Blackboards were taken down from front walls and carved up into slates for each pupil, and student work began to appear on classroom walls. Nearly a decade later, Guatemala had increased not only the number of Mayan-speaking children attending school but also the proportion who were graduating six years later. Nine years ago, at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, educational and political leaders from both developing and developed nations agreed to get behind a major global push to increase primary school enrollment, and significant progress has been made toward this goal. Most of the growth occurred in developing countries. As enrollment figures began to move upward, attention began to shift to whether school systems were using their scarce resources in the most efficient way.
Educators say the problem of wastage is really two problems.
The first is dropouts who leave school before completing the primary school cycle. Since research shows that many of these students are likely to relapse into illiteracy, the time and money spent on their partial education has in many cases gone for naught. The second problem is students who stay in the same grade for more than one year. These repeaters take up space and consume teaching time, textbooks and other resources that might otherwise be devoted to other students. The Asian Development Bank estimated that serving these repeaters requires 10,000 additional teachers and 5,000 more classrooms - all of which could be used for other purposes.