As the world achieved massive gains in bringing students into school, Van der Gaag and Adams (2010) warned that a ‘global learning crisis’ has emerged where students lack fundamental reading, writing, and mathematical capabilities. International governmental organisations (IGOs) soon chimed in using results from large-scale assessments (LSAs) and showed that more than half of the children attending primary school lack basic literacy and numeracy skills (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017; World Bank, 2018). By framing education systems as undergoing a ‘learning crisis’, these IGOs have set a new global agenda for education policy reforms, moving from bringing students to school to improving education quality to meet proficiency standards of those in school.
Scholars of comparative education have mainly rejected the crisis framing adopted by these IGOs to be patronising and rooted in colonialism (Schweisfurth 2023, Whyte 2020). Such framing prioritises universal criteria of educational success determined by these LSAs that privilege a narrow set of problems and solutions, often offered by these IGOs (Silova, et al., 2025). Even governments pegged as ‘reference societies’ by these metrics like Finland complain that such approaches do not accommodate “integrated, contextually grounded approach to reform” (Santos and Silova 2025). Just like many foreign ideas advocated by these IOs like the PISA, framing learning as a crisis forces governments to respond through either over-reaction (scandalisation) or under-reaction (indifference).
The Philippines offers an interest case in understanding how governments respond to foreign ideas. While the crisis has been framed as a global phenomenon, the efforts of these IGOs have been decidedly limited to Global South. Actors within the country embraced the ‘learning crisis’ to advance education reforms, only to be stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the government rejected a similar framing by the World Bank using similar results from LSAs. The notion of ‘learning poverty’ did not gain the same traction as the ‘learning crisis’ with the government even demanding the World Bank for painting a bad picture of education in the country. This differentiated response implies that foreign ideas do not have the same effect in inspiring domestic policy reforms.
This paper looks at the ideational sources of education policy dynamics but instead of looking at the source of these ideas, it examines the nature of policy ideas and how they were conveyed. In doing so, it advances a relational approach to understanding how policy ideas are contested and adopted or rejected to drive domestic education reforms. Specifically, the paper finds that the learning crisis framing was embraced by the government because they wanted to use the PISA results instrumentally to build its domestic resources to address issue of educational quality. World Bank’s ‘learning poverty’ created a scandal that could only be solved through systemic and externally-driven reforms.
