EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY: IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORLD BANK’S EDUCATION STRATEGY 2020 Devin Joshi and William Smith ABSTRACT The purpose of this chapter is to explore the World Bank’s Education Strategy 2020 (WBES) and assess the likelihood that the WBES will reduce education inequality in the developing world. Utilizing a Marxist theoretical perspective of the structural inequities supposedly inherent in global and national systems of capitalist political economy, we develop the hypothesis that increasing the quantity (rather than the quality) of elementary education may unfortunately be a means of reproducing and reinforcing both education gaps and class inequalities in the developing world. We expect this phenomenon to be most salient in bifurcated education systems where upper classes have recourse to higher quality private schooling while the lower classes must submit to ‘‘compulsory’’ low quality government schooling. We test this hypothesis using statistical regression analysis of historical data from the International Futures software on increasing elementary education enrolment from 1960 to 2010 and its impact on education equality and poverty reduction. 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 Education Strategy in the Developing World: Revising the World Bank’s Education Policy International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 16, 173–201 Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1108/S1479-3679(2012)0000016013 173