The World Bank's plan for education: Behind the teacher bashing

[Hannah Bell]

Behind the Teacher Bashing

Education is one of the few sectors of the economy that is thoroughly unionized, and teacher unions are the best organized, most stable institutions blocking the neoliberal agenda to transform education. This is because union principles of solidarity and collective action counteract the selfishness and competitiveness that “free-market” ideologues say are essential for economic progress. Strikingly similar exposés about how teacher unions protect malevolent, incompetent teachers are prominent in media outlets all over the world...

Elsewhere in the world these same reforms, imposed by the World Bank as a condition for loans and aid, are justified quite differently. In its report, “Making Services Work for Poor People,” the World Bank lays out its rationale for a new economic order and a system of public education that serves it, all of which depends on weakening teacher unions:

1. Workers in every country must compete with those elsewhere for jobs, most of which require little education.

2. Public money spent on creating a highly educated workforce is therefore wasted because most people don’t need much schooling...


http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/


Oh, & here's the report: the education deformers at the World Bank can't even produce a report with "Foreword" spelled correctly.

Lighter (less MB) documents which may or may not be the final, official version
File Type Description File Size (mb)

PDF 8 pages TOC 0.09
PDF 4 pages Foreward 0.08


http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2004/0,,ImgPagePK:64202988~entityID:000090341_20031007150121~pagePK:64217930~piPK:64217936~theSitePK:477688,00.html

[Skittles]

1. K&R

[Ken Burch]

2. K&R

n/t.

[JCMach1]

3. How long before some nut recommends euthanasia for poor people since they are not needed

???

:(

[RandomThoughts]

5. Or calls them useless eaters.

[JCMach1]

11. I predict someone will this political season...

[RandomThoughts]

4. Schooling is not just so you can do some job that will make someone money.

This whole topic is so simple. It is class warfare.

[leveymg]

6. I took a quick look at the education section of the report, and it doesn't appear to say that

First of all, the report is from 2004 and addresses issues related to the Millenium Development goals that were set a decade earlier. The focus seems to be on bringing accountability and transparency to public services, in general, not just education, along with eliminating corruption. Secondly, the report repeatedly states, over and over again, that privatization is not a panacea for poor provision of public services. For instance, at p. 113:

That public provision has often failed to public engagement are communicated to
create universally available and effective the public and to private organizations
schooling does not imply that the solution that provide services (Ministries of Edu-
is a radically different approach (complete cation, school districts).
decentralization, total control by parent � Management, or the actions that create
groups, generalized choice) or a narrow effective frontline providers (teachers,
focus on proximate determinants (more administrators) within organizations.
textbooks, more teacher training). Univer- � Client power, or how well citizens, as
sal and quality education can come from clients, can increase the accountability of
very centralized systems (France, Japan) or schools and school systems.
from very decentralized systems with con-
siderable local accountability and flexibility Effective solutions are likely to be mixtures
(United States). Many countries have little of voice, choice, direct participation, and orga-
private schooling, and some a great deal nizational command and control, with func-
(Holland). Classroom practice is what mat- tional responsibilities distributed among
ters. If the underlying causes of failure are central, regional, local, and school administra-
not addressed, all these approaches can fail. tions. The pieces have to fit together as a sys-
Chapters 3 through 6 developed a frame- tem. More scope for parental choice without
work for analyzing service provision, looking greater information about schooling outputs
at four relationships of accountability. In will not necessarily lead to better results.
education, these are:



[Hannah Bell]

7. you need to do more than take a quick look.

Reforms to promote greater parental
involvement, more school autonomy, more
emphasis on results, and changes in the
training, selection, assignment, and
compensation of teachers are politically
explosive—particularly with teachers’
unions.

A study of five attempts at education
reforms that included many of these
elements in Latin America in the 1990s
found that teachers’ unions opposed nearly
all of them—emphatically and stridently...

Teachers’unions wanted governments to
address the issues of teachers’wages and
working conditions and were concerned that
decentralization and school autonomy would
intrude on more familiar relationships and
negotiations between a centralized school
administration and a centralized union.

Even when governments pushed
reforms through, conflicts with the unions
made implementation problematic, since
successful reform requires teacher participation.
Source: Grindle (forthcoming


In too many countries discussions
between the government and teachers’
unions are no different from discussions
between a large company and its unions.

The
relationship between policymakers and
teachers’ organizations needs to shift from a
pure bargaining game to a positive-sum
game. This is easier said than done.

As professional
development bodies teachers’ unions
can reinforce professional ethics and mutual
accountability. They can be used to organize
teacher input on technical issues of educational
reform, such as assessment, classroom
autonomy, student discipline, and teacher
training.

If unions refuse to take on that role,
preferring to concentrate on wages and working
conditions, there are no firm guidelines
for how reformers should cope with that...

Here's a "success" story:

In addition, Educo’s
more flexible compensation scheme
resulted in greater variability in teacher
earnings, which suggests that parent associations
used compensation to motivate
greater effort among teachers.

Offering
or withholding future employment itself
was an incentive, and one that ACEs used.
Turnover among Educo teachers was high,
which suggests that job loss was not an idle threat.


In other words, the report doesn't explicitly state that unions are the biggest problem with such "reform," but the message is there under the seemingly measured "professional" language.

[leveymg]

8. You're right. The implication there is that teacher unions are an impediment to "reform".

You don't need a very large magnifying glass to read that between the lines.

I agree, this appears to be the usual neo-liberal orthodoxy, wrapped up in seemingly objective, professional language. But, it does not necessarily prove that the World Bank is behind the movement to strip teachers and other public sector workers of the scant job and income security they now have, or that this is even representative of the Bank's current policies.

I know it doesn't capture my thinking on public sector reform, and I've known the Bank from the inside as well as other international development agencies.

The section you quoted above -- with its implicit endorsement of stripping tenure to increase performance "incentives" -- is a throwback to an era when education was not treated as a profession and was not a guaranteed civil right. Rather than being a "reform", such privatization schemes are simply a way to cut public sector costs by eliminating civil service protections and de-professionalizing public sector occupations.

The attacks we are seeing on teacher unions across the US today under the guise of "reform" are disgusting.

[Hannah Bell]

9. I've read more of that report & some related ones, & they include

the idea of funneling aid through localities -- including local parents or their "representatives" who would "contract" with ngo's for education -- the ngo's acting as charter management corps do here in the us. this is called "decentralization".

it would effectively remove a chunk of power from cental governments & give it to foreign ngos who would control the education pursestrings & policy.

weiner's tack is that this kind of "education reform" is happening globally, not just in the us. the paper doesn't prove the wb is behind the ed deform movement, but there's enough out there to satisfy me that super-national forces are very much in the mix, if not coordinating behind the scenes.

[G_j]

10. K&R