Anti-Racism in Education Financing and Practice
The United Nations International Day of Education on 24th January 2025 is an opportunity for us to look critically at what is required to transform public education systems globally. This blogpost is part of NORRAG’s Financing Education blog series. By David Archer.
Public education systems around the world are both chronically underfunded and chronically unequal. Whilst education should and could be the most powerful equalising force, access to, and achievement in, education are increasingly stratified, reinforcing rather that counteracting historic injustices. Global inequalities in education financing are startling, with the latest data showing that $8,532 is spent each year on educating an average child in high income countries, whilst only $55 per child is spent each year in low income countries – 155 times less.
There are also profound inequalities within countries. In Brazil, a recent survey found that racism is the main factor that drives inequalities, with 81% of respondents saying Brazil is a racist country, and 64% of 16-24-years-olds saying that education contexts were the locations where they experienced the most racism. Gaps between white children and black, quilombola and indigenous children across all basic education indicators in Brazil are persistent and are particularly acute for 11-17-year-olds. At the end of 2024 UNESCO convened the biannual Global Education Meeting in Fortaleza, Brazil and at that meeting it became clear that we need urgent action to address these global and national inequalities, confronting racism both within public education systems and within the global financing of education.
Despite the existence of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, global and national education policy agendas rarely address racism directly. The Sustainable Development Goal on Education, whilst emphasising the importance of equity and inclusion in general, makes no specific references to racial justice. There is no systematic data on racial equality in education collected by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and no reliable global disaggregation of data or monitoring. The largest global initiative on education, the Global Partnership for Education has made no notable references to racial equity or anti-racism in education. Of course, there are challenges because racism takes different forms and has different histories in different countries, but there are significant common roots in ongoing structural histories of colonialism, ethnonationalism, and Indigenous dispossession. There should surely be some urgency to pool learning around progressive policies and practices that are effective in addressing racism through education in diverse contexts.
Over the past year the SETA Project has been mapping initiatives across the world that seek to address issues of racial discrimination in education, understanding diverse anti-racist education interventions and the work being done to build anti-racist education movements in different local and national contexts. In Brazil the SETA Project brings together black, indigenous, quilombola and education movements to transform the public education system. The scope of this work in Brazil gives some sense of the investments needed to truly deliver an anti-racist public education system. There is a need to support inter-generational dialogue on racism and education in homes, school, workplaces, and the media. New data is urgently required, based on an intersectional approach to monitoring and evaluating of education. Policy dialogue on anti-racist education is needed at federal, state and municipal level. Educators and education managers need to be trained and supported by good quality anti-racist education resources. Young people and students themselves have to be actively engaged to embed anti-racist education practices.
Increased investments are clearly needed to achieve anti-racist education, but these are difficult to make in an underfunded public education system, whether in Brazil or any other country, so we have to link action on anti-racist education to action that transforms the wider financing of education. In relative terms Brazil is a positive global reference point for commitments to domestic financing of education – although this reputation was battered in the Bolsonaro years. Domestic financing will always be the key, with the Education Commission noting that 97% of education financing comes from domestic sources and even in low-income countries only 12% of education financing comes from aid or loans. Yet global discourse on education is dominated by the aid industry, with donors often having immense power over the direction of education reforms in low- and middle-income countries. Colonial power relations are perpetuated in disturbing ways by agencies who always think they know best. Perhaps then we should not be so surprised that racial equity in education and anti-racist education are not on the global agenda.
The UN Heads of State Transforming Education Summit in 2022 charted a radically different path for global discourse on education financing. For the first time global attention shifted away from aid and loans to domestic financing – and particularly to the structural forces that undermine domestic financing of education. The TES discussion paper and Call to Action on Financing Education showed how attention needs to move on from a narrow focus on the share of budgets allocated to education to address the strategic forces that impact on education, notably relating to tax justice, debt justice and ending austerity.
Countries concerned with financing education need to be able to increase their tax revenues through progressive tax reforms – which is difficult when global tax rules have been set for 60 years by the rich countries of the OECD, facilitating illicit financial flows. African groups at the UN have recently won a long battle for a UN Framework Convention on Tax which could transform this. Many countries also need a solution to the debt crisis – with 3.3 billion people living in countries that spend more on servicing their debt than on education and health. Demands for a UN Framework Convention on Debt are already being supported by the African Group at the UN and are likely to be centre-stage at the fourth UN Financing for Development conference in Seville in June 2025.
It is external debt that make countries dependent on the IMF, who drive a cult of austerity through Ministries of Finance – leading to cuts or freezes to public sector wage bills that undermine the recruitment and retention of teachers. In simple terms, the discredited and racist neoliberal economic model continues to be the biggest obstacle to countries making breakthroughs on the financing education.
A new short briefing titled Dear Ministers of Finance – outlines how there are alternatives to the present model – and shows that Ministers of Finance can chart a different path to transform education financing. By action on tax, debt and austerity it is possible to release the resources needed to create more equitable, better quality and anti-racist public education systems. But this requires a shift away from the (sometimes subtly) racist worldview that has shaped both education and economic policymaking for generations. Meanwhile, there is also growing pressure for the global education community to break the silence on racism within education and to put anti-racist education at the centre of future policy debates.
The Author:
David Archer, Head of Programmes, ActionAid