Ei-iE

In a well-received speech delivered at the World Bank, EI Vice-President Dennis van Roekel from the National Education Association/USA has raised some important issues about the Bank’s approach to education sector reform, how that approach impacts on teachers, misses important opportunities for educational improvement and equity ... and where the approach is out of step with much of the serious global research and evidence.

Van Roekel started by stressing that there is a real and substantive basis for a constructive, well-grounded dialogue about the role of teachers unions in education today, and that this dialogue is actually happening everywhere else in the world. He however regretted that, for some reason, the World Bank would rather play it down or caution its clients against it.

He went on to say:  “Not that we haven’t tried. For the past three years Education International and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have partnered with the US Government and, this year the Dutch government, to convene the International Summits of the Teaching Profession, where 25 to 30 national delegations of education ministers and union leaders come from high performing countries and discuss major policy issues. The Bank has been at each of these.”

One of the most obvious areas for improvement in the area of sector reform, he underlined, is the advice from the World Bank to governments regarding whether or not they should even engage in social dialogue with teachers’ unions and that, somehow, weaker unions are more desirable.

Van Roekel explained that the OECD, whose research supposedly informs SABER – the Banks’s education policy benchmarking tool - doesn’t equivocate: The better a country’s education system performs, the more likely that country is working constructively with its unions and treating its teachers as trusted professional partners.

He further observed that virtually all the top performing countries on international education measures have strong teacher unions, including Finland, Korea, Japan, Canada, Australia and others.

Van Roekel underlined the OECD understanding that “teachers need to be active agents, not just in the implementation of reforms, but also in their design. Reform must be underpinned by solid research and analysis. Conflict between unions and reform has best been avoided not where unions are weak, but where they are strong and co-operate with reform.”

Tackling the issue of the trained teacher gap and particularly the deployment to rural areas issue, he also reminded the World Bank that together with the Global Campaign for Education EI released the report Closing the Trained Teacher Gap.

On education quality, van Roekel said that according to the new Learning Strategy of the World Bank, improving quality of education is at the centre of its agenda. “Yet for the last twenty years the message has been to reduce teacher training, hire unqualified teachers on short term contracts, advise governments how to remove the teacher union obstacle,” he noted.

Against the privatisation of education currently being promoted by the World Bank, he mentioned that OECD Deputy Director for Education Andreas Schleicher said there is nothing that can be done at charter or private schools that cannot be done as well, if not better, at a public school.

He finished by deploring the fact that two years before the 2015 EFA deadline, the GMR shows that progress is stalling. Inequality is growing, growth is stalling.

He highlighted the fact that the Bank's jobs report says that unions and labour policies do not negatively affect growth but they do mitigate rising inequality. “The OECD says that strong teacher unions are good partners for serious reform. And I'm here on behalf of the education sector asking for a reset on your benchmarks. Join the bold risk takers that have thrown in with dialogue and not obstruction. We'll meet you halfway.”

To read van Roekel’s speech in its entirety, please click here