LAUSR

The World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) purports to benchmark developing country education systems against global best practices. SABER covers 13 topics, called “domains,” and has produced over 16,000 indicators of what the Bank considers best practice and applied them in over 130 countries. Yet this massive effort has received hardly any critical scrutiny. In this article, we argue that this search for global best practice is fundamentally flawed. We apply Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s three façades of universality, precision, and rationality to problematize the search for best practice, both in general and specifically in SABER. We then critique the Bank’s analysis of three of SABER’s 13 domains: Teachers, School Autonomy and Accountability, and Engaging the Private Sector. We conclude by connecting this to broader critiques of the Bank and some of the new directions envisioned for SABER.