Nowadays, in most countries, providing primary education is considered a right of the people and duty of their governments. The governments are generally expecting to ensure access to primary education while the people are always urging by the law to attain education up to a certain basic level.
Generally, the advancement of these ideas started during the early stage of the 19th century. At that time, most of today’s developed countries started expanding to provide primary-level education, mainly through public sector finances and government interventions. According to the historical data, the funds from the governments to grow education had come from several various sources. Still, mainly the taxes paid at the local level played an important role. The historical part played by the local funding for public schools is vital to support us understands changes – or persistence – in regional inequalities.
The global phenomenon of the beginning of education expansion was marked during the second half of the 20th century. According to available data from history, by 1990, government spending on education as a percentage of national income in most of the 20th century’s developing countries was already almost equal to the average observed in developed countries.
This global level expansion in education back in the second half of the 20th century resulted in a historical reduction in education inequality across the globe: from 1960 to 2010, education inequality went down year by year for all age groups and all regions of the world. In the recent past, estimations of education inequality across age groups suggest that a further downsize in schooling inequality is still to be expected in developing countries.
UNESCO’s recent cross-country data shows us that the world is improving in government funding for education today. These excess amounts of public funds for education are not necessarily at the expense of other government sectors. Yet, there is substantial cross-country and cross-regional heterogeneity behind these broad global trends. In high-income countries, the households shoulder a significant portion of expenditure in education at higher education levels than at lower education levels – but in low-income countries, this is primarily another way around. For example, in Malawi, the territory education is almost wholly subsidized by the state, yet households contribute nearly 20% of the direct primary education costs.
Following the signing of the Millennium Development Goals agreement, there has been a noticeable improvement in international financial flows under the umbrella of development assistance during the first decade of the 21st century. Recent evaluations indicate that the development assistance for education has stopped improving since 2010, along with a noticeable downsize in the financial flow to primary education. These changes in the less focus of development assistance funds on education across the regions can primarily negatively affect distributional aspects, mainly within developing and low-income countries that depend excessively on this funding source for their primary education.
In the evaluation and analysis on the correlates, determinants, and consequences of the consumption of education, the available macro data shows that the national expenditure on education does not explain the learning outcome differences of cross-countries.
Available corroborations, particularly on the importance of school inputs to produce education, proposes that learning outcomes may be more sensitive to enhance the quality of the teachers than to improvements in the sizes of the classes. When it comes to household inputs, the recent analytical data evidence recommends that interventions that increase the benefits of attending schools are likely to increase time in school for students. In that sense, any incentivize academic efforts like scholarships are reasonable to improve outcomes of learning.
Improvements in policy experiments have also indicated that pre-school investment in demand-side inputs lures positive impacts on education – and other vital results and events later in life. The children’s environment that exposed to early in life plays a significant role in fine-tuning their talents, abilities, and behavior.
Nowadays, the governments around the globe widely considered working to be responsible for making sure the provision of accessible quality education, and this is an outstanding achievement of the recent history of the world. The concept to provide education for children had only started during the mid of 19th century. It was following the beginning of the expansion in primary education in today’s industrialized economies. After that, those countries stepped forward to plot public expenditure on education as a portion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and this move shows that this expansion took place mainly through public funding.
In the United States, public schools cover to educate over 90% of all children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools. The progress resulted from the progress of expansion in education that depended heavily on public funding, mainly from local governments. This process has been the source of revenue for public schools in the United States for over the last 120 years. As it is visible in the history records, states and localities have always been the main funding sources for public primary education in the United States. There are three broad periods in the United States history regarding funding records for public schools; in the first place, the period between 1890-1920 shows stable revenues, then there is a period of sharp growth and decline during the interwar period between 1920-1940. There had been substantial growth since the second world war, slowing down in the early 1970s. The federal funding was always very minimal in all three phrases, as seen when changing the visualization from absolute to relative. Segregated data from the previous couple of decades gives other intuitions into the schools’ particular fund income sources in the United States: the most prominent part comes from the tax on properties, while fees and donations play tiny amounts. This hugely decentralized funding process mainly and hugely relies on imbalances in education since public schools in affluent urban areas can raise more funds via local revenues. A noticeable part of the argument on education imbalances in the United States today centers on the importance of growing progressive federal spending to reduce public schools’ equalities.
An expenditure comparison between the public and private sector education institutions two supports the review of the role of the public sector in the education process expansion in industrialized countries. A comparative evaluation of the historical data from the National Center of Education Statistics in the United States has shown that the period between the years 1950 to 1970 can be considered a period of substantial growth in education expenditure in the United States and that expansion happened explicitly in the public sector.
Marking the start of the education expansion global phenomenon happened during the second half of the 20th century. Szirmai data (2005) published on the government expenditure on education as a portion of national income for low and middle-income countries, along with the corresponding average income of the high-income countries between years 1960 to 2010, shows that the government spending on education in many developing countries in 1990 was already close to the average observed in developed countries.
