Does the Right to Education Lead to Better Primary Education Outcomes?

This chapter investigates the relationship between the right to primary education as a legal construct (right as structure) and education outcomes (right as outcome). The former is defined as the extent to which national legislation is in line with the minimum core obligations of the right to primary education. Since this information was not readily available, a dataset has been constructed containing information about the seven minimum core obligations (divided among 18 indicators) for 45 countries over the period 1990-2018. This information was then aggregated into the ‘right to education protection-index’, a summary score for a state’s national education legislation. There is a clear upward trend in terms of the legal protection of the right to education. The relationship between the rights-index and right-asoutcome (defined as primary net enrolment rates) was tested empirically, using fixed effects regression analysis. As there was no statistically significant direct effect, the hypothesis that the ‘right to education protection-index’ is positively related to the net enrolment rate had to be rejected at first. It was shown, however, that there is a statistically significant positive effect if we allow the effect to be delayed by a number of years. After seven years the effect becomes statistically significant, and it remains so over time, indicating that improvements in the right-as-structure can be effective in changing right-as-outcome-as long as we are patient enough.