World Bank and Education: Ideological Premises and Ideological Conclusions

The World Bank has been the predominant institution for developing and enforcing a global education policy for over three decades, eclipsing UNESCO, UNICEF, and bilateral institutions. Every decade or so the Bank writes up their current version of global education policy in a strategy report. The most recent strategy continues past trends that offer little actual attention to education itself but instead focus on a particular, narrow, ideologically based approach to managing education. This chapter highlights three of these trends. First, the title of the strategy is misleading as the report has little to do with “Learning for All.” More accurately, the approach should be known as “Testing for All,” focusing on partial measures of just two of the many outcomes of education that are important. Second, the strategy emphasizes that the Bank will use a “system approach” to analyze and manage education around the world (continuing their infamous one-size-fits-all methodology), yet it offers no evidence to support the productivity of such an approach and ignores decades of criticism of its narrow and distorting nature. Third, the strategy emphasizes the benefits of the privatization of education, ignoring issues of education as a public good and the inequities associated with fee-for-service, especially for marginalized groups.