What’s with the lockstep thing?

by Sasha Alyson

The Global Partnership for Education has shown us their vision of the future. Let’s pay attention.

Though it isn’t a household name like UNICEF, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), based in the U.S. and Europe, rechannels billions of dollars from agencies such as USAID and European nations for the purpose of shaping school policy for the world’s poorest children, especially in Africa. After a quarter century, however, these schools have more students, but they’re learning less. (More at: Schools Are Getting Worse)

The photo accompanying one GPE news release is downright creepy:

An announcement from the Global Partnership for Education shows girls marching in lockstep. The boys in back appear less enthusiastic about the lockstep thing.

Scary, because this is their vision: Girls marching in lockstep. They could have looked for a picture of girls reading. Or acting independently. They chose schoolgirls marching in lockstep.

Scary, to realize that the groupthink within GPE is so strong that nobody within the organization said, “Maybe this isn’t the right image for our Education news release.”

Scary, that they are downright proud to announce that an organization funded and run by the West, run by an overwhelmingly white management, has managed to get these schoolgirls to show they can do exactly as ordered from above.

Schools for the world’s poorest children, under the influence of the U.N. and agencies like GPE, are joyless places where children learn to memorize the right answer – maybe. If they don’t, at least they learn to accept their fate as nothing more than beans to be counted on in the enrollment statistics, creatures to walk and think in lockstep, following orders sent from another continent.

Just as GPE published this picture and story, an outside evaluation of its 5-year, $100-million education program in northern Nigeria became available. Did that money do any good? We don’t know. The report states that while “contributions from several partners in Nigeria have modestly improved education planning in Nigeria,” they don’t know if that planning achieved anything because “stakeholder appetite for monitoring has been low.” Why would “stakeholders” want to be monitored, when the money flows anyway?

The report concluded that “effectively the GPE theory of change is not appropriate for Nigeria…. This means taking a bottom up approach….”

That sounds promising: They learned that top-down didn’t work, so next they’ll try bottom-up. But if GPE actually wanted bottom-up, it had 18 years to try that. The latest $386 million is being passed along (after taking out GPE’s salaries and overhead) to the same top-down organizations – the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO – that for years have contributed to creating disastrously bad schools in the global South.

They all prefer top-down. That’s how everybody at the top gets their salaries.

None of them want to pass control to the populations of Nigeria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the rest. They know full well that people who are running their own lives do not do it in lockstep.

The Global Partnership for Education has shown us their vision of the future. Is that the future that the rest of us want?

Related stories

Left: Schools in the global South are getting worse. The aid industry doesn’t ask why, and for good reason. It created much of the problem.
Right: Willful blindness. As it tries to control school policies in the global South, the aid industry has data about every subject except one: Are students learning anything? It doesn’t want to know.
Left: UNICEF preaches diversity. But for 77 years, UNICEF has ALWAYS had a white USA citizen in its top spot. That’s hypocritical. Racist, too? You decide. And it leads UNICEF to push Western interests.
Right: Does the U.N. actually WANT rote schooling for children in the South? It sounds absurd, but that’s what the evidence says. And with a little thought, we can see how U.N. interests push it in this direction.
Left: The origin of modern schooling: Worldwide, children attend schools that use rote memorization to teach for the test, and leave students unprepared for the real world. How did this system become so widespread?
Right: Do African perspectives matter? The Global Partnership for Education shapes education policy in 70 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. Its CEO, chair, and 7-member evaluation team are from the USA, Australia, and Europe.

Other stories about karma colonialism

Left: The campaign against reading. The aid industry says it promotes reading. But its actions — such as dumping unwanted books from the USA — are motivated by self-interest, and consistently undermine reading in the global South.
Right: Francophonie. By forcing children in its former African colonies to study in French, France thought it was spreading the glory of the French language. But students ended up learning neither French, nor much of anything else.
Left: Masters of Deceit. Raising funds for “girls’ education” has become big business…. and remarkably often, the aid industry has crossed the line into deceit and dishonesty.
Right: Why not just give them the money? Cash transfers — just giving aid money directly to those you wish to help — has a proven track record. Why does the aid industry dislike this approach?
Left: It’s still colonialism. Today’s foreign aid and charities look different from colonialism of the past. But the old goals and attitudes haven’t changed.
Right: What would make a better future? There are ways that wealthier countries can genuinely help others, if they want to. Give the aid money directly to the poor, for example. Here are ideas.