The Millions Learning Project: Scaling Quality Education to Children & Youth Harvard Center for International Development

Originally recorded on November 20, 2020

Jenny Perlman Robinson and Molly Curtiss joined us at CID's virtual Speaker Series event and sat down with us for further discussion on their work on scaling and education at the Center for Universal Education(CUE), Brookings Institution.

Despite growing evidence on what works to improve access and quality in education, the world continues to face a global learning crisis, with 258 million children already out of school and 617 million children and adolescents in school but not learning the basics even before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools around the globe. While there are many initiatives working to address this challenge at a small-scale, they often do not translate into the large-scale, systemic change required. Since 2014, the Millions Learning project, led by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, has examined how and under what conditions education policies and programs have gone to scale in developing contexts. Drawing upon literature and case studies from around the world, the 2016 report, Millions Learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries, identified 14 core ingredients that, in different combinations depending on the context, contribute to scaling effective practices and approaches that improve learning. Now in the second phase of the project, CUE is implementing Real-time Scaling Labs, an action research project undertaken in partnership with local institutions and governments in several countries to support, learn from, and document the scaling process in real-time. The ultimate goal of these labs is to support initiatives as they deepen and expand while simultaneously gaining deeper insight into how policymakers, civil society, and the private sector can most effectively work together to bring about large-scale transformation in the quality of children’s learning and their development. This presentation will share key insights and lessons learned from the Millions Learning project to date, including the key drivers of scaling impact in education and common scaling barriers, alongside illustrative examples from the Real-time Scaling Labs currently underway.



Jenny Perlman Robinson is senior fellow at the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution where she leads CUE’s efforts to build the evidence and produce practical guidance for scaling effective education initiatives through the Millions Learning project. Molly Curtiss is a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution Center for Universal Education (CUE), where she has worked on the Millions Learning project since 2017.