Control of education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was transferred from the Israeli Civil Administration to the Palestinian National Authority in 1994. Scholarship covering the educational reality in the OPT in the lead up and immediate aftermath of this period generally falls into two categories: education policy reports and historical accounts. In the policy category, scholars typically have focused on the idea of "quality" education, but have dehistoricized "quality" as an objective term rather than as an inherently local, political, and temporally malleable development concept. Meanwhile, in the history category, many historians have uncritically adopted value-laden education language when describing the historical logistics of Palestinian education, unwittingly reifying the "west knows best" mentality of international development while also failing to account for the wide variety of organizations and peoples involved in the educational reality of the territories. In other words, most literature on late twentieth century Palestinian education has failed to recognize that "notions of knowledge" cannot be "disconnected" from the power structures that devised them (Mazawi 2010, 22). Thus, this paper aims to bridge and critique these two bodies of Palestinian education literature by using a historical lens to trace the many changing visions of education held by the wide variety of stakeholders who had a hand in developing Palestinian education through the 1980s and 1990s. In order to paint a comprehensive picture, this paper draws upon original research conducted in the UNESCO and World Bank archives. It will also incorporate ethnographic interviews with Palestinian students, teachers, and other education affiliated employees in the West Bank in order to localize ideas of education success. This research thus explores how the various education ideologies complemented, contradicted, and competed to shape the complicated terrain of the Palestinian education system. Ultimately, the paper argues that in this competition of ideas, the aims of international organizations often overshadowed the aspirations of local Palestinians for two main reasons. First, as Palestinian goals were tied to resistance, they were difficult to quantify, a key trait for the international education regime. Second, resistance directly opposed the security goals of international funders like the United States. Thus, this paper calls into question the normative descriptions used in historical writings about Palestinian education while adding to the growing body of literature that challenges the underlying assumptions of development ideologies and organizations.