This online library provides resources from the Right to Education Initiative as well as from other partner organisations. You can filter relevant resources by topic, region, country, content type and language. Note that resources in other languages will be available soon.
See also our list of useful databases for information on the implementation of the right to education at national level.
Alternative report submitted in November 2014 to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) at its 54th Session for its consideration of the List of Issues for Chile. The report calls on UN human rights experts to question the government of Chile about the human rights violations resulting from its privatised education system.
This report aims to present a brief overview of the ongoing privatisation processes in education in Brazil and its negative impacts on the achievement of the human right to education of children and adolescents.
This report, which complements a recent submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by the Brazilian National Association of Centers for the Defense of Child Rights (ANCED), cites evidence that education privatisation inhibits equity of access and participation, and reduces education to a commodity.
This report finishes by calling upon the Brazilian State to limit the role of the private sector in education, from preschool to higher education, and that the State itself should commit to ensuring the public provision of education through improved financing, regulation and governance enforcement mechanisms.
Alternative Report submitted by ISER-Uganda and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, with the support of the Privatisation in Education Research Initiative, the Right to Education Project, Education International, the Global Campaign for Education, the Africa Network Campaign on Education For All, Forum for Education NGO's in Uganda and the Girls Education Movement Uganda Chapter to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at its 54th Session for its consideration of the List of Issues for Uganda. This report highlights the issue of privatisation in education in Uganda.
Parallel Report submitted by the Coalition Marocaine pour l'Education pour Tous, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and others to the Pre-sessional Working Group of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the occasion of the consideration of the List of Issues related to the Periodic Reports of Morocco. This report highlights the issue of privatisation in education in Morocco.
This report begins by examining some of the explicit and implicit causes of attacks on girls’ education during peacetime and in situations of crisis, including settings of armed conflict, political instability and widespread criminal violence. It looks at the impact of attacks against girls accessing education on their rights to and within educational systems as well as the broader consequences of these attacks on the promotion and protection of human rights through education by focusing on the linkages between education and a host of other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The applicable international legal and policy framework is then outlined and the situation of girls accessing education within settings of crisis, political instability and conflict is analysed in greater detail. The final section of the report provides several recommendations to States and other stakeholders aimed at preventing and redressing violations of girls’ rights to, within and through education.
This publication includes an overview of key right to education decisions made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, and the UN Human Rights Committee. They are judgments that have taken place in these courts from 1988 to 2014 and deal with the fulfilment of the right to education for various groups, such as people with disabilities, migrants, persons deprived of liberty and Indigenous Peoples.
The Summaries of Jurisprudence series has been published since 2010. This recent publication is available for download via the following websites (in both Spanish and English):
CEJIL: http://cejil.org/publicaciones/sumarios-de-jurisprudencia-derecho-a-la-educacion
CLADE: http://www.campanaderechoeducacion.org/v2/en/publications/clade/studies.html
This booklet brings together educators from different countries to examine the negative effects of privatisation on the right to education, education quality, equity, and teaching. Building upon specific examples from the US, Canada, Chile and South Africa, it makes the argument that privatisation increases inequality and stratification in education, and substitutes good public policy with the vagaries of charity or the single-mindedness of profit-making.
This report was submitted to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a contribution to a Day of General Discussion on the right to education for persons with disabilities to be held on 15 April 2015.
The reports highlights the systemic failure of the South African government to adequately provide for learners with disabilities. In particular, many learners with disabilities are not getting access to an education. These learners are not being screened and placed in appropriate schools, and in many instances are not in any schools. Even where learners are placed in schools the failure to accommodate their needs means that they do not have meaningful access to education because they are not provided with, for instance, accessible learning materials, appropriately qualified teachers and safe and accessible infrastructure. The ongoing failure to prioritise special needs education, and a lack of understanding of the needs of learners with disabilities, has resulted in the inadequate budgeting and provisioning for learners with disabilities. Finally, there is a lack of expertise amongst teachers and other staff at special needs schools, as well as officials within education departments responsible for developing and implementing policies to accommodate learners with special needs.
This training manual explores the origins of the African regional human rights mechanisms. It elaborates the normative framework and rights recognised in the regional human rights treaties in the region. It also focuses on how to use these monitoring and enforcement mechanisms and some of the challenges faced in doing so. This is a learning tool for human rights defenders, and especially trainers from the region interested in conducting training on human rights. With a focus also on civil society engagement in the regional human rights mechanisms, the publication provides useful insights at a practical level. The publication will enhance your knowledge on African regional human rights mechanisms.
From humble beginnings in the early 1990s, charter schools have grown explosively to become a pillar in a market-oriented national education reform in the United States. The fiscal fallout from the financial crisis of 2007-08 constricted educational budgets and intensified the public debate around directing resources to all aspects of educational reform, especially charter schools.
The human right to education is well established in a variety of international treaties and covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The right establishes the obligation of states to provide all young people with a quality education, as defined by the prevailing social and economic context of each country. Guidance provided by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, focuses attention on the acceptability, availability, adaptability and accessibility of education in every context.
The impact of charter school expansion on the ability of U.S. states to implement the right to education for all children has, to date, been little considered in the national debate around education reform. Given the diversity of the legal foundations of charter schools in the states, it is difficult to carry out such an analysis at the national level.
Despite the fact that its public education system is rated among the most effective in the country, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been the site of large-scale implementation of the charter school model. Prominent educational research institutes have analyzed Massachusetts charters and found them - especially the schools located in Boston - to be among the most successful in the country.
The experience of Massachusetts charter schools undoubtedly includes positive effects on the implementation of the right to education. A significant number of students who had difficulty accessing quality education in traditional public schools have been able to do so in charter schools. Many of those students are from racial or ethnic groups that have faced historic discrimination in U.S. public schools. In addition, charter schools are, by their nature, adaptations of the public education model and, therefore, increase the adaptability of the system.
At the same time, other aspects of the charter school model raise concerns from a human rights perspective, some of them serious concerns. The extreme school discipline models employed by some charters and the increased use of disciplinary exclusion to maintain social order in the schools both raise human rights concerns that go well beyond the right to education. Also, the existence of an “enrollment gap” between charter schools and traditional public schools, especially in relation to the enrollment of Students with Special Needs and English Language Learners is the source of further concern. Finally, the way in which charter schools are financed, in Massachusetts and in most other jurisdictions, gradually degrades the financial capacity of public school districts. This loss of financial capacity often leads to mass school closings or other major disruptions to the system. In districts with high charter density, this process can reach the point where the capacity of the district to provide for even the basic educational needs of all students comes into question.
Massachusetts and other states with relatively high charter density in urban centers should reinforce regulatory mechanisms in place to ensure the accountability of existing charter schools to legal and regulatory frameworks. In addition, legislative bodies considering laws to allow further expansion of charter schools should carefully consider the impacts of charter school growth on the human right to education of all children in their jurisdiction before enabling such expansion.