Sometimes everything changes at lunchtime, with one group's students, teachers and textbooks swapped for those of a different group.

BBC: Vlado and Serdjan are friends in a multi-ethnic school

Better teachers and textbooks might be a smarter investment.

FORBES: Thailand Taps China For Cut-Price 'One Tablet Per Child' Program

Although practices vary from state to state, most boards of education are locally elected to hire and fire superintendents and teachers, decide curriculums, propose budgets, and even choose textbooks.

ECONOMIST: Letters

If the school opens as scheduled in September, it will, as a practical matter, have to operate on the basis of her curriculum, with the teachers she has hired and utilizing her selections of Arabic-language textbooks.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Stop the madrassa

Professor Semenov has developed exemplary programmes to enable teachers to include ICTs in their work, as well as textbooks and teacher guides used widely in the Russian Federation and other countries.

UNESCO: Education

These include the acute shortage of qualified teachers, financial resources and appropriate educational resources (such as school buildings and textbooks) as well as the failure of most parents to send their children to school due to poverty.

UNESCO: Room to Read: Local Language Publishing Programme

The visitors tried to ensure that teachers showed up to work, that classes took place, and that pupils received their textbooks more or less on time.

ECONOMIST: A fillip for South Africa��s schools

Transforming education so that it meets the needs of all children is a complex and difficult task that spans issues ranging from the global shortage of trained, qualified teachers--UNESCO estimates that we need 18 million new teachers to meet current demand--to the problems of overcrowded schools, aging infrastructure, obsolete equipment and textbooks, and outdated teaching methods and curricula.

FORBES: Magazine Article