Across the windswept plains of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest country by land area, opportunity often depends on geography. In Astana and Almaty, sleek public schools boast robotics labs and trilingual instruction. In the western steppe, children gather in aging buildings where electricity flickers and textbooks are passed from sibling to sibling. The nation’s vastness, once its pride, has quietly become its most stubborn barrier to educational equality. After the Sovi

South Korea is often praised as an education miracle, a nation that transformed poverty into prosperity through schooling. Its students consistently rank among the world’s best in math, science, and reading. Nearly every child completes secondary school, and university enrollment rates exceed 70 percent, far above the OECD average. Yet beneath this success lies a quiet crisis: an education system so competitive that students' success largely links to their family income, and

In the global imagination, Japan’s schools symbolize excellence—high literacy, disciplined classrooms, and students who consistently rank near the top in math and reading. Yet beneath that reputation lies a quieter reality: inequality has not vanished. It has merely become harder to see. Across Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama, one can trace the contours of inequality through postal codes. In Setagaya, a middle-class district in Tokyo, classrooms are well resourced, after-school tu

In Haiti, the question of education is not about progress. Rather, it’s about endurance. The story of schooling here unfolds between disaster and determination, between classrooms rebuilt and classrooms remembered. Fifteen years after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, education in Haiti still stands precariously on fractured ground. When the quake struck near Port-au-Prince, it tore through the country’s fragile infrastructure. Thousands of schools collapsed, destroying more