Data Impact
The report’s value is in showing how uneven the gains remain. Higher girls’ participation, better access to schools and improved facilities coexist with weak enrolment in some poorer or remote regions, teacher shortages, and large stage-by-stage differences in dropout and pupil load. In the authors’ view, those gaps make universal quality education an unfinished data story, not just an access story.
Limits
The evidence is descriptive, not causal: it maps disparities but does not prove which policy changes would close them fastest.
The article relies on national and state-level aggregates, which can hide sharp district-level differences that matter for implementation.