Education Strategy in the Developing World: Revising the World Bank's Education Policy: Volume 16

This volume of the International Perspectives on Education and Society series examines the development of the World Bank's Education Strategy 2020 ¹ (http://www.worldbank.org/educationstrategy2020). The Executive Summary of this strategy is reprinted in this volume for easy reference. Prior to the release of the Education Strategy 2020, a World Bank concept note was developed and consultations about the new strategy took place around the world. To document and analyze this process of education strategy development by the World Bank, this volume brings together a diverse array of voices and responses to the Bank's strategy for education in the developing world. As discussed in the introductory chapter, this volume primarily focuses on the World Bank's strategy development, and attempts to bridge the dichotomy between critics and advocates by providing relevant scholarship to influence both the World Bank's practice and the research and critiques that focus on the Bank's education strategies, policies and activities. The unique character of this volume is that it follows a significant shift in the World Bank's education policy as it was taking place and immediately following its development by using the unique approach of simultaneously documenting and analyzing the Education Strategy 2020 development.

The World Bank's Education Strategy 2020 is the latest in a line of education-related strategies focused on supporting economic development in countries worldwide through systematic and targeted educational reform. Yet, the Bank has many critics and a history of developing educational policies that do as much to create inequality in education as to develop it. This chapter introduces the theme of the volume by focusing on the link between the World Bank's education strategy development and poverty reduction. The key emphasis of this volume is the development of the Bank's Education Strategy 2020 and how it is shaped by empirical evidence, contextualized by national and regional variations in education and the economy, and the legacy of World Bank educational involvement. This introductory chapter concludes by summarizing the ways in which each of the volume's chapters contribute to this theme, and suggests how the debates related to the Bank's education strategies and policies can move forward and contribute to educational improvement, economic development, and poverty reduction worldwide.

Education is fundamental to development and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is also a strategic development investment. The human mind makes possible all other development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovation to infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For developing countries to reap these benefits fully—both by learning from the stock of global ideas and through innovation—they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education.

This chapter presents the findings from a series of interviews with World Bank staff on the topic of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy 2020. The six questions used in these interviews serve as the template for the information presented in this chapter. This chapter provides a brief but important set of background information necessary to understand the strategy and the following chapters because it provides a reflective voice to the World Bank staff involved in the development of the new strategy or familiar with the development process.

To understand the World Bank's education sector strategy development, an historical perspective of where previous strategies have gone is essential. Rather than building schools the Education Strategy 2020 suggests that it will emphasize the efficiency of the education system and help reform its management, governance and finance. Rather than provide new curriculum, it will try to lay the foundations of an education knowledge base by supporting the use of assessments of academic achievement, both local and cross-national. Countries will be asked to measure their progress against statistical evidence. While none of these changes are entirely new, they all represent progress. In this chapter, the new strategy efforts of the World Bank are examined in relation to the contribution of education to social cohesion, education and corruption, education financing and educational quality and cognitive skills and economic development. This portion of the volume will emerge from a 22-year personal history of working with the World Bank on researching education quality, designing policies to support educational effectiveness and training senior officials worldwide in education policy-related lending strategy.

This chapter recounts my involvement with one of the World Bank's consultations soliciting critical input into the draft of its Education Strategy 2020. Following a summary of the consultation that took place at the Brookings Institution, I reflect on the Bank's response to the input it received as well as to subsequent iterations of its education strategy. This chapter suggests how education has been narrowly conceptualized by the World Bank in past lending policies and how the Bank now conceptualizes it with regard to its intrinsic or external value to human and societal well-being. To elaborate upon these opening points, it will be pointed out how the language and circulating discourses of the World Bank, as well as those of other major international policy and funding actors, reflect and limit the vision of what the goals and purposes of an education system should be. In short, this chapter suggests that the language and discourses of the new World Bank Education Strategy 2020 (like previous World Bank education strategies) are narrowly framed in market and commercial terms focused on improving the competitive position of a country in the global economy, which does not maximize human development.

This study compares the World Bank 2020 Education Strategy to research conducted a few years ago analyzing the effectiveness of the Bolivian Popular Participation law (1994) through policy study conducted from 2000 to 2004, including fieldwork in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2002. The policy research focused on Popular Participation and successive policy initiatives that modified or impacted public services, particularly public education. The fieldwork in Cochabamba focused on civil society and government interactions regarding public education. In studying the governance structures put in place by the Popular Participation law, particularly decentralizing authority and resources to the municipal level and creating mechanisms for civil society participation in governance, parallels to proposed Bank practices for the 2020 Education Strategy can been seen, as well as potential pitfalls. We cannot exam the World Bank 2020 Education Strategy development process in a vacuum – history, environment, and culture must be taken into account, as must the influence of particular stakeholder groups and established norms of behavior at the World Bank. The implementation of Popular Participation was problematic at best, and the response to features of Popular Participation that parallel the 2020 Education Strategy – in particular, the operating principles enumerated on pp. 7–8 of the 2020 Education Strategy Concept Note – have important implications for the proposed Bank strategy.

The World Bank's new Education Sector Strategy 2020 (2011) points to an important role for private actors in the development of high-quality, high-equity education systems that effectively address poverty alleviation in low and middle-income countries. This chapter asks whether this emphasis on private participation is new, focusing in particular on Bank policies, research, and operations in K-12 education. It also explores some surprising disjunctures between the World Bank Group's official policies promoting privatization and its operational practices. To do so, the chapter draws on a separate research project for which we completed a review of the Bank's current portfolio of projects in K-12 education and a series of interviews with World Bank staff. We also look at the expansion of Bank activities beyond its traditional arms – the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA) lending facilities – by including a brief a review of the educational activities of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which directly supports the private sector in education.

This chapter focuses on two concepts: development and gender, examining how they have been defined and applied to educational policy by the World Bank. To accomplish these two objectives, key documents developed by the Bank are reviewed, paying special attention to the educational policy documents produced by the Bank since 2000. The chapter discusses the rationale and evidence presented by the Bank to substantiate its new policies and the extent to which these policies reflect current social science research theory as well as empirical findings concerning educational strategies to create both economic growth and social inclusion.

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.

This chapter analyzes the World Bank's Education Strategy 2020 (WBES) to assess its likely impact on inequality. The chapter begins with a review of assessments of the Bank's past education policies. It then compares four different theoretical perspectives on education policy: social class equalization, public goods, human capital, and neoliberalism. Applying quantitative and qualitative content analysis to the WBES, we identify the World Bank's approach as promoting a neo-liberal capitalist development ideology emphasizing private sector schooling and nonformal education along with standardized testing. Our analysis predicts that this strategy will not lead to major increases in educational equality in the developing world, and may even increase inequality.

The primacy of teacher effects on student achievement has been well documented from a variety of methodological approaches within the field of education research. Governments across the globe have or will address educational equity, especially the education of the poor, by designing programs to attract, train, develop, retain, and study more effective teachers. In their Concept Note, the World Bank also raises “fundamental questions” that balance upon an understanding of the development and measurement of teacher effectiveness. These include question 1: “What are the most important challenges in the next decade for building knowledge and skills for life and work in different country contexts?” and question 3: “What educational results should the Bank be accountable for in the next ten years, and how would we measure these achievements?” In this chapter, we build upon the extensive research that suggests teacher effectiveness ought to be the primary goal of educational reform efforts across the globe. We highlight the complexity of measuring effectiveness, especially across countries and varied contexts for education. We argue that the ways in which effectiveness is measured will have a direct impact on the potential of any reform policy to positively influence the overall effectiveness of a teaching force and the achievement of its students.

The objective of this chapter is to argue a case for the need to include teachers and professional educators in the policy making and implementation processes of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy 2020. By drawing on evidence from the Consultation Plan, the chapter investigates how communicative practices about teachers are embedded in the discourse of the plan and how these influence the rationalisation of the policy. In doing so, the chapter will examine the relationships between social actions, systems rationalisation and life world rationalisation. Much like commercial and entrepreneurial organisations focus on the voice of the customer (VOC), that is on satisfying the stakeholders and end users in their processes, in this chapter, the voice of the teacher (VOT) is highlighted. The skills and knowledge of key stakeholders need to be leveraged and engaged in order to ensure that the policy achieves its desired aims. In order to frame this argument, notions of Habermas’ communicative action theory is used to show how policy engages in systems steering. Rather than understanding education strategy and reform as a process of engaging only government and policy makers, this chapter suggests that by engaging the practitioners and listening to the practical discourse around reform, teachers can be leaders of reforms rather than obfuscated agents.

This chapter takes as its focus a series of issues related to participation and the World Bank. First, it traces from 1980 to the present the trajectory within the Bank of thinking related to participation in development generally. Second, it unpacks the framework within which that thinking has been crystallized – namely, the Framework for Service Provision (FSP) delineated in the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People. Third, it shows how the work done by the Bank in the education sector has both paralleled and furthered the concepts embedded in the FSP. Focusing on the education sector is essential because it is the sector in which the Bank has perhaps been most active in theorizing and most successful in implementing its conception of participation. As the chapter shows, a particular approach to decentralization is central to the way the Bank advances that conception of participation and to the way that it supports the realization of participation in practice, both generally and with regard to education governance. Lastly, the chapter reviews and discusses the results of Bank-supported education decentralization projects in light of the theory elaborated to promote them.

As the World Bank approaches its fiftieth year of involvement in the education sector, its Sector Strategy for Education 2020 focuses on key challenges created in the past decade. With the successes in building up primary education systems, millions of matriculating students in many developing countries will now be seeking secondary and tertiary education. For most observers, this is a crisis: even if enough schools could magically be built in time, there would not be nearly enough trained teachers to staff them. For some observers, this is a crisis that can be coped with: information and communications technologies (ICT) have reached a stage where virtual schools and distance learning can be employed at scale to meet such challenges. Curiously, the Education Sector Strategy 2020 makes no mention of virtual schools or distance learning. In fact, it contains only a single, ambivalent reference to ICT for education. The curious silence belies the World Bank's vital leadership and active involvement over the years in identifying and funding model ICT uses in the education sector. However, this chapter is ultimately not about arguing over the extent to which ICT should be mentioned in the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy. Instead, the goal here is to draw attention to a specific opportunity that the World Bank has before it to shape and guide the many ICT-based virtual school projects that will be undertaken in the coming decade. The crucially important opportunity is one for which the World Bank is uniquely suited: to seed and grow an open e-learning movement based on open source, open educational resources, and open pedagogy for secondary and tertiary education in the developing world.

Historically, the World Bank has been the largest external financier of education in the world, committing a peak amount of just over $5 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 through both its Education Sector projects and multisector projects managed by other sectors (World Bank, 2010b). The World Bank also hosts the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative (EFA FTI). Launched in 2002, EFA FTI is a partnership of governments, civil society organizations, and multilateral agencies such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank, which provides grant funding and technical assistance to implement the basic education components of national education strategies. By providing significant funding for education in low-income countries (LICs) through its own International Development Association (IDA) and by managing the majority of EFA FTI grant funding, the World Bank has a major impact on the direction of education development around the world.

In 2011 the Bank released a new Education Sector Strategy, Learning for All, which sets out the World Bank Education Sector's approach to education development over the coming decade. The analysis in this chapter examines the role of the EFA FTI and the growth of World Bank education operations managed outside the World Bank Education Sector, as well as their influence on Bank education lending objectives in sub-Saharan Africa. We examine trends in World Bank and EFA FTI basic education financing in sub-Saharan African countries that have joined the EFA FTI partnership to compare these two sources of financing for primary education and analyze the extent to which the World Bank is substituting its primary education lending with grants from the EFA FTI. We also assess the results frameworks of 10 multisector operations managed by noneducation sectors (Economic Management and Poverty Reduction; Urban Development; Rural Sector; Population, Health, and Nutrition; and Social Protection) to ascertain the extent to which they include education objectives and indicators. The chapter focuses its research around two questions:1.Is there evidence that financing from the EFA FTI is substituting World Bank financing for education in sub-Saharan Africa?2.Are World Bank multisector operations well designed to achieve education objectives in sub-Saharan Africa?

The research finds that the EFA FTI has almost certainly impacted the demand for IDA financing for basic education development. The comparison of IDA and EFA FTI primary education financing shows country-level substitution is occurring in a number of sub-Saharan African countries, with at least 13 out of 18 EFA FTI grant recipients in sub-Saharan Africa receiving a declining share of IDA financing for primary education since joining the EFA FTI.

Second, multisector operations now account for one-third of Bank education lending and have increased to comprise half of all new education commitments in sub-Saharan Africa. The research finds that multisector operations with education components are not as effective or accountable for education outcomes as those managed by the Education Sector, unless they are explicitly linked to national education plans. Given the disconnect between Education Sector managed education lending, and financing for education managed by other Bank sectors, it is unclear how the latter will be guided by the Bank's Education Sector Strategy, which will only apply to half of all Bank education lending for sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, there is no guarantee that both EFA FTI funding and noneducation sector managed lending will be measured against World Bank education strategy standards, and yet the Education Sector Strategy 2020 does little to address these challenges.

This study presents an innovative approach to Information and communication technology (ICT) skill training and employment generation for out-of-school and disadvantaged youths in Africa. With technical and policy assistance from the World Bank, ICTs can be used to revitalize technical and vocational training to meet skill and employment needs of disadvantaged youths in the region. The deplorable conditions of out-of-school youth and the state of secondary education in Africa underscore the urgency to engage disadvantaged youth in productive economic activities. An ICT-enhanced technical and vocational training program in Africa provides both private and social gains: it provides economic prospects for disadvantaged youth and; it adds to the development of the knowledge economy in Africa. The NairoBits Digital Design School in Kenya is presented as a model of a vocational and training school that uses ICTs to improve skill formation among disadvantaged youths in informal settlements in urban Africa. Meeting the objectives of an ICT-based training and employment generation program for underprivileged youth in Africa require strong regulatory frameworks and contributions from the World Bank. The involvement of the bank, particularly through private sector grants for ICT skill train in Africa will help to revitalize technical and vocational education and training in the region. Above all, the collaboration of government agencies, private businesses, other international development agencies and civil society groups in ICT skill training will help to meaningfully engage African youths in the development of their communities in the emerging knowledge economy.

This chapter is a theoretical exploration of the relevance, challenges, and points of consideration to be taken into account as India prepares for the next stage of educational development. By providing context for the current challenges faced by India and aligning the framework of ESS2020 with government goals, this chapter seeks to inform the debate on ESS2020, especially in light of the significant gap in secondary education in India. Though the case itself focuses on India, in part due to its size, relative importance in the global economy and the relatively open nature of its government and media, there is much that would be relevant to other countries that have succeeded in addressing the first stages of educational development and that are poised to tackle the next steps. This chapter utilizes media reports, government documents, and in-country research to highlight how ES 2020 applies, falls short, or altogether misses the Indian context.

This chapter examines World Bank publications, including publicized reports and widely disseminated policy statements like the World Development Reports, as well as the plans and appraisals of two specific operations in Indonesia. Based on this examination, the author suggests that characterizations which emphasize the Bank's intransigence or celebrate its responsiveness fail to provide a satisfactory description of country-level education policy evolution. The chapter begins with two of the major theoretical frameworks that have been used to study the Bank's work in education. This is followed by a summary of the evolution of the Bank's involvement in education at the international level. The third part of this chapter analyzes two educational reforms that the World Bank has promoted in Indonesia in the last 10 years – programs advancing vocational education and decentralization – and examines how these priorities have been affected by local context and demands and shifts in the global discourse on education. The author concludes that the World Bank's role in the diffusion of education reform is best understood from a world culture perspective but that its interests – and the interests of its primary shareholders – are advanced in particularly opportune moments like democratic transitions.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the dichotomous nature of two World Bank educational goals and examine how enrollment growth became prioritized over quality in Tanzania. Nestled within the theoretical framework of developmental discourse, the chapter begins with a historical review of World Bank educational policy, exploring Tanzania's lending relationship with the Bank. The chapter next evaluates the new World Bank 2020 educational strategy using the Tanzanian context to draw attention to policy strengths and weaknesses. Finally, using current research regarding World Bank policy in Tanzania, this chapter explores the implications of the new strategy on the next installment of Tanzania's SEDP policy. By locating the intersections of these policies, one may gauge a better understanding as to why the past trend of flooding Tanzania's classrooms with students has had the effect of eroding educational quality.

Richard Allington is professor of education at the University of Tennessee. Richard is a past president of the International Reading Association and the Literacy Research Association. He has been principal investigator on a number of research projects funded by the United States Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation, and the National Institutes of Health. He is the author of over 150 articles and several books.