For the last 15 years, the government of Morocco has made education reform a top national development priority, and this effort has been underwritten by consecutive rounds of World Bank loans and foreign technical assistance. Despite some success in expanding access to primary and secondary education, the government and its donors have repeatedly noted that polices have fallen short in a crucial respect: improving outcomes through a more learner-centered pedagogy have done little to affect the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms (See World Bank 2005; CSE 2008a; World Bank 2013a: 16). For most Moroccans with a stake in the education system, this assessment is relatively uncontroversial. Though many disagree about causes and implications of the policy failure, few would argue that Morocco’s pedagogical reforms since 2000 have had a significant or broad-scale impact on how teachers do their jobs, or the resources available to them. Yet a uniformly negative assessment overlooks the divergent ways in which new norms of learner-centered teaching have been received and internalized by Morocco’s public teaching corps, even if these norms have not led to transformation of teacher practice on a mass scale. Using open-ended interviews with secondary teachers in provincial Morocco, I compare the perspectives of teachers of English and Arabic to reveal a significant disparity in how teachers of either language view the possibility for learner-centered pedagogy (LCP) within their classrooms. While English is commonly viewed as the most innovative and learner-centered subject in the curriculum, Arabic instruction and learning is widely regarded as in a state of crisis. I argue that this imbalance results from a mutually reinforcing relationship between inequality in pedagogical resources on the one hand, and on the other, implicit associations of certain foreign languages, especially English, with the notion and purpose of learner-centeredness. In this paper, I draw a parallel to Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis of French higher education in the 1960’s (1977), in which emerging socio-political inequality in the educational system was “re-translated” as a failure of pedagogical communication. Similarly, Morocco finds itself in the midst of in the discourse of pedagogical crisis. By drawing attention to asymmetries of prestige, power and resources within this perceived pedagogical failure, it is possible to expose political roots of pedagogical inequality, and challenge the notion of a pedagogical best practice that can be neatly transferred from one context to the next.