All children and youth, regardless of the situations into which they were born, deserve the opportunity to improve their life chances by acquiring the knowledge and skills that will help them thrive in the future. As the world lags far behind the Millennium Development and Education for All goals, swift, targeted, and effective action is needed to improve both access and quality in education.

Bringing together evidence-based recommendations and in-depth case studies of successful programs from around the world, this edited volume details effective educational equity initiatives and assesses how these models could be improved, expanded, and adapted to diverse contexts. ILessons in Educational Equality/I is uniquely comprehensive in its scope and its focus on how best to increase educational equality from early childhood to the tertiary level, and in contexts that span the geographic and political spectrum.

This volume offers concrete solutions to barriers based on gender, income, disability, race, ethnicity, and language. Chapters on gender address equity for female students in tertiary science and engineering programs, primary and secondary education for socially excluded girls, and equitable early childhood education for boys and girls. Socioeconomic equity is examined in chapters on promoting equal opportunities in secondary school across social class, quality primary education for the poor, and early childhood strategies for closing the achievement gap. Chapters on disability detail strategies for making inclusive education a part of the Millennium Development goals and for increasing access and achievement in tertiary education. Approaches to racial, ethnic, and linguistic equity are presented in chapters on bridging the gap in higher education, improving primary and secondary school quality and outcomes, and providing well-designed early childhood education.

Jody Heymann is founding director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, and founding director for the Project on Global Working Families, Harvard.

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