguing that the later in life we attempt to repair early learning deficits in mathematics, the costlier the remediation becomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is consensus in the international mathematics teacher education literature that teachers should, at the most basic level, have mastery of the content knowledge they are required to teach. In this paper we test this assumption empirically by analyzing the South African SACMEQ 2007 mathematics teacher test data which tested 401 grade 6 mathematics teachers from a nationally representative sample of primary schools. With items matched to curriculum grade bands, findings indicate that 79% of grade 6 mathematics teachers showed content knowledge levels below the grade 6/7 band, and that the few teachers with higher-level content knowledge are highly inequitably distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]