This article examines the progress of primary education in Madagascar. The challenge facing policy makers is enormous: how to maintain (or indeed, improve) learning across schools within Madagascar based on the data from the Conference des Ministries de l'Education des Pays Ayant le Francais en Partage in five African countries where common tests were administered to second- and fifth-graders. Beyond documenting the aggregate differences across sectors, the extent to which differences across schools, particularly between those in the public and private sectors, are associated with pupils' socioeconomic background, difference sin school inputs, and gaps across schools in managerial effectiveness is evaluated. The results suggest that private schools are generally more efficient than public schools in the sense that a student with a given set of personal characteristic who attends a private school would obtain a higher score than he or she would in a public school with the same inputs.