Introduction
The 2030 deadline for Sustainable Development Goal 4 arrives in five years, yet the global education community remains trapped in a fundamental contradiction. We measure what's easy to count—enrollment rates, completion percentages, gender parity indices—while the global education crisis unfolds in plain sight within classrooms themselves. In 18 of 31 recently assessed low and lower-middle income countries, fewer than 10% of children achieve minimum proficiency in reading or mathematics by the end of primary school. This isn't a marginal implementation challenge. This is wholesale system failure.
