By Elizabeth Cooper

Emergent Conversation 22

This essay is part of the series The Politics of Crisis, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 22

Descent into Crisis 

Every year the World Bank issues a World Development Report that takes up a particular focus. In 2018, the focus was trained to what “the Bank” identified as a “global learning crisis.”[1] The declaration of a crisis suggests a tipping point, a sudden and decisive change in conditions, an aberration from what is considered normal (Roitman 2016; Vigh 2008; Walby 2022). However, when we trace the history of global education policy campaigns, the declaration of a global learning crisis does not mark a sudden rupture, but rather appears as an unsurprising development in a continued process of diminution. It encapsulates an extreme reduction in the ambitions for education for all children around the world, and particularly for children in low-income countries.[2] While that reductionism has long been in progress, policymakers’ adoption of a crisis framework for education has further restricted what is deemed possible. The “global learning crisis” has been enabled by the centralization of education policy into the hands of a few globally influential decisionmakers and by a turn to limiting policy choices to meet the data entry requirements for scenario-building technologies that extrapolate from students’ reading proficiency today to countries’ future economic well-being or devastation.

The declaration of a “global learning crisis” might seem surprising since it follows three decades of significant progress in prioritizing education for all children in the world. The year 1990 marked a milestone in global education policymakers’ ambitions; at an international conference in Jomtien, Thailand, 155 countries, the major multilateral agencies (led by the World Bank, UNICEF, and UNESCO) and dozens of other education-focused actors, launched the “Education for All” (EFA) agenda to ensure every person could access education to meet their “basic learning needs.” While ambitious as a universally applied goal, the EFA focus on “basic education” reflects a limited vision for education (Torres 1999; Unterhalter 2015). The World Bank pushed for that reduced scope, Heyneman argues (2003, 2009), based on their calculations, that investments in basic education would yield higher human capital returns than investments in other education levels (also see Guthrie 2019).[3] The agenda fed directly into the establishment of Millennium Development Goal 2 which aimed to “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.” Those years of high-profile goal setting mobilized significant increases in funding, largely directed at ensuring free schooling for all, and dramatic expansions of enrollment in basic education around the world. As the UN (n.d.) reports, the worldwide number of children out of school dropped by almost half between 2000 and 2015. While the goals for global education during this period were limited, their accomplishment was celebrated within a narrative structure of progress and optimism.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) grew powerful through their technique of time-sensitive measurability and spurred the further growth of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) industry, participated in by countries, multilateral policy agencies, international not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, and academics (Abrahams 2015; Jerven 2017). Within this orbit, alongside measuring success in terms of numbers of children in school emerged alarm about whether the quality of that schooling was adequately factored in. When the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015 as a set of more focused and multi-dimensional goals, that concern was reflected in Goal 4 which aimed to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” While the concern with quality of education is arguably more nuanced than quantity, the overriding M&E interest confined goal setting to quantifiable data that could be compared across contexts and time. The first indicator of quality education for all was set as the “proportion of children and young people (a) in grades 2/3; (b) at the end of primary; and (c) at the end of lower secondary achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, by sex.” This authorized increased monitoring and evaluation interventions and their feeding into a predictive logic of success or failure.

Expanding the authority of standardized tests to measure quality of schooling did not substantively challenge the limited scope of educational ambitions, but it did catalyze a transformation in how global policy actors narrated the state of global education. The policy agencies turned from building a hopeful story marked by successes and progress in increasing enrollments in education especially among the poorest children in the world, to depicting a fearful story of failures and their consequences. Spun around, the logic of education as investment became reinterpreted in terms of the costs of missed opportunities. Distilled to its crux, that trepidatious framing became the “global learning crisis.” And once the crisis framework was adopted, crisis-inspired interpretive modalities—most notably the construction of future scenario simulations—tightened their grip on how education might be realized around the world.

Caught by Crisis

In 2019, the World Bank introduced the concept of “Learning Poverty” as “a tool” to spotlight a crisis in education systems around the world. In their report entitled “Ending Learning Poverty: What Will It Take?” the Bank’s team of authors laid out the very simple definition that “Learning poverty means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.”

The singularity of this definition is surprising, even jarring, when we consider all that children’s learning and education entail as well as contemporary understandings of poverty as multidimensional. That same organization, and its partners, continue to assert their appreciation of learning as complex and implicating “the whole child” (World Bank 2019: 38), yet at the same time choose to single out this one measure to define “learning poverty” and thereby to ascertain a learning crisis. This suggests a contortion of logic, and I argue this type of contortion is encouraged by choosing to use a crisis framework for education.

A reductionist logic has always run through the agendas for education promoted by the World Bank (Heyneman 2003; Ansell et al. 2021). And, as others have noted, “The MDGs taught us ‘what gets measured gets done’” (Betelli 2021: 9; Jerven 2017). What we see in the turn to a “learning crisis” is an outgrowth of instrumentalist problem definitions and measurable solutions for education, and in turn a positive feedback loop for those reductionist paradigms. Specifically, global education policy and investments have been largely driven by the simplistic formula that education increases human capital which generates more worker productivity and thus higher income for countries. This relationship is now computed through the Human Capital Index (HCI), which uses an aggregate of expected years of school and international test scores (the two education-related measures), and child survival, stunting, and adult survival rates (the health-related measures) to predict “the productivity of the next generation of workers’ as well as quantify the ‘costs of inaction’” (World Bank 2020).

The “global learning crisis” is a futuristic invention; it is predicated on a hypothesis about how missed education outcomes today portend future adversity. Its authority is vested in the formula that inputs children’s reading proficiency today to calculate countries’ GDP decades from now, and the simulated futures this formula produces. For instance, in 2020, the World Bank, UNICEF, and UNESCO sought to address how the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially school closures, might affect children and their futures. The agencies used the HCI formula to populate simulations resulting in the prediction that “this generation of children and young people [could] lose USD 10 trillion of future earnings (in net present value)—an amount equivalent to almost 10 percent of global GDP” (World Bank 2020: 7).[4] Country-specific simulations are also done to forecast alternative GDP futures if different percentages of children score better on their reading tests. The practice of tracking future gains or losses back to the two measures of educational quantity and quality creates a positive feedback loop that further isolates those selected outcomes, reifying them as deterministic, and crowding out other possible conceptualizations of what education might entail and how educational experiences might correlate with possible futures.

When policy entrepreneurs claimed a “global learning crisis” they did not simply exchange their preferred discursive frames from international solidarity and progress to faulty systems and future dangers. In adopting a crisis framework, they doubled down on their power to determine outcomes; this is demonstrated in their use of simulations as evidence for the crisis claim, and plays out in the real world where those simulations rationalize increasingly restricted foci for educational expenditures. The global education policy agencies argued that the urgency and high stakes of the “global learning crisis” (termed “a crisis within a crisis” when combined with the COVID-19 pandemic) required “a new vision” for education which would entail “a sharp acceleration of learning” (World Bank et al. 2022, 5; World Bank et al. 2021). That “new vision” is narrowed to achieving measures of reading proficiency at age ten which would signal the avoidance of the “global learning crisis” as presently defined.

Where Does a “Global Learning Crisis” Lead?

 Adopting a crisis framework has facilitated narrowed ways of thinking about learning and education to such a degree that it can be hard to recognize children or schools in them. Schools could be rendered obsolete by this reductionist approach. One can imagine children gaining the reading proficiency needed to pass standardized tests through isolated practices with technologies that sidestep spending time with other children and adults in schools. The narrow objective of reading proficiency might best be attained through intensive stints of training, rather than a more drawn-out and holistic approach to children’s social and cognitive development and more fulsome ideas of how schools can figure in these. When policymakers select educational goals based on a logic of feasibility,[5] and educational governance becomes increasingly centralized under accountability to standardized reading proficiency tests and the “experts” who can evaluate this, will children, families, teachers, broader communities, and governments have any say in how education is organized, what is taught and how?

Claims of crisis have been used in multiple contexts to justify – and expedite – opening education systems up to what is framed as “innovation,” including restructuring systems, introducing new actors, and experimenting with techniques, increasingly through technology in education. Through such justifications, global education policy has been centralized into the hands of privatized entities. Mahasan Offutt-Chaney (2021, 181) analyzes how transnational philanthropic networks use narratives of crisis about “underserved,” “urban,” and “undeveloped” school systems—reinforcing a cumulative discursive idea of “Black Crisis”—to justify their increasing control and experiments in educational systems as “rescue missions,” and she documents these interventions in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and later post-Ebola Liberia. A predominant trend in these experimentations has been the outsourcing of education management and delivery from state governments to other, private actors (Hook, forthcoming; Offutt-Chaney 2021). Teachers are a common target of “learning crisis” accounts, as they are discursively constructed in policy reports as obstacles to improved learning outcomes, thereby justifying the need for “highly scripted lessons plans” and other forms of de-professionalization to reduce teachers’ agency (Pesambili, Sayed and Stambach 2022). Increasing digital technology uptake is another dominant focus.[6] In sum, the “new vision” for global education focuses on vastly increasing standardized data collection (i.e. through standardized testing) and disseminating “learning packages” and technologies to standardize teaching methodologies. These are clearly very focused technical fixes, centering the authority of global education agencies and affiliated education planners and evaluators. They eschew political and public participation.[7]

The ambitiousness of “education for all” engendered a “cruel” type of optimism in many people’s experiences, in that its promises remained engrossing yet unattainable (Jakimow 2016; Stambach 2017; Dost and Froerer 2021; Black 2022; all citing Berlant 2011). There are obvious disparities between people’s hopes for education and their realities. However, in applying the essentialist logic of crisis to education, global policymakers have further alienated education from the multiple hopes that people desire it to steward. This case of the construction of a “global learning crisis” shows how the turn to crisis logics favours conservativism, not through engendering a sense of paralysis, (Masco 2017) but by embracing a profound poverty of ambition.

Elizabeth Cooper is an anthropologist and associate professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her 2022 book Burning Ambition: Education, Arson, and Learning Justice in Kenya offers a detailed analysis of students’ experiences of violence and protest in Kenya’s education system.

Notes

[1] For decades, the World Bank has been the largest single international source of education finance and its educational financing and policy influence are particularly significant in low and middle-income countries (Mundy and Verger 2016; Heyneman 2003). In addition, the Bank has received pooled funding from OECD donor countries as bilateral and private sector funding to support its education initiatives (Mundy and Verger 2016).

[2] This analysis follows the global education policymakers’ dominant focus on education in low- and middle-income countries, and particularly those that have been evaluated to have “learning poverty.”

[3] The focus on access was also a political decision based on concerns that emphasizing the poor quality of education might reduce demand for education and deter governments’ commitments.

[4] This simulation exercise was redone in 2021 to warn that “this generation of student now risks losing $17 trillion…, or the equivalent of 14 percent of today’s global GDP” (World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF 2021). In 2022, the simulation was done again to warn that “Without action, the current generation of students now risks losing $21 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value, or the equivalent of 17 percent of today’s global GDP” (World Bank et al 2022).

[5] Feasibility is top of mind in the essentialist logic reflected in the “global learning crisis”: the authors of the 2018 “Ending Learning Poverty” report observe that the ambitious Sustainable Development Goal to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” looks unlikely to be met, and they reflect that if education targets seem overly ambitious and thus impossible to achieve, “they will disappear from policy attention” (p. 9). With those concerns in mind, the selected policy approach is narrowed to more “feasible” and “intermediate” targets “to spur concrete, focused action.”

[6] The World Bank’s (2018: 6) plan for responding to the “learning crisis” argues that “Change is needed at scale, quickly, and for large populations. That cannot be done without technology. Open-source digital infrastructure and information systems will be used to ensure that resources reach all teachers, students and schools.” Also see Sara Black’s (2021) analysis of the “techno-solutionist utopian discourse” conveyed in education policies responding to a perceived “crisis” in lifelong learning in South Africa.

[7] A contrasting agenda emphasizes the importance of holistic and interpersonal approaches to literacy, including public participation (Kell, McKinney, Tyler and Guzula 2023).

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