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I recently completed work on a moderated discussion (Ginsburg et al., 2018) for the Comparative Education Review (CER) focused on the World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise (WDR) (Filmer et al., 2018). In the moderated discussion I muted my voice in order to facilitate a conversation among...

The World Development Report (WDR) recognizes the importance of the formative years, which is a positive step toward addressing many problems facing children and families. It was refreshing to read that issues like poverty, malnutrition, pre- and post-natal care, and parent education (pp. 9, 21, 112) are acknowledged as powerful...

The “Forward” of the 2018 World Development Report (WDR) by the World Bank Group’s president, Jim Yong Kim, shocked me. It starts: “Education and learning raise aspirations, set values, and ultimately enrich lives. The country where I was born, the Republic of Korea, is a good example of how education...

This blog argues that the inconsistencies of the World Bank seen as instances of ‘organised hypocrisy’ and ‘duplicity’ are not new nor are they limited to the area of education. On the heels of the WDR, another significant World Bank report, The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018: Building a Sustainable...

Learning does not begin when a child enters school. It is widely known that from birth to age five the brain develops more rapidly than at any other stage of life, and it is also most sensitive to influences from the external environment (such as cognitive stimulation, language development, care,...

The most striking features of the World Development Report 2018’s chapter on technical and vocational training (TVET) are that it is a superficial examination of the role and impact of TVET around the world, and that it persists in perpetuating a very narrow framing of the role that the sector...

The 2018 World Development Report “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise” provides deep insights into the worldview of the World Bank, the world’s most powerful development institution. Instead of critically questioning the Bank’s explicit claims – as most of the blogs thus far have done – it is also worth pausing...

The 2018 World Development Report (WDR) “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise” has been widely praised for placing education at the forefront of the international development agenda. But while signaling a global commitment to increasing education access and quality in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the 2018 WDR...

My colleagues in my school probably know the World Bank quite superficially, at least if they teach economics history, geography or social sciences. For the rest of them I would say there is name recognition, but not much more than that. However, they would recognize its policy, the tone and...

One of the primary avenues highlighted for educational improvement in the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) 2018 is school-based management (SBM). This is not surprising, as SBM has been one of the World Bank’s preferred education governance reforms since the 1990s. Indeed, as Dean Nielsen, former Senior Evaluation Officer...

The World Development report 2018 (WDR2018) is right about the global learning crisis: many children not in school, educational inequity, and low quality of learning outcomes. But it often misses the point when trying to use available evidence to realize education’s promise. The problem is that there are so many...

The annual World Development Report (WDR) is the World Bank’s flagship publication. The 2018 report is entitled Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. In the 40 year history of the WDR, this is the first time its focus has been on education. Many commentators have welcomed this as needed in this...

The World Development Report 2018 recognises, although briefly, that poor working conditions for teachers can undermine learning (p.138). It argues that the status of the teaching profession has declined over the last few decades, and that as a result, “teachers deserve more from the systems that employ them” (p.138).

With the production of a World Development Report focused on education, the World Bank makes a decisive claim to its authority in education policy. Given an introductory section acknowledging 119 “researchers and specialists across the world” who provided “feedback and suggestions” for the report (WDR 2018 hereafter), it would seem...

When the World Bank announced that the 2018 World Development Report (WDR) would be on education, I was sceptical. I’m not denying the Bank’s research expertise. It devotes substantial money and staff and has a trove of reports that are accessible in the public domain. It’s also open to criticism...

The World Development Report on Education, "Learning to Realize Education's Promise," contains both promise and peril.

The World Bank’s 2018 world development report, with its focus on education and the need ‘to realize education’s promise’, is a welcome, if perhaps surprising, step forward. The report scores highly on intent, but it must work with teachers, not against them, if the report’s ambitions are to become a...

The World Development Report (WDR) 2018 - Learning to realize Education’s Promise - places learning at the center to equip children and youth for the future. The report recognizes the key role teachers play in achievement of quality education.