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6. Early Childhood Education, Poverty and Privatization: Why is ECE so important and underfunded in World Bank policy? Carol Anne Spreen 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, imagination but also negative influences like hunger and violence). Children raised in households with protracted poverty, who are orphaned, or have limited access to resources and services, start their formal schooling many steps behind their peers. Healthy, stable, enriching early development opportunities affect later cognitive, social and emotional growth, and with increased opportunities there are greater chances for children to thrive. A significant part of the World Development Report (WDR) report pays attention to the important links between child development, neuro-science, and issues of poverty (see for example Spotlight 1 and 2), and is generally in-line with the current research and thinking about child well-being and the creation of learning opportunities at an early age. However, the underlying logic of the World Bank (WB)’s approach to learning can be seen in the continued reliance on market rhetoric in the WDR report (e.g. education as an investment, ‘the poverty deficit’, ‘skills beget skills’ and aiming at ‘higher learning trajectories’. By hanging on to the idea that education (even ECE) should primarily be about improving
testing and accountability, the WDR misses the opportunity to create a more holistic approach to learning and thinking about human development throughout the span of a person’s life. To prioritize investing in testing and accountability measures over ECE or poverty alleviation, seems to be putting the proverbial ‘cart before the horse’. The importance of ECE is not just about improving learning outcomes but about its long term potential to help us thrive as human beings. Furthermore, critics of the report are concerned that the WDR seems to largely bypass the issue of public support and provisioning of education, particularly under-resourced and largely private sectors like ECE. Despite widespread recognition of its importance, the WDR does not indicate whether and how ECE should be funded. The elaborate discussion of the benefits of ECE, especially for children from poor communities, ends with no policy recommendations about funding or creating universal ECE programs.
The WB’s failure to promote government funding, support and expansion of this critical sector Despite the WB’s recognition of the importance of ECE, it has continuously promoted privatization policies (Klees et al., 2012) that undermine equity and give governments a pass 21