The World Bank and Education

Critiques and Alternatives

Series: 

For more than three decades, the World Bank has been proposing global policies for education. Presented as research-based, validated by experience, and broadly applicable, these policies are ideologically driven, insensitive to local contexts, and treat education as independent of international dynamics and national and local economies and cultures. Target countries, needing resources and unable to generate comparable research, find it difficult to challenge World Bank recommendations.

The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives represents a powerful challenge to World Bank proposals. Probing core issues—equity, quality, finance, privatization, teaching and learning, gender, and human rights—highlights the disabilities of neoliberal globalization. The authors demonstrate the ideological nature of the evidence marshaled by the World Bank and the accompanying policy advice.

Addressing key education issues in developing countries, the authors’ analyses provide tools for resisting and rejecting generic policy prescriptions as well as alternative directions to consider.

Robert Arnove, in his preface, says, “Whether the Bank is responsive to the critiques and alternatives brilliantly offered by the present authors, the book is certain to influence development and education scholars, policymakers, and practitioners around the globe.”

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For All by All?
The World Bank’s Global Framework for Education
Pages: 1–20
World Bank Poetry
How the Education Strategy 2020 Imagines the World
Pages: 21–32
The Poverty of Theory
The World Bank’s System Approach to Education Policy
Pages: 33–47
World Bank and Education
Ideological Premises and Ideological Conclusions
Pages: 49–65
“Quality’s” Horizons
The Politics of Monitoring Educational Quality
Pages: 95–107
More of the Same Will Not Do
Learning without Learning in the World Bank’s 2020 Education Strategy
Pages: 109–121
“All Things Being Equal?”
Policy Options, Shortfalls, and Absences in the World Bank Education Strategy 2020
Pages: 123–142
“Highly recommended for anyone interested in the harm neoliberal policy is doing to education worldwide.” —International Review of Education
Educational Researchers and their students
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