A recent report issued by National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) suggests that 22.6 million children are out of school in Pakistan. Despite the constitutional mandate,the statehas failed to fulfill its promise of universal education. The situation is also a sad reflection on the dysfunctional state of public education system in Pakistan. Needless to say declaring this is a grave crisis that will affect our future generations. The provision of quality education has become quite a herculean task. As many as 44 percent children between the ages of five and 16 are still out of school in a country where over a quarter of its population is less than16 years old. Further, the report indicates a glaring dearth of infrastructural facilities as well as staff members in a majority of public sector primary schools. The situation is worse in the poorer regions such as the Balochistan province and tribal regions, where as many as 70 and 58 percent children are out of school,respectively. Given the importance of education, one expected policy makers to have formulated concrete policy interventions to efficiently reform the sector. Apart from lofty pledges and seemingly unachievable goals in public speeches, the federal and provincial governments have not yet succeeded in upholding their commitment to bring a lasting change in the educationsector. It should be noted that some improvements took place in the recent years especially the increase in spending since the devolution of powers under the 18th amendment in 2010. Subsequently, most provinces have doubled their education budgets. Despite the recent increase in spending, Pakistan only spends 2% of its GDP on education compared to India’s 3.3 and Nepal’s 4.7 percent. This fact alone tells us that provision of quality education is not the top priority of the State. However, given the broken system of governance, especially centralized control of the sector at provincial level will not yield results even if education budgets are further increased. Decentralization of education services and involvement of communities and parents would be vital to achieve the target of universal primary education. Policy interventions need to focus on improving quality of education being imparted and address issues related to faculty absenteeism, ghost schools, cronyism, corruption and widespread corporal punishment. At the same time, we need to modernize our curricula to achieve better learning outcomes. Teacher training is another crucial area, which has not received proper attention by policymakers. International donors have invested billions into the provincial budgets but the results are tentative at best. Until Pakistan’s governance system is not reformed at the national and subnational levels, investments in education will not achieve intended objectives. We need accountable and responsive local governments with adequate powers and resources to deliver the constitutional obligation of the state. The ruling party needs to review its skewed priority of investing in megaprojects at the expense of millions of children that should be in school. *