Learning Poverty: What We Haven't Learned in Classrooms

30 Second Overview: In 2019, the World Bank and UNESCO jointly published the term "Learning Poverty" ¹. The definition is: a 10-year-old child who cannot read and understand a simple story appropriate for their age ¹. The learning poverty rate in low-income and lower-middle-income countries was 53% in 2019; it rose to about 70% after the pandemic in 2022; the World Bank's February 2023 update shows that even with current improvement rates, it will only drop to 43% by 2030 ²³. Taiwan has no official learning poverty rate statistics, but PISA 2022 provided an awkward double answer ⁴: Taiwanese students ranked 3rd globally in Math, 5th in Reading, and 4th in Science, with the math scores of the weakest 20% reaching the OECD average of 472 (rated as having a "resilient" educational system by the OECD) ⁵. However, the same report showed that the average Math score was 571 in urban areas and 517 in rural areas, a gap of 54 points (equivalent to about one and a half to two years of learning progress) ⁶. A 2019 survey by the Bo-You Foundation across 13 rural junior high schools found that 70% of students in 6 schools scored C in English, and 70% of students in 5 schools scored C in Math ⁷. A long-term observation from PISA 2018 showed a reading test performance gap of about 6 years' worth of learning between the top 10% and bottom 10% of Taiwanese students ⁸. The Taiwanese version of learning poverty is not found in the urban average, but on the standardized test scores of rural areas; it has not yet been officially measured.

A Very Awkward Term

Educational research has a long-standing awkwardness: billions of children globally attend school every day, but they are not learning anything. Describing this phenomenon as "out-of-school" is wrong because they are not out of school; describing it as "drop-out" is also wrong because they have not dropped out; and saying "poor grades" is too mild because the problem is not about grades, but that the foundational capacity has not been established.

In 2019, the World Bank and UNESCO jointly published a report titled Ending Learning Poverty: What Will It Take?, introducing a new term: Learning Poverty ¹.

The definition is only one sentence: a child who, by age 10, cannot read a simple story appropriate for their age ¹.

Why age 10? Because age 10 is a critical threshold. Learning before this age is "learn to read," and learning after this age is "read to learn" (learning new things through reading) ¹. If a child, at age 10, still cannot read a story, they are not just behind; they are excluded from the entire subsequent educational system. Every subsequent science class, social studies class, and math class assumes you can read the textbook. If you cannot, it is equivalent to being asked out of the classroom, even if your body is sitting there.

The World Bank uses this definition to name the global education crisis. In 2019, the global learning poverty rate was 53%, meaning that over half of children in low-income and lower-middle-income countries could not read a simple story ². After the pandemic, this number rose to about 70% ². A generation lost its already shaky learning foundation within three years. The World Bank's February 2023 updated report, The State of Learning Poverty, predicts that even at the current rate of improvement, the global learning poverty rate will only drop to 43% by 2030, meaning nearly half of children remain in a state of learning poverty ³.

The advantage of this term is its concreteness. It is not abstract academic language like "structural educational inequality"; it is a concrete image: a 10-year-old child holding a book and unable to read it. Any parent, teacher, or policymaker can immediately visualize this scene. It can even be measured by giving a text to a 10-year-old and seeing if they can understand it—this was deliberately designed by the World Bank.

Taiwan Does Not Have the Term "Learning Poverty"

If you search for "learning poverty" in Taiwanese educational policy documents, you will find few results. This term has not yet truly entered mainstream public discourse in Taiwan as of 2026.

However, Taiwan uses several other terms to express similar concepts: "learning gaps," "insufficient basic academic skills," "low-achieving students," and "passing grade C." Each term refers to a similar phenomenon, but none of them use "reading ability" as the core indicator like "Learning Poverty," nor can any single phrase clearly convey the picture.

This is not a coincidence. The long-standing discourse framework in Taiwan's educational sector has been "urban-rural disparity" or "vulnerable students," both of which are structural terms pointing to causes like "geographic inequality" or "family inequality." Learning Poverty, conversely, does not ask about the cause; it only asks about the result: Did they learn? This shift in focus is important for Taiwan because structural language can lead readers to feel that "it is someone else's problem," whereas results-oriented language allows readers to see "a child sitting in a classroom who has learned nothing."

The Big Turnaround of PISA 2022

To understand how unique the Taiwanese version of learning poverty is, we must start with PISA 2022.

In December 2023, the OECD released the PISA 2022 results ⁴. Taiwan's scores were ⁵:

• Math: Global Rank 3 (second only to Singapore and Macau)
• Reading: Global Rank 5
• Science: Global Rank 4
• Educational System rated as "Resilient"

The most dramatic aspect was the performance of vulnerable students: the math competency of the bottom 20% of Taiwanese students (defined by PISA as those in the lowest socioeconomic strata) reached 471 points, matching the OECD average of 472 ⁵. Another indicator: from 2012 to 2022, the percentage of variance in math performance explained by socioeconomic status decreased from 17.9% to 15.7% ⁵. This means that the influence of socioeconomic background on student performance is decreasing.

This figure was used by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan as "the best result in ten years" for promotion ⁹. The media also reported positively: "Taiwan's PISA International Assessment Makes a Big Leap," and "The Educational Systems of Taiwan, Japan, and Korea are Resilient" ⁵. This is real progress that should not be denied. But it is only half the story.

The 54-Point Gap in the Same Report

If we open another part of the PISA 2022 Taiwan report, the term urban-rural disparity still exists ⁶:

• Average Math Score for Urban Students: 571 points
• Average Math Score for Rural Students: 517 points
• Gap: 54 points

In PISA's design, 20–30 points are equivalent to one year of learning progress ¹⁰. A gap of 54 points means that urban students have learned nearly two years more math than rural students. There is also a difference of over 40 points in Reading and Science ⁶.

Why was this number not widely reported? Because it conflicts with the mainstream narrative of "Taiwan's big turnaround." The good news from PISA 2022—"overall ranking improvement" and "vulnerable students catching up to the OECD average"—both operate at the average level. But the 54-point urban-rural gap does not appear in the average. It is hidden within the comparison of the two subgroups: urban vs. rural.

A long-term observation from PISA 2018 is also worth noting: the reading test performance gap between the top 10% and bottom 10% of Taiwanese students was about 6 years' worth of learning ⁸. While PISA 2022 did not explicitly update this number, the 54-point urban-rural gap is a snapshot of that 6-year gap in 2022.

A junior high school math teacher told the media after the PISA 2022 results came out: "The data is quantified results; related data can be interpreted positively. Taiwan should compare itself to itself. The feelings from the teaching field are not as deep as the data progress." ¹¹ Another teacher was more direct: "Students from capable families can be better, while students from vulnerable families tend to stagnate or even regress" ¹¹.

These two statements contrast with the OECD's assessment that "Taiwan is resilient." The OECD sees average improvement; the Taiwanese teaching field sees a widening gap between vulnerable children and middle-class children.

Passing Grade C: Learning Poverty in Classrooms

If PISA is too academic, Taiwan has another indicator closer to reality: the C grade from the junior high school standardized tests.

The junior high school standardized tests have used an A/B/C grading system since 2014, assessing core competencies based on the 108 curriculum ¹²:

• Grade A (Proficient): Students highly master the basic skills of this subject.
• Grade B (Basic): Students grasp the basic skills of this subject.
• Grade C (Needs Improvement): Students have not yet mastered the basic skills of this subject.

The meaning of Grade C is straightforward: at the end of junior high school, this student has not mastered the basic skills for that subject.

A 2019 survey by the Bo-You Foundation made this number concrete. The Bo-You Foundation is an NGO that has long provided after-school tutoring in rural areas and tracks standardized test performance in these schools. The results from that year ⁷:

• 13 rural junior high schools were surveyed.
• 70% of students in 6 schools scored C in English.
• 70% of students in 5 schools scored C in Math.

Putting these two numbers together: in the surveyed rural junior high schools, 7 out of every 10 students did not achieve basic skills in English or Math by the end of junior high school.

This is not "they performed poorly"; it means "they did not master the basics for that subject when they graduated from junior high." When they advance to high school or vocational school, they continue sitting in classrooms listening to teachers speak without needing B1 English or math functions or chemical equations—all of which are assumed to be basic knowledge from junior high. If you don't have it, every class is like listening to a foreign language.

This is the Taiwanese version of learning poverty. It is not about a 10-year-old who cannot read a story; it is about a 15-year-old holding three C grades on their standardized test report.

Years of field observation by the Bo-You Foundation led to one conclusion: "What rural children truly lack in learning is the role of long-term stable companionship and guidance for learning" ¹³. In rural families, there are higher proportions of single-parent, intergenerational, and migrant families, with parents generally having lower education levels who must work long hours outside to support the family economy. In such environments, children's learning lacks support from the family level.

Why Remedial Teaching Cannot Fix It

Taiwan has a complete remedial teaching system. Since the 100th academic year, the Ministry of Education has fully promoted the "Learning Support Program for Elementary and Junior High School Students" (formerly the "Hand-in-Hand Project"), using standardized assessments to screen low-achieving students into remedial classes to ensure basic skills for every student in junior high school ¹⁴. The Student Support Resource Platform (PRIORI) provides resources such as teaching materials, assessments, and teacher training ¹⁴.

The design of this system is not flawed. The challenge lies in implementation:

First, most remedial teachers are part-time. There is no dedicated "remedial teaching specialist" in the official school staffing; it is usually done by current teachers after hours or hired as contract instructors. Part-time means limited time, poor continuity, and insufficient long-term companionship with students.

Second, what remedial teaching can achieve is limited. When a fifth grader's reading ability is at a second-grade level, two hours of remedial teaching per week cannot really pull them back. What they need is not "one extra language class after school," but a complete overhaul and retraining of the learning model. Intervention at this level is almost impossible within the regular school system.

Third, the children who need remediation the most are often the hardest to remediate. Remedial teaching requires students to be willing to attend classes, parents to cooperate with supervision, and students themselves to maintain motivation for learning. But when a child has accumulated years of failure experience in academics, their reaction to learning is often avoidance rather than seeking help. If you ask them to attend one more class, they might just skip it.

This is why some rural schools with resources have begun attempting more structural interventions ¹⁴: differentiated reading (grouping classes by actual reading ability rather than grade level), cross-grade co-learning (gathering students from different grades who are behind into one class), and after-school companionship (combining NGO support for stable long-term guidance). These practices are educationally sound, but administratively difficult: Taiwan's schools are organized by grade level, requiring massive coordination of human resources for cross-grade courses, and rural schools already have limited administrative resources.

Article 11 of the Act on Education Development in Remote Areas allows mixed-age classes in remote schools, and Article 16 authorizes cooperation among five parties. These two articles have actually left room for structural reform in remedial teaching. But the tools provided by the regulations need someone to use them, and using them requires intensive coordination between the school, the education bureau, NGOs, universities, and parents.

TFT Lists It as a 2030 Vision

In 2024, TFT released its 2030 Strategic Blueprint, proposing three major changes for the next decade ¹⁵:

1. "Changing Educational Inequality" becomes a social movement involving many people.
2. "Learning Poverty" becomes history.
3. "Non-traditional careers" become "equal options."

"Learning Poverty" appears for the first time in the long-term strategic vision of a Taiwanese NGO, which is a noteworthy moment. TFT renamed its ten years of rural education work using this term: previously, "educational inequality" was viewed from the perspective of social justice; now, "learning poverty" is viewed from the perspective of what children actually learn. A definition derived from results is harder to avoid than one derived from structural arguments.

TFT's 3A framework ¹⁵ (Access / Achievement / Aspiration) places learning poverty in the second A (Achievement). Access means "having the opportunity to go to school"; Achievement means "truly mastering key competencies." Learning Poverty is a precise description of when "Access is achieved but Achievement is not."

TFT's observations on the ground in rural areas align with the Bo-You Foundation: what is most needed is not extra teaching materials, but an environment where children can learn in ways familiar to them ¹⁶. This environment requires not just teacher passion, but a structural design of the entire system: stable teachers (the issue of a teacher's birth: taiwan teacher training), complete curriculum (the provisions of act on education development in remote areas), cross-cultural sensitivity (the challenges of taiwan indigenous education and language revival), and family/community support (TFT's concentric circle framework). Every layer must be in place to truly lower the learning poverty rate.

Why This Term Should Enter Public Discourse in Taiwan

"Learning Poverty" is more precise than "educational inequality," more universal than "rural education," and more concrete than "learning gaps." It has three advantages:

First, it is results-oriented. "Educational inequality" is a structural description; general readers often struggle to feel something about an abstract structure. "Learning Poverty" is a results description; general readers can imagine what a "10-year-old who cannot read a story" looks like, or a "standardized test report with three C grades at age 15." The narrative effectiveness is much greater.

Second, it breaks down the urban-rural dichotomy. "Rural education" makes city dwellers feel that this is an issue from the mountains and unrelated to them. But learning poverty does not only happen in rural areas. Vulnerable families in cities, children of migrant workers, low-income households, and students with special needs can all be in a state of learning poverty. It is a description that transcends geography. The 54-point urban-rural gap in PISA 2022 is only half the picture; the learning poverty in families of migrants and economically disadvantaged groups is the unseen other half.

Third, it can be measured. The World Bank's definition is clear: age 10, understanding, simple story. If Taiwan conducted a proper survey, it could derive its own learning poverty rate. This number would force the issue that has been hidden behind "top 5 global average scores" to come into view for the first time. Currently, the closest substitute indicator might be the proportion of Grade C in junior high school standardized tests, as there is a fixed proportion of students across Taiwan who score C in three subjects annually, and this proportion is much higher in rural schools than in urban areas. The Ministry of Education has not published this as a "learning poverty rate," but the data exists ¹².

Conclusion: Learning Poverty While Seated

Taiwan rural education described a child named Ah-wei who skipped class to help run his family's foam tea shop, and after TFT teachers found him, he scored the highest in the class. This is an inspirational story. Learning poverty is another version:

Ah-wei's classmate did not skip class; they attended school on time every day, but graduated from junior high with three C grades.

This student does not make the news, does not have a documentary made about them, and no teacher writes an essay introducing their story. Their predicament is not dramatic; they are just a compliant student who learned nothing. They represent the greatest silence in Taiwan's education system.

The scale of this silence has not yet been officially measured. Only when someone creates the number for "the Taiwanese version of learning poverty" will our description of Taiwan's education be complete. Will this number appear in the next decade? Who will create it? Once created, will there be a place for it in public discourse in Taiwan?

TFT has written it into its 2030 Strategic Vision. The Bo-You Foundation uses the proportion of Grade C to show us the reality on the ground in rural areas. The World Bank's Learning Poverty Database provides an international comparative framework ¹⁷. Now, at least three organizations are willing to undertake this task of measurement and companionship. But one NGO, one international organization, or one foundation cannot carry the learning poverty of an entire country. This term must enter the Ministry of Education, the county/city education bureaus, the teacher training system, and the daily conversations of ordinary parents.

The first step is to acknowledge: Taiwan's average PISA scores are real; 571 vs 517 in urban vs rural is real; 70% scoring C in 13 rural schools is real—all these things happen within the same educational system. Seeing all three is the starting point for this discussion.

Further Reading

• Teach for Taiwan (TFT)—TFT's 3A framework places learning poverty under Achievement. The 2030 Strategic Blueprint officially lists "making learning poverty a history" as one of its three major visions for the decade. This is the first time an organization in Taiwan has written this term into its long-term vision.
• Taiwan Rural Education—Rural education is where learning poverty occurs most intensely. TFT's concentric circle framework explains why the struggles of rural children cannot be explained by individual effort alone.
• The Intersection of Indigenous Education and Language Revival in Taiwan—The educational experience of indigenous students is one of the most severe sub-groups experiencing learning poverty. The interaction between language shift, geographic distance, and social expectations causes children fluent in their native languages to appear weaker on mainstream academic indicators.
• Act on Education Development in Remote Areas Fully Explained—The institutional tools provided by the regulations (mixed-age teaching, transportation subsidies, five-party cooperation) respond to upstream conditions of learning poverty at a structural level. The news that 18 elementary schools closed in the 113th academic year proves that the regulations cannot stop demographic gravity.
• A Teacher's Birth: Taiwan Teacher Training System—If the teacher training system does not teach "differentiated and remedial teaching skills," the school has no capacity to handle existing learning poverty. The self-assessment of novice teachers for these three skills is precisely what is lacking the most.
• Taiwan's Youth Crisis—Learning poverty and youth decline are not the same problem, but they occur simultaneously in rural areas: as students decrease, schools shrink, and resources become more concentrated, the proportion of learning poverty among the remaining children is actually higher.
• Expansion and Exit of Higher Education in Taiwan—After higher education became widespread and "getting into university" was no longer a barrier, the gap in "what was learned" became the next wall.
• Educational System and College Entrance Culture—Taiwan's culture that treats college entrance as the only path leaves children with learning poverty with almost no other options within the system.
• Who is Low Paid—Another definitional question: the National Labor Relations Board calculates low pay based on monthly salary (zero people) or annual salary (1.26 million people), differing by whether the year-end bonus falls under legal purview.

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