A critical analysis of Teach for All’s Girls’ Education Initiative

• In Event: Case studies of gender education programming toward improving girls educational outcomes and wellbeing

Proposal

Introduction:
Improving educational access and quality for girls has been an ongoing goal of governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs, and other organizations for decades. From reducing poverty, to boosting economies, to eliminating gender inequalities, a range of motivations, discourses, and interventions have been promoted, often justified by the claim that girls’ education is the solution to systemic development issues (Boyd, 2016; Hickel, 2014; Purewal, 2014; Robles, 2020). As new types of development actors have emerged, however, so too have questions about their approaches to girls’ education, gender, and development.

Purpose:
This study examines how girls’ education and gender equality are constructed by one prominent (and increasingly powerful) actor: Teach for All (TFAll). TFAll was launched in 2007 and supports national affiliate programs across 60+ countries to recruit (primarily) elite graduates into teaching. In 2014, TFAll announced at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference its Girls’ Education Initiative, intended to ‘identify and address the barriers that keep girls from learning and fulfilling their potential’ (TFAll, 2021; see also TFAll, 2014). As an organization with deep philanthropic and governmental ties — and involved in the global mobility of particular educational programs, policies, and policy actors (e.g., Adhikary et al., 2018; Olmedo et al., 2013) — TFAll’s recent foray into gender and development is both immensely important to international development practice and directly relevant to the field of comparative and international education.

Conceptual Framework:
While a considerable body of literature has examined various aspects of TFAll and its national programs — including the model’s effectiveness (e.g., Anderson, 2020; Rice et al., 2015; Skourdoumbis, 2012), global proliferation (Author, 2022; Straubhaar, 2020), discursive framing of education and the teaching profession (Adhikary et al., 2018; Elliott, 2018; Ellis et al., 2016; Southern, 2021) — no known research has explored TFAll’s GEI. This paper therefore builds on and extends research about TFAll as a prominent organization involved in the heterarchical governance of global education (e.g., Olmedo et al., 2013).

Moreover, and given its focus on girls’ education and gender, this paper draws theoretically on Unterhalter’s (2017) dispersal framework. This approach responds to the considerable expansion of neoliberalism and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education and mounting concern that ‘PPPs seem to exemplify policies and practices around gender that span sometimes incommensurable goals associated with human rights, equalities, security, military strategy, transparent governance, sustainable development, and partnerships with corporations’ (p. 81). The dispersal framework highlights how gender equality in policies ‘blinks on and off’ – sometimes appearing as an objective or having importance in girls’ education and sometimes not appearing at all. Taken together, this theoretical framing provides a robust lens through which to analyze how girls’ education and gender equality are constructed by a growing global network, TFAll.

Research Methodology:
This qualitative study employed three methods. We first conducted an in-depth historical analysis of the emergence and evolution of TFAll’s interest in gender and girls’ education, utilizing in-depth online searches and digital archival research (e.g., Hogan 2016; Varis 2016). Second, we engaged in a comprehensive mapping exercise to examine the corpus of online GEI materials (n=161), which included individual webpages and news stories from TFAll as well as a range of supplemental resources produced by external organizations — e.g., the Malala Fund (2), Population Council (13), UNESCO (9), UNGEI (7), World Bank (3), etc. Several were selected for deeper analysis. Third and finally, seven texts/online resources associated with GEI, TFAll, and its founders were analyzed through critical discourse analysis to attain a more nuanced understanding of the internal organizational logic of GEI. These data were analyzed using Mullet’s (2018) critical discourse analytical framework, drawing on Fairclough (1999, 2003), Van Djik (1993), and others.

Research Findings:
Two key findings emerged. First, the data suggest TFAll is a comparatively recent actor in gender and development. Their organizational discourse emerged in the early 2010s (Kopp, 2013), closely following the increasing prominence of Malala Yousafzai as a global voice for gender and empowerment, and would continue to grow alongside global events and attention to girls and education. Second, the study suggests that TFAll has adopted common, though contested, neoliberal discourses associated with the power of girls’ education to solve wider development problems; gender equality itself rarely features as a key goal. For example, one data point suggests:
“The issue that is literally the cornerstone of any other intervention any society makes anywhere, to improve itself is to educate its girls….you invest in girls as the lynchpin of any developing country….it will bring to your national economy growth and productivity….that education contributes to the reduction and eventual elimination of gender bias, you know, for children of all genders.”
In another:
“lifetime earnings for women could increase by $15 trillion to $30 trillion every year….leads to broader benefits for families and communities: improved wage income, reduced population growth, decreased disease transmission,… mitigate climate change.”
These and other data suggest that TFAll — a relatively recent development actor with newfound interests in gender — has in many ways relied on an approach to girls’ education that ‘blinks on and off’ and is inconsistent at best, misguided at worst.

Conclusion:
In sum, this study explores how an education PPP with global influence largely adopted discourses around girls’ education and gender equality that lack nuance and engagement with well-documented research. Despite the robust body of literature on gender, education, and development, some organizations may (un)intentionally overlook the deep-rooted, intersectional causes of gender inequality in favor of discourses which oversimplify the solutions as a means to achieving commercial or organizational objectives (Ahmann, 2015; Boyd, 2014; Moeller, 2014; Prugl & True, 2014; Rutherford, 2018; Shain, 2013). Although by no means exhaustive, this study serves as a starting point for further research and discussion around how PPPs like TFAll are constructing girls’ education and the potential effects — positive, negative, or both — of their approaches.

Authors

• Bernadette McCurrie, University College London, Institute of Education

• Matthew A.M. Thomas, The University of Glasgow