In 1992, the Journal of Political Economy published Glomm and Ravikumar’s “Public versus Private Investment in Human Capital,” explaining why public education can reduce the intergenerational transmission of inequality faster than privately financed schooling (Glomm, G., & Ravikumar, B., 1992). Hardly a revelation that education can level the playing field—but an important economic explanation of why it should.
More than thirty years later, Ukraine offers a sobering lesson about what happens when that promise meets unequal realities. It might seem unfair to scrutinize a country whose schools have endured Russia’s full-scale invasion. Yet, war cannot explain everything, especially inequalities that were there long before 2022. Ukraine’s latest PISA report gives us an opportunity to ask what public policy has—and has not—done about them.
The mathematics gap between students in villages and those in the largest cities was 86 PISA points in 2018, 92 in 2022, and still 60 in 2025. In reading, only 41% of rural students reached basic proficiency in 2025, compared with 59% of urban students (Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment, 2026). These are not merely different test scores; they reflect sharply unequal chances of acquiring fundamental skills. And the narrowing mathematics gap is hardly a triumph: much of it reflects falling results in the largest cities rather than a rural breakthrough. Wartime restrictions also limit direct comparisons across survey years.
Meanwhile, headlines celebrate another milestone in Ukraine’s ambitious, decade-long transformation of schooling, with the New Ukrainian School (NUS) reform at its centre. PISA-2025 does not yet measure NUS’s full impact: its participants started school before the reform (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, 2016; Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment, 2026). But it shows the formidable inequality that these reforms could have been starting to overcome by this time. So what has gone wrong—and what can other countries learn?
Lesson One: Big ambitions can mean big failures if needed resources are not provided
The promise was to transform practically everything, from classroom equipment to the relationships between teachers and students. One particularly ambitious initiative was the consolidation of the school network, especially in rural areas.
The logic was sound: tiny schools in desperately underfunded communities cannot always offer the laboratories, specialist teachers and opportunities of a prestigious city school (Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment, 2023). Why not replace many small schools with better-equipped hub schools, using buses—and residential facilities where necessary—to make them accessible?
On paper, it looked brilliant. Children could leave behind poorly equipped classrooms and finally study in facilities worthy of Kyiv, Kharkiv or Lviv. But infrastructure cannot be reorganized on paper alone. For some communities, closing or restructuring a nearby school has proved easier than guaranteeing reliable transport to its replacement. Sometimes there is no bus. Or no driver. Or no fuel. Or no passable road. Occasionally, the entire collection is missing.
The government has invested in school buses, but continuing transport needs show how far implementation still has to go (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, 2026a). And when getting children to school becomes impossible, the tempting answer is familiar: There’s a war on. Let them study online. A practical emergency measure risks becoming a substitute for genuine access.
Lesson Two: People change systems
The most important person in any school system is, rather obviously, the teacher. Low pay, shortages and excessive workloads are hardly uniquely Ukrainian problems. Ukraine, however, has collected the whole set.
In 2025, unfilled teaching positions were reported in 53% of the 233 schools examined in unscheduled institutional audits. In only 40% were all teachers teaching subjects corresponding to their professional qualifications (Osvita.UA, 2026; State Education Quality Service of Ukraine, 2026). Then comes the age profile: in 2023/24, barely 10% of teachers were aged 30 or under, while almost 30% were over 55 (Educational Ombudsman Service of Ukraine, 2024). The profession is struggling to renew itself.
Yet the country is pursuing an enormous reform that needs energetic specialists, fresh ideas and, given Ukraine’s colonial past, a renewed civic outlook. How do we persuade a young graduate to become a teacher—particularly in a village? Since the old-fashioned option of sending people wherever the state pleases is thankfully off the table, perhaps we should start with salaries.
The September 2026 pay reform raised guaranteed salaries and narrowed differences in some allowances (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, 2026b). That is progress. But more standardized pay does not eliminate differences in workloads, bonuses, local supplements or the incentives needed to attract teachers to disadvantaged areas. Treating unequal circumstances identically is not the same as making them fair.
Lesson Three: Everything is connected
Now for a question that may seem only loosely related: have Ukraine’s education reforms worked in tandem with its other reforms? Consider decentralization.
Since 2015, local governments have assumed greater responsibility for running schools, something hardly unusual (Barabash, O., & Chytaieva, K., 2025). The problem is expecting communities with radically different resources to deliver comparable outcomes. Municipalities must help organize hub schools, maintain facilities and transport children—obligations that can weigh far more heavily on a small, poor community than on a prosperous city.
Teachers’ pay exposes the same tension. National rules set the baseline, but municipalities differ in their ability to add support. In 2024, local spending on teachers’ pay amounted to 2.94% of education-subvention payroll spending in rural communities, compared with 6.32% in urban ones (Barabash, O., & Chytaieva, K., 2025). This does not prove that rural teachers earned less; it does show unequal fiscal room to act.
And that is the contradiction: Ukraine has too often pursued equality of rules where equality of opportunity requires differentiated support. Decentralizing responsibility without adequately equalizing resources risks decentralizing inequality itself.
Ukraine’s experience demonstrates that public education does not automatically reduce inequality simply because it is publicly funded. Its redistributive potential depends on whether governments recognize unequal starting conditions and respond accordingly. Equal rules cannot guarantee equal opportunities when schools, teachers and communities face fundamentally different constraints. The lesson is simple: to make public education an instrument of social mobility, states must prioritize those who begin with the least.
References
Barabash, O., & Chytaieva, K. (2025). Analysis of the use of education subvention funds for the remuneration of teaching staff in 2024. Educational Analytics of Ukraine, 4(36), 69–82. https://doi.org/10.32987/2617-8532-2025-4-69-82
Educational Ombudsman Service of Ukraine. (2024, October 16). How to attract young people to work in educational institutions? Experience of communities [In Ukrainian]. https://eo.gov.ua/yak-zaluchyty-molod-do-roboty-u-zakladakh-osvity-dosvid-hromad/2024/10/16/
Glomm, G., & Ravikumar, B. (1992). Public versus private investment in human capital: Endogenous growth and income inequality. Journal of Political Economy, 100(4), 818–834. https://doi.org/10.1086/261841
Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. (2016, August 18). “We need new results, not a system tune-up”: Liliia Hrynevych presents the New Ukrainian School concept [In Ukrainian]. https://mon.gov.ua/news/nam-potriben-ne-tyuning-sistemi-a-novi-rezultati-liliya-grinevich-prezentuvala-kontseptsiyu-novoi-ukrainskoi-shkoli
Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. (2026a, April 21). The Ministry is developing solutions to modernize school transportation, taking into account the specific needs of communities [In Ukrainian]. https://mon.gov.ua/news/mon-napratsovuie-rishennia-dlia-onovlennia-systemy-shkilnykh-perevezen-z-urakhuvanniam-osoblyvykh-potreb-hromad
Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. (2026b, September 15). New remuneration mechanism for educators: Answers to frequently asked questions [In Ukrainian]. https://mon.gov.ua/news/novyi-mekhanizm-oplaty-pratsi-osvitian-vidpovidi-na-naiposhyrenishi-zapytannia
Osvita.UA. (2026, May 1). Ukrainian schools face teacher shortages, according to the State Education Quality Service report [In Ukrainian]. https://osvita.ua/school/96773/
State Education Quality Service of Ukraine. (2026, June 26). Quality of educational activities in 2025: Results of institutional audits of general secondary education institutions [In Ukrainian]. https://sqe.gov.ua/rezultaty-instytuczijnyh-audytiv-2025/
Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment. (2023). National report on the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA-2022) [In Ukrainian]. https://pisa.testportal.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/PISA-2022_Naczionalnyj-zvit_povnyj.pdf
Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment. (2026). National report on the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA-2025) [In Ukrainian]. https://testportal.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Ofitsijnyj-zvit_PISA-2025.pdf