The gap between rhetoric and reality on free public education

Katarina Tomasevski, The State of the Right to Education Worldwide: Free or Fee: 2006 Global Report, Copenhagen, August 2006. This is a major, 281-page report surveying the laws and practices of 170 countries. There is no executive summary, but here's a short overview from the splash page:

[The] bitter reality of economic exclusion from education is evidenced in 22 different types of fees in primary school which should legally be free....The law, which mandates education to be free and compulsory, has been cast aside. Education should be free but it is for-fee.

People lucky to live in countries where at least compulsory education is free think that this is the case worldwide. People in poor countries are forced to pay up to a third of their annual income to keep a child at school. Worse, children are forced to work, even at school, to pay the cost of their primary education. None of this can be gleaned from official documents.