Is expanding access to schooling always a moral good? What happens when global education reforms are exported across countries with vastly different histories and cultures? And how do power, politics, and funding shape what counts as success?

Today’s guest is Nancy Kendall, Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work focuses on global education policy, gender, development, and the political economy of schooling. Through long-term research in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States, she studies how international organizations, national governments, and local communities interact in shaping education systems. Her scholarship examines the promises and contradictions embedded in global campaigns for universal schooling.

Nancy’s work challenges us to look beyond slogans and to examine how policies unfold in lived contexts.

In this episode, Nancy and I explore the complexity behind the idea of universal education. She explains how international efforts to increase enrollment and standardize schooling often carry assumptions about progress, development, and gender equality that do not always align with local priorities. We discuss how global policy frameworks, funding structures, and accountability metrics can unintentionally reshape communities in ways policymakers never anticipated.

Nancy reflects on her fieldwork, describing how families navigate the costs and benefits of schooling in environments shaped by poverty, gender norms, and economic precarity. We also examine how Western models of schooling became global defaults and why it is important to ask whose knowledge and whose values are embedded in them.

This conversation invites listeners to rethink what educational success means on a global scale. Expanding access matters, but so does context, culture, and voice. Nancy reminds us that education policy is never neutral. It is always entangled with power, resources, and competing visions of what a good life should look like.