Steven J. Klees & Joel Samoff 
The World Bank and Education [PDF ebook] 
Critiques and Alternatives

World Bank and Education: Book Blurb 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.”

Table of Content

Foreword; Abbreviations; Contributors; Introduction; PART I: Framing the Issues; For All by All? The World Bank’s Global Framework for Education; World Bank Poetry: How the Education Strategy 2020 Imagines the World; The Poverty of Theory. The World Bank’s System Approach to Education Policy; World Bank and Education: Ideological Premises and Ideological Conclusions; PART II: Learning, Assessment, and the Role of Teachers; The 2020 World Bank Education Strategy: Nothing New, or the Same Old Gospel; Teachers as Learners: A Missing Focus in “Learning for All”; “Quality’s” Horizons. The Politics of Monitoring Educational Quality; More of the Same Will Not Do. Learning Without Learning in the World Bank’s 2020 Education Strategy; PART III: Research and Policy; “All Things Being Equal?” Policy Options, Shortfalls, and Absences in the World Bank Education Strategy 2020; “Research Shows that …”: Creating the Knowledge Environment for Learning for All; The Gender Dimension in the World Bank’s Education Strategy: Assertions in Need of a Theory; Human Rights in the World Bank 2020 Education Strategy; The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberal Privatization in the World Bank’s Educational Strategy 2020; PART IV: Reshaping the Future; Alternatives to the World Bank’s Strategies for Education and Development; Conclusions; Index.