"Global learning crisis" narratives, in focusing on the "proximate determinants" of the crisis, represent a welcome "classroom turn" in international education and development. Extant learning crisis literatures are problematic, however, as their homogenizing gaze distorts how teachers and students co-constitute classrooms as locally meaningful learning spaces. Drawing on anthropological approaches in comparative education, this article addresses the "learning crisis" in a middle-school classroom in a weavers' neighborhood in Kanchipuram. Constituted in an elaborate "notebook economy," this classroom was an inventive response that not only accommodated students' material cultures and social-educational disadvantages but also affected their belonging in a resource-scarce public education system. If the learning it afforded was disdained in "learning crisis" narratives, it was nevertheless relevant for students, readily translated into educationally unintensive assembly-line jobs. In producing contempt for such classrooms, "learning crisis" narratives merely distract from--and thus entrench--the deeply unequal economic and educational development that necessitated the notebook economy in the first place.