See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/330323187

The 2018 World Development Report on Education: A Critical Analysis:

Assessment: The World Development Report 2018

Article  in  Development and Change · January 2019

DOI: 10.1111/dech.12483

CITATIONS READS

0 356

4 authors, including:

Steven J. Klees Nelly P. Stromquist

University of Maryland, College Park University of Maryland, College Park
67 PUBLICATIONS   829 CITATIONS    151 PUBLICATIONS   1,778 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Salim Vally
University of Johannesburg
38 PUBLICATIONS   279 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Steven J. Klees on 18 January 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Assessment

The 2018 World Development Report on Education: A

Critical Analysis

Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and

Salim Vally

World Bank, World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize

Education’s Promise. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018. 216 pp. Avail-
able for download at: www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018

INTRODUCTION

In 1948 the world decreed the universal right to free basic education (UN,
1948: Art. 26). In 1990 the world committed itself to universal basic
education, with a target of the year 2000 to fully achieve this endeavour
(UNESCO, 1990).1 Noting the failure to reach the target, in 2000 the
world reaffirmed its commitment to universal basic education, assured poor
countries that external support would address limited resources, and reset the
target to 2015 (World Education Forum, 2000). In 2015, again acknowledg-
ing the unclosed gap, the world once more reset the target, to 2030; that is, 40
years after the original commitment (UNESCO, 2015a, 2015b). The world
reaffirmed its commitment to several of these education goals by including
them in the Millennium Development Goals (UN, 2000) and expanded
them substantially in the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015). It is
within this context that the World Bank has been working in education.
The World Bank has long been involved in giving grants, loans and advice
for education in developing countries.2 Conceived at the Bretton Woods
Monetary Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 1–12 July 1944,
along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank’s initial

1. See the ‘World Declaration on Education for All’, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/

001275/127583e.pdf
2. The label ‘developing’ countries is very problematic. We use it for lack of an acceptable
alternative (Esteva et al., 2013).

Development and Change 00(0): 1–18. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12483


C 2019 International Institute of Social Studies.
2 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

mission was the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. However, it quickly

moved into what has become its primary role of international development.
The World Bank gave its first loan for education in 1962, just at the time
that economists began writing about education as investment in human
capital (Edwards and Storen, 2017; Klees, 2016a). Its efforts in education
expanded rapidly and, by the mid-1980s, it had far eclipsed the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in
spending and influence. Since the early 1970s, every decade or so, the World
Bank’s education division produces a strategy paper that offers analysis and
recommendations, the most recent of which came out in 2011 (World Bank,
2011).
The World Development Report (WDR), the annual flagship publication
of the World Bank and first published in 1978, is different from these strat-
egy papers. In the 40-year history of the WDR, the 2018 Report entitled
Learning to Realize Education’s Promise is the first time the WDR’s fo-
cus has been on education. While the strategy papers are influential among
ministries of education, the WDR is circulated to ministries of finance and
broadly within the development community. With the production of a WDR
focused on education in 2018, the World Bank makes a decisive claim
to its authority in education policy. The 2018 WDR begins by highlight-
ing the extensive consultations undertaken with researchers and specialists
across the world who provided feedback and suggestions for this 216-page
report.
Learning to Realize Education’s Promise opens with a conventional ac-
knowledgment of the benefits of formal education: it is the foundation of
freedom, justice and peace; it produces freedoms for individuals and com-
munities; and it unleashes economic and social benefits for nations. Beyond
these generous comments, the Report offers a simple and undeveloped ana-
lysis. It centres exclusively on one outcome and two causes. The outcome
is student learning, which is described as being in crisis and which provides
the overriding theme for the Report, replete with many statistics on how so
many students are learning so little in basic education. Hundreds of millions
of students who have completed a number of years of primary school are
said to be illiterate. The causes of poor learning are divided into ‘immediate’
and ‘deeper’: immediate causes are unprepared students (those affected by
poverty and conflict), ineffective teachers, lack of learning-related inputs
and unskilled management and governance. Identified as deeper causes are
those of a ‘technical’ nature, particularly the failure by education systems
to measure learning, and those of a ‘political’ nature — the fact that key
players do ‘not always prioritize learning’ (pp. 4–9). Solutions are then
proposed; these follow an internal and closed logic that merely mirrors the
causes: assess learning, use research evidence to guide innovation and prac-
tice, and confront technical and political barriers (pp. 9–15). The body of the
Report amplifies these points but makes little effort to produce a coherent
analysis that connects the various arguments with one another, recognizes
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 3

contradictions or goes beyond an economic approach to include sociological

and political perspectives.
The 2018 WDR covers a lot of territory and here we can comment only
on some of the issues raised. Overall, we find that the Report continues to
reflect the narrow views that World Bank economists have long brought to
education (Klees et al., 2012). In what follows, we begin by unpacking the
bases on which the Report and its recommendations are framed. We argue
that the preconceptions in framing preclude the consideration of broader
development discourses. We then examine the treatment of four specific
core issues in the Report: learning, teachers, privatization and finance, noting
the biases in how they are presented. Next, we take as a case in point an
area of major, global concern — equity in women and men’s education
— and consider how the Report neglects decades of theory and research
in framing and presenting its treatment of gender issues. Finally, we offer
some concluding observations about the 2018 WDR and its implications for
understanding the nature of and problems with the World Bank.

HOW ARE THE ARGUMENTS OF THE REPORT FRAMED?

Careful analysis of the Report yields insights into the current global devel-
opment discourse and into the World Bank’s influence, which is far more
extensive than its funding. Especially because the 2018 WDR will become
a widely-cited reference document, its most consequential influence will be
less in its recommendations than in the assumptions, values and analytic
constructs embedded in the way it frames education and learning. How we
frame issues shapes how we address them. For example, when we frame
alcohol-induced unacceptable behaviour as a problem of deviant behaviour,
we focus on the offending individual. If counselling and advice do not suc-
ceed in changing the individual’s behaviour, we recast what is unacceptable
as illegal, and we turn to laws, police, courts and prison. When we frame that
behaviour as the consequence of an illness or an addiction, we turn instead
to treatment rather than arrests and incarceration.
In most respects, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise extends the
analytic perspectives of several decades of World Bank advice and rec-
ommendations (Klees et al., 2012). Learning is understood as a largely
technical activity to be managed by skilled people available primarily
in the world’s richest countries. The World Bank focuses on learning in
terms of inputs and outputs and ignores what happens in between. It pro-
poses to measure cognitive achievement, not human capabilities,3 human

3. The 2018 WDR offers a brief, half-hearted mention of Amartya Sen’s capabilities ap-
proach. Seriously framing the issue of ‘learning’ in terms of Sen’s ideas of functionings
and capabilities would lead to a much broader view of what the learning crisis means (Sen,
1999).
4 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

rights,4 equity or democracy. The learning crisis, in its view, results from
insufficient information, poor planning and ineffective implementation. The
remedies follow: collect better information, use that information better and
manage implementation better to align those involved in education.
As the discussion in the Report proceeds from crisis to recommendations,
the framing becomes clear. The organizing frame is not a human rights
crisis. The proposed frame does not acknowledge global failure that requires
an analysis of education’s role in reproducing inequality. Much less does
it reorient schooling both to empower learners and to enable it to play a
dynamizing role in societal transformation or to do things differently (Klees,
2017). In the course of more than 200 pages, the world is exhorted to do more
of the same, a bit better grounded, organized and implemented, managed
with unthreatening incrementalism. As in the World Bank’s 2020 education
strategy (World Bank, 2011), we find no evidence here that doing more of
the same will lead to a different outcome (Samoff, 2012). To understand
how the discourse of Learning to Realize Education’s Promise is framed,
we centre on its three major recommendations: assess learning, act on that
evidence and align the actors (see World Bank, 2017: 16).

Assessing Learning

Teachers, educators and education systems assess learning regularly. While

Learning to Realize Education’s Promise notes several ways of measuring
learning, its reference standards are impact assessments with randomized
controlled trials for education reforms and cross-national sample testing
for education system assessments. At the core of the assessment advice is
an effort to reproduce laboratory experiments in which independent and
dependent variables are clear and distinct, claims of reproducibility and falsi-
fication require quantification, and the primary actors (students and teachers)
are objects of observation, not subjects whose agency is central. Causality is
linear, not even curvilinear or multilinear, and certainly not interactive where
causes are effects and where holding things constant is poor pedagogy.
Dismissed as impractical are assessment strategies developed by teachers
and implemented in classrooms and schools. Dismissed as unnecessary are
concerns with higher order learning, since measuring cognitive achievement
will ‘crowd in’ higher-order learning objectives (p. 19). Regarding the as-
sessment of learning, the Report presents reading as a definitive measure of

4. The Report also offers a brief and half-hearted mention of the right to education. The right
to education has been the focal point of a decades-long movement to redefine the world’s
approach to education policy and practice. UNESCO and UNICEF have based all their
education programming on treating education as a right, not as an instrumental investment
to achieve faster economic growth. Seriously framing the learning crisis in terms of the
right to education would lead to a very different approach than that taken in the 2018 WDR
(Tomasevski, 2003; Vally and Spreen, 2012).
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 5

learning — an assumption, not a claim presented and supported with evi-

dence. Excluded from assessment are socio-emotional skills and the sense
of agency that comes from developing mastery. Also excluded are organiz-
ing, planning and multitasking, termed ‘executive functions’. Unconsidered
(without evidence) are assessment strategies developed by learners or em-
bedded in observations of the ways in which learning is used, whether
narrowly within occupations, or more broadly in problem posing and prob-
lem solving, or in social transformation (Bamberger et al., 2012; Chambers,
1994). The major critiques of quasi-experimental methods, including impact
assessments and randomized controlled trials, are simply not addressed (for
a summary, see Samoff et al., 2016: 47–58; as well as Edwards, 2018; Klees,
2016b; Pritchett, 2015).
Measurement must guide action, insists the Report. The specific meas-
urements employed, for example using cognitive achievement in reading
and mathematics as proxies for the learning that matters, are deeply flawed.
More problematic is the framing, the specification of what constitutes
measurement and what is not worthy of attention: the methodology trap.
Once the methodology is accepted, it frames the inquiry, the research, the
data and thereby the policy discussion and programmatic recommendations.
The limitations of that methodology are not assessed with evidence and
where noted, largely ignored. What is difficult to measure within that frame
is either ignored or dismissed and excluded from analysis and recommen-
dations. The methodology trap itself reinforces a narrow notion of learning.
Most troubling is that so embedded are the assumptions about methodology
that we hardly notice their consequences.

Acting on Evidence

As in most World Bank prescriptions for education, what is needed are

interventions, a term that appears every four pages in Learning to Realize
Education’s Promise. The framing, and thus the agenda, are embedded in
the words. Here too, the model is the experiment. Interventions are what
outsiders do. Teachers who work on teaching reading more effectively or
finding clearer ways to present mathematical concepts do not regard what
they do as interventions. Teachers who see what they do as enabling learning
rather than delivering information do not characterize their approach as an in-
tervention. Educators whose pedagogy is responsive to learner curiosity and
initiatives do not describe their approach as an intervention. Teachers and
learners are inside education’s black box — unexplored territory in the Re-
port. They develop, revise, initiate, adopt and collaborate. Intervention is the
perspective of the experimenter, not the vision of subjects of the experiment.
There is a medical metaphor here that becomes a frame within which
problems are specified, causes are identified, and remedies are prescribed
by external experts, all without a challenge to the metaphor itself. Never
6 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

addressed, for example, is who is likely to have the clearest insight into
what is wrong and why. Generally unexplored is the possibility that the
major causes lie outside the education system rather than within it. The
frame employed also suggests what the appropriate evidence is and how that
evidence should be gathered.
‘Acting on the evidence’ is really acting on the evidence derived from
quantifiable intervention, where ‘intervention’ is a quasi-experiment in
which the experimenters control the variables, obscuring and marginalizing
organic initiatives from within the education system and learning strategies
organized around learners. Especially troubling here is that as educators
adopt this frame, they accept as reasonable the injunction that they do not
change what is being assessed, since that risks corrupting the experiment.
Adopting the frame uncritically, educators become responsible for imple-
menting their own deskilling and disempowerment.

Aligning the Actors

The third 2018 WDR recommendation seeks to ensure that those involved
in education and those whose actions are consequential for education are
acting in concert, or at least along parallel paths, to accomplish its one goal
of improving learning. Beyond a general notion of better coordination, what
does that mean? More important, how is the necessary action framed? While
for the most part, the Report ignores the politics of education, promoting
cooperation among policy and decision makers on what is the most contested
of public policies requires paying attention to the political context. The
frame here combines technical expertise and cautious incrementalism; in
other words, it assumes and advocates an administrative state.
The starting point for this frame is the assertion that information is the
primary criterion for making public policy. This sounds logical, but studies of
how research enters the policy process are rich and regularly show that policy
making is necessarily political and that muddling through and satisficing are
more accurate characterizations of how policies are made and implemented
(Lindblom, 1959, 1979; Simon, 1982, 1997). The literature on policy making
as a political process is similarly rich and similarly ignored (Grindle and
Thomas, 1991; Pawson, 2002; Taylor et al., 1997).
Filling out the frame then requires attention to the political environment,
yet the 2018 WDR refers to political action as ‘unhealthy politics’ (p. 189).
In the World Bank’s view, it is undesirable that policy choices reflect con-
cerns other than improving learning. Interests and informal networks are
assumed to jeopardize this overarching education goal. That is, the frame
here specifies that conflicts of interest and informal networks are scourges to
be treated or avoided, rather than hallmarks of democratic society. Deeply
embedded in this frame — all the more powerful because it is so little vis-
ible — is the insistence that society be understood as a market rather than
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 7

a polity. Completing this frame is the admonition that change must be in-
cremental and non-confrontational. Here too, notwithstanding the reiterated
emphasis on evidence-based policy and programmes, we find no evidence
to support the action strategy. That education and educators can address the
learning crisis through innovations that are intellectually and pedagogically
disruptive and transformative — precisely what educators in settings that
are at the top of the global ranking comparisons insist is necessary — is
not considered, reviewed and assessed, but rather, excluded by the framing
(Sahlberg, 2015).
The framing of these three 2018 WDR recommendations shows how the
World Bank thinks about education and learning. Embedded in the frame
and thus generally unnoticed, are approaches, constructs and models that
are presented as normal, natural, inevitable. Ultimately, the framing is even
more consequential than the observations and recommendations, however
flawed we find them to be. As educators and communities adopt the framing
employed by the World Bank, they engage in actions that nurture the learning
crisis, entrench inequality and that make both quality education for all and
equity ever more distant.

WHAT IS THE CONTENT OF THE REPORT?

Below we examine what the 2018 WDR says about four core issues: learning,
teachers, privatization and finance.

Learning

It is problematic that we have long cycled between attention to education

access and equity, on the one hand, and quality and learning, on the other
hand. Expanding access often leads to deterioration in quality, and attention
to quality too often leads to ignoring access. Yet clearly, access and quality
are intricately connected. ‘Access to what?’ and ‘Quality for whom?’ are
always the questions and both need to be considered simultaneously. In its
focus on the ‘learning crisis’, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise gives
short shrift to issues of access. While the 260 million children and youth who
are out of school are mentioned briefly (p. 3), the Report pays no attention
at all to what is needed to give them an education. And, of course, they are
the worst victims of the learning crisis.
The Report adopts a very narrow focus on what is learning — basically
reading and mathematics. While socio-emotional skills are mentioned at
various points, other than the repeated reference to problematic, narrow,
blame-the-victim ideas of ‘grit’ and ‘resilience’, there is no attention to what
this means for improving a broad idea of learning. Almost all the research the
2018 WDR cites to decide ‘what works’ to improve learning is based only on
the impact on reading and mathematics. This narrow focus compounds the
8 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

problematic results of attention to early reading and mathematics over the last
decade that has distorted primary school curricula to focus on what is tested.
The massive assessment regime that the Report recommends will continue
that trend and result in the same distortion of the curriculum to focus on
tested subjects that we saw in the US No Child Left Behind initiative whose
measurement focus did nothing to improve test scores (Ravitch, 2010).
The 2018 WDR does not promote a transformative pedagogy and avoids
addressing social and power relations. There is an overemphasis on learn-
ing metrics without adequately engaging with critiques of this approach.
Fifty years since Freire (1970) wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, there is no
recognition of his and others’ insights and practice in teaching critical liter-
acy, so we have instead no more than a technical exercise of reading words
in a short text without grounding them in lived experience. Critical literacy
entails ‘reading the word’ but also ‘reading the world’ and the imperative to
change it.

Teachers

While there are occasional sensible comments about teachers and teaching
in the 2018 WDR, the overall tenor of the Report is that unmotivated and
unskilled teachers are one of the principal sources of the learning crisis.
Teachers with too little training is definitely a worldwide problem. However,
it is a problem in which the World Bank has been complicit (Fontdevila and
Verger, 2015). For decades, the World Bank has criticized pre-service and
in-service teacher training as not cost-effective. For decades, the World Bank
has been pushing the hiring of untrained contract teachers as a cheap fix and
a way to get around teachers’ unions — and contract teachers are again
praised in the Report. This is in contradiction to the places in Learning to
Realize Education’s Promise where the World Bank argues that developing
countries need to follow the lead of the few countries, like Finland, that
attract the best students to teaching, and improve their training and working
conditions (p. 136).
There is no explicit evidence offered for the repeated claim that teachers
are unmotivated and need to be controlled and monitored to do their job.
The World Bank implicitly argues that the problem of teacher absenteeism,
referred to throughout this Report, means teachers are unmotivated — but
that simply is not true. To anyone who has worked extensively with teachers
in developing countries, as the authors of this article have, it is clear that,
even under the very trying current circumstances, most teachers are highly
motivated to do the best for their students. This is true even if they must be
absent at times just to receive their salaries or comply with bureaucratic needs
— or even if they miss school because they are working at other jobs to make
ends meet. Teacher absenteeism is not a sign of low motivation. Teacher
salaries are abysmally low in most developing countries, as is the status of
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 9

teaching. Yet, the teaching profession still attracts dedicated teachers (see
Stromquist et al., 2017). The World Bank has been complicit in this state
of affairs: for decades, the World Bank and IMF have enforced neoliberal,
Washington Consensus policies which resulted in government cutbacks and
declining real salaries for teachers around the world (Lambert, 2004).

Privatization

The World Bank does not acknowledge its role and legacy in imposing
disastrous education policies on low-income countries through its structural
adjustment policies. These policies include support for the privatization of
schooling and user fees, neglect of early childhood development, large class
sizes, the disparaging of higher education, caps on the salaries of teachers
and generally encouraging cuts to education expenditure by nation states. In
particular, the World Bank has been promoting the privatization of schooling
for the past 40 years. Yet, the 2018 WDR raises some concerns: the Report
concedes that private providers of schooling ‘may skim off the higher-
income students who are easiest and most profitable to teach, leaving only the
more disadvantaged students in the public system’, ‘deepen social cleavages’
and seduce families by taking ‘advantage of them to increase profits’ (p. 177).
Despite these welcome comments, the World Bank, in practice, continues
to promote privatization even if the term ‘privatization’ is carefully avoided
in the Report. Importantly, the World Bank’s investment arm, the Inter-
national Finance Corporation (IFC), aggressively and practically supports
so-called low-cost private schools in poorer countries. We have witnessed,
over the past decade, a rapid growth of these schools notorious for employing
unqualified teachers with low salaries and few labour rights. Recently, over
100 organizations criticized the World Bank’s support for the for-profit, fee-
charging chain of private primary schools, Bridge International Academies
(BIA), based in Kenya and Uganda (Pambazuka News, 2015; World Bank,
2015). The IFC invested US$ 10 million in BIA for the latter’s expansion
in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, and additional millions to private
schools in Uganda. Similarly, The IFC also participated in the development
of the Curro group, the largest for-profit school group in South Africa, and
its expansion (World Bank, 2012). In 2016, the IFC invested about US$ 22
million in the South African AdvTech Group to ‘support expansion into new
African markets’ (IFC, 2018: 25) once again underscoring the disconnect
between the content of the 2018 WDR and the actual investment and funding
policies of the World Bank.

Finance

One of the biggest problems with this World Development Report is the
lack of any serious attention to whether and how to finance meeting the
10 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

learning crisis and other education challenges. Only half a page of the regular
text of the report is devoted to finance, supplemented by one of their five-
page spotlights at the end. We find the tenor of its treatment of finance
unconscionable. The title of the spotlight embodies its problematic nature:
‘Spending more or spending better or both?’. Spending more gets short
shrift: ‘maybe, sometimes’ is the answer, emphasizing that more money (in
the research it chooses to cite) does not lead to more learning (in contrast, for
example, to a recent study of spending and PISA scores; see Vegas, 2016).
This is even a weaker approach than the tenor of World Bank reports for
many decades, which devoted a line or two to saying that ‘yes, more money
is needed’, ‘but’— then spent the rest of the report giving their narrow views
of what more efficient spending would mean.
This approach to finance contradicts the most sensible parts of the 2018
WDR, which mention the many very expensive things that have to be done
to solve the learning crisis, such as much better prenatal and post-natal
care; tackling widespread stunting and malnutrition and home visits and
caregiver programmes to support parents of 0 to 3-year-olds. The Report
(pp. 112–17) also mentions daycare centres for the very young followed by
three years of quality preschool; libraries and recreation centres; the elimina-
tion of chemically toxic and physically dangerous environments; attracting
the best students into teaching; improving pre-service and in-service train-
ing; using technologies that complement teachers’ skills; improving school
management; lowering school fees and costs; providing cash transfers and
psychosocial support; and remedial and dropout prevention programmes for
at-risk youth; among others.
Yet nowhere does the Report say that implementing this very impressive
agenda will be extremely expensive. Nor does it mention the costs of getting
the 260 million children and youth who are out of school back in school.
Not mentioned either is that, as documented in many UNESCO studies
over the years, we are facing a vast shortfall in the international assistance
necessary to improve the access to and quality of primary and secondary
school in developing countries — to the tune of US$ 40 billion per year —
80 times what the multilateral Global Partnership for Education has managed
to cajole from donors so far (UNESCO, 2015c). For an organization full of
economists, finance should be front and centre, not ignored.

AT THE INTERSECTION OF FRAMING AND CONTENT: EDUCATION AND

GENDER

How the World Bank frames issues also limits its treatment of gender issues.
Enriched by more than 45 years of documenting the inequalities women face
in educational systems across the world, the academic world and researchers
elsewhere have gained the realization that theorizing how gender operates in
society is critical to any efforts to reduce — or possibly to eliminate — such
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 11

inequalities. The same cannot be said of the World Bank, which continues
to filter all the external research through its own distorted lens to provide
policy advice disconnected from theory. Learning to Realize Education’s
Promise manifests a concern for the chronic underrepresentation of girls at
primary and secondary education levels, particularly in poor households and
traditional societies. At the same time, it fails to address the interlocking
forces of patriarchy, a market-led social order, and religious beliefs that
assign women subordinate roles across the world. As such, the Report is
frozen in time.
The 2018 WDR presents a rather superficial set of solutions to what in
fact are persistent and deeply ingrained beliefs, practices and institutions
— the core of the social relations of gender — which at present are still
unfavourable to women. Gender has been theorized as a social structure
deeply embedded in society and manifested in individual, interactional and
institutional dimensions (Risman, 2004). Fraser (2005) observes three major
problems of social justice affecting women: a political facet or representation
(i.e., who is included in the polity), an economic facet (issues of distribu-
tion and redistribution of wealth), and a cultural facet (the recognition and
valuing of women as a group with rights). From another perspective, one
that connects education to empowerment, Stromquist (1999, 2002, 2015a,
2015b) also touches upon the economic and political dimensions, but adds
two others: a psychological and a knowledge dimension. Her concept of
empowerment also seeks to link structural conditions to agency, and indi-
vidual to collective agency. If the goal is truly to alter the social relations of
gender, the conceptualization drawn from these three authors will lead any
reasonable effort to the fundamental requirement that it must be done on a
multi-sectoral basis.
The subordinate position of women is evident in statistics that show the dis-
advantage of women in political and economic conditions across the world.
A very appropriate measure of gender equality is the Global Gender Gap
Index (GGGI).5 According to this index, based on 144 countries in 2016, the
average GGGI score (measuring women’s disadvantage compared to men)
is 0.68 — far from parity (World Economic Forum, 2017). Looking at only
the three best-performing countries in terms of equality (Iceland, Norway
and Finland), the average GGGI score is 0.84. In other words, even in the
most gender-egalitarian nations, there is a power differential of 16 per cent
— by no means insignificant. And progress is not always linear. Globally,
education and health evince the smallest average gender gaps, with GGGI
scores of 0.96, but the average scores in economic and political participation
remain low, at 0.58 and 0.23, respectively (ibid.). The success in the area
of education — measured exclusively as access in this index — contrasts

5. This index comprises four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational
attainment, health and survival and political empowerment. A coefficient of 1 signals total
parity while a coefficient of 0 represents total lack of parity (World Economic Forum, 2017).
12 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

with weak progress in the political and economic areas. This is clear evidence
that schooling at present is fostering no major challenge to the construction
of gender ideologies and that challenge, therefore, must be effected through
multiple sectors and means.
Indeed, one of the most pervasive, long-standing inequalities in our so-
cial world exists between men and women. Women are not just one more
disadvantaged group, but part of a system that involves women and men
in the articulation of permanent asymmetries in multiple dimensions of so-
ciety (the household, marriage, work, wealth, citizenship, property rights,
etc.). International financial organizations and bilateral agencies — no less
than the governments they support — tend to frame their analyses on the
overt aspects of gender asymmetries: sex discrimination, low pay and low
authority status. Conversely, they ignore or disregard less visible factors
that are deeper in nature: ideologies supporting male-dominant behaviours
of domesticity and sexuality, which in turn set marked boundaries between
men’s and women’s roles in the household, assign women and men differ-
ential positions in the labour market, and enforce notions of femininity and
masculinity that deter women from seeking autonomous lives and political
representation.

Why the Concern with Gender Theory?

The World Bank’s concern with education parity and learning outcomes
between girls and boys is welcome. Definitely, much remains to be done in
many countries to enable girls to have access not only to primary but also to
secondary education, a situation especially precarious in sub-Saharan Africa
and South Asia. Girls should also learn to read and do mathematical opera-
tions. Yet, the 2018 WDR solution to the subordination of women ends there.
The Report presents data confirming what is well known: gaps in access to
schooling and completion between boys and girls continue to be observed
in many countries; girls’ participation in schooling decreases noticeably as
they reach puberty; girls’ academic performance is impacted by economic
conditions in the household; girls perform better than boys in reading in
all countries but boys tend to do better in mathematics and science. On the
other hand, women are enrolling in higher education in greater proportions
than men, except in sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and Western Asia
(UNESCO, 2017). The question to be asked about these conditions is why
this is the case. It is here that using gender theory to frame the analysis
can provide crucial explanations about how the state, culture, ideology and
schooling create interlocking forces that make it necessary to look for deeper
causes and to act on multiple sectors of government to address persistent
gender asymmetries, for example, education, health, welfare (childcare and
elder-care services), the mass media, wages, economic policies and legal
frameworks.
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 13

For Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, learning is a paramount

objective of education. Who could disagree with that? But serious concerns
emerge when it becomes clear that ‘learning’ is being equated with perfor-
mance in national standardized tests (or even global tests), and when it is
assumed that test data lead to unambiguous instructional strategies. Being
linked to such tests, the measurement of learning is limited to subjects that
are easily tested: reading and mathematics. By now, it is well known that
an improvement in the social relations of gender requires knowledge that
challenges the status quo. Femininity and the devaluation of women must
be explicitly faced. Issues related to domestic and sexual violence at home,
in the workplace and at school must become part of the crucial knowledge
to be provided to and acquired by both girls and boys. The understanding of
gender dynamics must be an explicit aim of civic education; it must also be
a part of sex education. All of this implies the transmission and acquisition
of knowledge concerning how women experience inequality in their social
world (private and public). These topics are not usually taught or tested, and
yet they are crucial elements of any progressive educational effort.
What is to be done? The challenge to destroy old ideas and practices and
to make new ones emerge is far from easy. Nevertheless, the attempt is
imperative. To this end, schooling needs not only to open its doors to more
girls and women but to provide them with the knowledge and experience
that fosters their resolve to question the current gender order. Educational
authorities need to work with a gender-sensitive curriculum, to constantly
update the representation of femininity and masculinity in textbooks, and
to shape schools into girl-friendly environments. Teachers, principals, fac-
ulty in teacher training programmes and higher-level administrators must
undergo training in gender issues. At the same time, working to alter the
current gender regime cannot be circumscribed to schooling; multiple sec-
tors of government and society have to be involved, especially women’s
groups in civil society. And institutions such as the World Bank need to de-
velop greater knowledge of gender dynamics so that their advice and actions
embody the theoretical understanding of gender that feminist scholarship
and activists in women’s movements have so far achieved.

CONCLUSIONS

Why does the World Bank frame and present education and learning the way
it does? In its discussion of political barriers, Learning to Realize Education’s
Promise argues that ‘[v]ested interests are not confined to private or rent-
seeking interests. Actors in education systems are often driven by their
values or ideology’ (p. 190). Including the World Bank! The World Bank
prides itself on being evidence- and research-based, but it is not. Its premises
and conclusions are based on ideology, not evidence. As we have argued,
the Report presents a very particular and biased view of educational issues
14 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

like learning, teachers, privatization, finance and gender. More generally,

the 2018 WDR is simply one example of how the World Bank selects and
interprets the research that fits with its ideology. In this sense, it resembles
conservative ideological institutions like the Cato Institute or the Heritage
Foundation in the US. However, it differs in two important ways. First,
everyone realizes Cato and Heritage are partisan. The World Bank, on the
other hand, makes a pretence of objectivity and inclusiveness. Second, Cato
and Heritage are private institutions with limited influence. The World Bank
is a public institution, a monopoly at that, financed by taxes, which gives
grants, loans and advice around the world, wielding a vast global influence.6
The ideology behind the 2018 WDR and of the World Bank is neolib-
eralism, a term World Bank economists barely acknowledge. In the 1960s
and 1970s, liberal education economists at the World Bank, like Jean-Pierre
Jallade, routinely recommended substantial investments in education access
and quality financed by progressive taxes (Jallade, 1976). Without any ba-
sis in evidence and with specious reasoning, the World Bank, along with
the IMF, imbibed and spread so-called Washington Consensus policies for
the next four decades through Structural Adjustment Programmes and their
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper successors, delegitimizing government
and starving the public sector of resources.
Of course there is a learning crisis. The world is replete with crises of
education, health, poverty, development, environment, war and more. How
the World Bank and other neoliberal institutions frame these crises, cast
blame and proffer solutions, as we have seen here, reflects their ideology. In
education, the 2018 WDR privileges a narrow view of learning, separates it
from attention to access, blames teachers and, unbelievably, does worse than
ignore finance — actually questions whether more resources are needed.
Most fundamentally, in our view, we should not have economists writing
these influential reports and making these decisions. Contrary to decades
of legitimating knowledge and practice, leading the charge for education,
health or the environment should not be the business of banks run by a
particularly narrow school of economic thought. This neoliberal school of
economics hides its ideological recommendations behind a veneer of science.
World Bank staff are intelligent and well intentioned — but hopelessly
biased. They are hired and retained because their perspectives fit with the
narrow neoliberal views that dominate the Bank. Education International
(2018) has put together 22 commentaries by scholars and activists who have
fundamental disagreements with the 2018 WDR. Literally millions of people
around the world hold contrary views, yet these are nowhere to be found
in the Report. One of the authors of this article once attended a seminar on

6. The World Bank (and other aid agencies) likes to say that policies are always country-
driven and country-owned. This is belied by decades of imposing conditionalities that, for
example, forced countries to cut taxes and social services or by a 1,200-page manual to
‘guide’ countries in developing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 15

a health World Development Report, held by the World Bank. It was clear
that there were many disagreements with the analysis and conclusions of
the WDR. When asked why these disagreements were not highlighted in the
WDR, the response was that telling more than one story would be confusing.
This should be unacceptable. There are multiple stories of why there is a
learning crisis and other crises and multiple approaches on what needs to
be done. We do not need a group of narrow economists deciding what to
do — solving these crises depends on widespread, democratic participation
and debate.
The World Bank is just one part of current neoliberal world system struc-
tures, but it is a very prominent and influential part. We need to challenge the
legitimacy of the World Bank, and the IMF. A few decades ago, there was
a strong ‘50 Years is Enough’ campaign that did just that (Danaher, 1994).
We need to revisit that campaign. In July 2019 it will be the 75th anniversary
of the World Bank. It is high time for a new Bretton Woods conference to
rethink and reformulate the role and nature of these institutions.

REFERENCES

Bamberger, M.J., J. Rugh and L. Mabry (2012) Real-world Evaluation: Working under Budget,
Time, Data, and Political Constraints (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Chambers, R. (1994) ‘The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal’, World Devel-
opment 22(7): 953–69.
Danaher, K. (1994) 50 Years is Enough — The Case against the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Education International (2018) ‘Reality Check: The Bank’s 2018 Word Development Report
on Education’. Brussels: Education International. https://issuu.com/educationinternational/
docs/2018_ei_wdr_realitycheck_publicatio
Edwards Jr., D.B. (2018) Global Education Policy, Impact Evaluations, and Alternatives: The
Political Economy of Knowledge Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edwards Jr., D.B. and I. Storen (2017) ‘The World Bank and Educational Assistance’,
in George Noblit (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. http://education.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.
001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-43
Esteva, G., S. Babones and P. Babcicky (2013) The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto.
Bristol: Policy Press.
Fontdevila, C. and A. Verger (2015) ‘The World Bank’s Doublespeak on Teachers: An
Analysis of Ten Years of Lending and Advice’. Brussels: Education International. http://
download.eiie.org/Docs/WebDepot/World_Banks_Doublespeak_on_Teachers_Fontdevila_
Verger_EI.pdf
Fraser, N. (2005) ‘Reframing Justice in a Globalized World’, New Left Review 36: 69–88.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Grindle, M.S. and J.W. Thomas (1991) Public Choices and Policy Change: The Political Econ-
omy of Reform in Developing Countries. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
IFC (2018) ‘A New Dawn for Education in Post-apartheid South Africa: ADvTECH: How
the Largest Education Group is Increasing Access to Quality, Affordable Higher Education’.
Washington, DC: International Finance Corporation. www.advtech.co.za/Media/Documents/
2018/ADvTECH+ver+13.pdf (accessed 9 April).
16 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

Jallade, J.P. (1976) ‘Education Finance and Income Distribution’, World Development 4(5):
435–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(76)90042-5
Klees, S. (2016a) ‘Human Capital Theory and Rates of Return: Brilliant Ideas or Ideological
Dead Ends?’, Comparative Education Review 60(4): 644–72.
Klees, S. (2016b) ‘Inferences from Regression Analysis: Are they Valid?’, Real World Economics
Review 74: 85–97.
Klees, S. (2017) ‘Beyond Neoliberalism: Reflections on Capitalism and Education’, Policy
Futures in Education. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1478210317715814
Klees, S., J. Samoff, N.P. Stromquist (eds) (2012) The World Bank and Education: Critiques
and Alternatives. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Lambert, S. (2004) ‘Teachers’ Pay and Conditions: An Assessment of Recent Trends in Africa’.
Paper commissioned for the ‘EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005, The Quality Imperative’.
Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001466/146656e.pdf
Lindblom, C.E. (1959) ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’, Public Administration Review
19(2): 79–88.
Lindblom, C.E. (1979) ‘Still Muddling, Not Yet Through’, Public Administration Review 39(6):
517–26.
Pambazuka News (2015) ‘“Just” $6 a Month? A Response to Jim Kim’, Pambazuka
News 13 May. www.pambazuka.org/governance/%E2%80%9Cjust%E2%80%9D-6-month-
response-jim-kim (accessed 8 April 2018).
Pawson, R. (2002) ‘Evidence-based Policy: The Promise of “Realist Synthesis”’, Evaluation
8(3): 340–58.
Pritchett, L. (2015) ‘Using “Random” Right: New Insights from IDinsight Team’. Cen-
ter for Global Development blog. www.cgdev.org/blog/using-“random”-right-new-insights-
idinsight-team (accessed 21 January 2016).
Ravitch, D. (2010) The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and
Choice are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.
Risman, B. (2004) ‘Gender as a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism’, Gender and
Society 18(4): 429–50.
Sahlberg, P. (2015) Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change
in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press.
Samoff, J. (2012) ‘More of the Same Will Not Do: Learning without Learning in the World
Bank’s 2020 Education Strategy’, in S.J. Klees, J. Samoff and N.P. Stromquist (eds) The World
Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives, pp. 109–21. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Samoff, J., J. Leer and M. Reddy (2016) Capturing Complexity and Context: Evaluating Aid to
Education. Stockholm: Expert Group for Aid Studies.
Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University.
Simon, H. (1982) Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. (1997) Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Adminis-
trative Organizations (4th edn). New York: Free Press.
Stromquist, N.P. (1999) ‘The Theoretical and Practical Bases for Empowerment’, in C. Medel-
Anonuevo (ed.) Women, Education, and Empowerment: Pathways toward Autonomy, pp. 13–
22. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education.
Stromquist, N.P. (2002) ‘Education as a Means for Empowering Women’, in J. Papart, S. Rai
and K. Staudt (eds) Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Globalized
World, pp. 22–38. London: Routledge.
Stromquist, N.P. (2015a) ‘Gender Structure and Women’s Agency: Toward Greater Theoretical
Understanding of Education for Transformation’, International Journal of Lifelong Education
34(1): 59–75.
Stromquist, N.P. (2015b) ‘Women’s Empowerment and Education: Linking Knowledge to
Transformative Action’, European Journal of Education 50(3): 307–24.
Stromquist, N.P., S. Klees and J. Lin (2017) Women Teachers in Africa: Challenges and Possi-
bilities. London: Routledge.
Assessment: The World Development Report 2018 17

Taylor, S., F. Rizvi, B. Lingard and M. Henry (1997) Educational Policy and the Politics of
Change. New York: Routledge.
Tomasevski, K. (2003) Education Denied: Costs and Remedies. London and New York: Zed
Books.
UN (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: United Nations.
UN (2000) United Nations Millennium Development Goals. New York: United Nations.
www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml
UN (2015) Sustainable Development Goals. New York: United Nations. https://sustainable
development.un.org/?menu=1300
UNESCO (1990) ‘World Declaration on Education for All and Framework for Action to Meet
Basic Learning Needs’. Inter-Agency Commission (UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, World
Bank) for the World Conference on Education for All, Jomtien, Thailand (5–9 March).
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001275/127583e.pdf
UNESCO (2015a) Education 2030: Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action for Imple-
mentation of Sustainable Development Goal 4. Paris: UNESCO. http://uis.unesco.org/sites/
default/files/documents/education-2030-incheon-framework-for-action-implementation-of-
sdg4-2016-en_2.pdf
UNESCO (2015b) World Education Forum 2015: Final Report. Paris: UNESCO.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002437/243724e.pdf
UNESCO (2015c) Global Education Monitoring Report 2016 — Education for People and
Planet: Creating Sustainable Futures for All. Paris: UNESCO.
UNESCO (2017) Global Education Monitoring Report 2017/18. Accountability in Education:
Meeting Our Commitments. Paris: UNESCO.
Vally, S. and C.A. Spreen (2012) ‘The World Bank and Human Rights: Dichotomizing Rights
and Responsibilities’, in S. Klees, N. Stromquist and J. Samoff (eds) The World Bank and
Education: Critiques and Alternatives, pp. 173–87. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Vegas, E. (2016) ‘Up Front: Why Money Matters for Improving Education’. Brookings In-
stitution blog 21 July. www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/07/21/why-money-matters-
for-improving-education/
World Bank (2011) Learning for All: Investing in People’s Knowledge and Skills to Promote
Development. World Bank Education Strategy 2020. Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank (2012) Africa Group I Constituency: FY10 Annual Report. Washing-
ton, DC: World Bank. http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/320011430925237099/AfricaGroup
IAnnualReportFY10.pdf
World Bank (2015) ‘Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030: The Final Push’. Speech by World Bank
Group President Jim Yong Kim, 7 April. http://bit.ly/1NR4wH8
World Bank (2017) ‘Maximizing Finance for Development: Leveraging the Private Sec-
tor for Growth and Sustainable Development’. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://
siteresources.worldbank.org/DEVCOMMINT/Documentation/23758671/DC2017-0009_
Maximizing_8-19.pdf
World Economic Forum (2017) The Global Gender Gap Report 2017. Geneva: World Economic
Forum.
World Education Forum (2000) The Dakar Framework for Action. Paris: UNESCO.

Steven J. Klees (corresponding author; sklees@umd.edu) is Professor of

International Education Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park,
MD, USA. His work examines the political economy of education and
development with specific research interests in globalization, neoliberalism
and education. He is co-editor of the book The World Bank and Education:
Critiques and Alternatives (Sense Publishers/Springer, 2012).
 18 Steven J. Klees, Nelly P. Stromquist, Joel Samoff and Salim Vally

Nelly P. Stromquist (stromqui@umd.edu) is the current Harold R.W. Pro-

fessor of International Education at the College of Education, University
of Maryland, USA. Her research addresses various issues, including glob-
alization and higher education, gender issues, global policies, literacy and
women’s social movements, which she examines from a critical sociological
perspective.
Joel Samoff (joel.samoff@stanford.edu) is Adjunct Professor in Stanford
University’s Center for African Studies, Stanford, CA, USA. He is an ed-
ucator, researcher and evaluator who studies and teaches about education
and development, with a principal focus on Africa. Recent publications
include Capturing Complexity and Context: Evaluating Aid to Education,
co-authored with Jane Leer and Michelle Reddy (The Expert Group for
Aid Studies, 2016) and ‘Education for All: A Global Commitment without
Global Funding’, co-authored with Margaret Irving (ESP Working Paper
Series, 2013).
Salim Vally (svally@uj.ac.za) is Director of the Centre for Education Rights
and Transformation and a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University
of Johannesburg, South Africa. Recent books include Reflections on Knowl-
edge, Learning and Social Movements: History’s Schools, co-edited with
Aziz Choudry (Routledge, 2017) and Education, Economy and Society, co-
edited with Enver Motala (UNISA Press, 2014).

View publication stats