On leaving office in 2013, Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili,remarked that if he’d spent as much of the state budget on the country’s education system as he had on the armed forces, Georgia would be in a much stronger position today.
Eight years later, in 2021, Georgia’s education spending is double the defence budget, and indeed, the education system is in a markedly better state. Rebuilt schools, retrained and better paid teachers, and improved IT facilities have all made a difference for the majority of Georgian students. But despite these successes, education reforms are still failing large numbers of children.
My colleagues and I at the Georgian Educational Advocacy Project (funded by the US Embassy in Georgia) have combed through reams of quantitative and qualitative data and spoken to dozens of teachers and parents. In particular, we reviewed and aggregated data collected by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US foreign aid agency, from studies that looked into each of Georgia’s 2,000 public schools.
