The education sector in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has experienced a surge of neoliberal reforms over the past few decades, primarily led by the World Bank (WB). One of these reform agendas has been to "decrease standards" or "destandardize" educational responsibilities and policies by devolving educational systems to subnational and school levels. Diffused through different mechanisms, such as conditional aid and the "what works" mantra, we know little about the growth and nature of these reforms, but they may have significant socioeconomic consequences. This is the first study to investigate the destandardization reforms implemented by the WB in the educational systems of 99 historical and present LMICs. Results show that about 63 percent of WB project components in primary and secondary education have focused on destandardizing educational systems at subnational and school levels. Growth of these reforms at the subnational level slowed between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s but sharply increased at the school level since the late 1980s. I argue that the latter could be due to a global emphasis on school-based intervention, an urge for aid effectiveness, and a strategy to spread democratic values in micro-social units. I provide evidence of how homogeneous strategies of supranational organizations diffuse heterogeneous educational systems of nation-states because of aid dependency.