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Arab world - Steady progress in education reform

Global Arab Network - - Maha Karim

Thursday, 19 May 2011 21:27

Arab world - Steady progress in education reform

Global Arab Network - Steady progress in education reform across the Arab world has seen numbers of school and university graduates soar. Girls and young women are included now and access to education is almost universal in most countries.

Hard to be a critic in the context of such success but recent reports and education measures have sounded warnings that an increase in attendance is not necessarily enough. International tests and benchmarking tools have shown young Arab students struggling to make it to the international class.

Those earlier successful reforms had been driven by an “engineering” approach: counting inputs like classrooms built, textbooks delivered, teachers trained. Important, yes, but not enough to deliver a quality outcome. What’s more, the latest research shows a strong positive relationship between a country’s quality of education and its economic growth. And with the huge youth “bulge” in the Arab world’s demographics between now and 2030 and the lag time it takes to gear up, the next five years are going to be make or break for education quality.

Skills for the 21st Century

"Next steps are really about driving incentives and accountability,” says Mourad Ezzine, education specialist at the World Bank. “About really measuring the outcomes of the education system, the degree to which your young graduate is skilled for the 21st Century."

So quality of education has come into central focus. A 2008 Bank report made the argument vigorously and Ezzine and his colleagues have been making the case, sensitive to how easy it is to politicize education results

A breakthrough came in October last year in Doha when 18 Arab countries embraced the Doha Declaration on Quality of Education in the Arab World. Then last month ministers meeting in Tunis at the general Assembly of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) gave the go ahead to an action plan that will begin building a coherent system across the Arab world for sharing, learning, building curricula and, critically, measuring real education results.

"You really can’t talk about incentives and accountability unless you know what you want to achieve,” says Ezzine. “ You need to know how the system is performing, to measure it and to be able to share expectations of performance.” Arab countries submit to international testing tools, like TIMMS and PISA, but there is no internal monitoring, he says. “You have to be ready to set expectations, to measure performance and be transparent about it so that schools know how they are performing relative to others."

A thrilling response

Education specialists like Ezzine were thrilled with the response of Arab education ministers in Doha. No one was pointing fingers but essentially the invitation was to everyone to stand up and be counted and with the clock ticking on the next five years, there was no time to waste in the effort in which ALECSO and the Qatar Foundation are leading partners with the Bank. Everyone at the table recognized the urgency.

The action plan envisages two parallel tracks, one at the country level, another at the regional level. Ezzine points out that countries across the Arab world are of course at different levels but what they need in common now are the institutions, tools and mechanisms to set and monitor standards, the ability to assess and disseminate results and the analytical capacity to develop evidence-based policy.

"That's when you see improvements start to happen," says Ezzine. “Education succeeds or fails in context; you can't expect what's successful in Finland to be so in Morocco.” Every country will be helped to build up the diagnostic tools and analytical capacity within an action plan.

Interestingly, at the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) in Marrakech these ideas were embraced with enthusiasm and WEF wants to be part of an expert group to keep momentum going. International business voices at WEF looking at opportunities in the Arab world also defined the skills they needed. Their strong message was that in addition to traditional skills what’s really essential to the market now is the soft skills: critical thinking, communications, solution orientation, learning to learn. The head of an international auto giant told Ezzine: "We don't know what technical skills we will need in the future and we can train for those quickly. Soft skills will always be needed.”

At the regional level, a consensus is emerging across the Arab world that there's merit to learning together, sharing best practices, leveraging a country's capacity by working and learning with others. The action plan envisages a network of centers (see graphic) all linked to national institutions, where research can be commissioned, training can take place, global knowledge can be adapted and disseminated. Teacher training will be remodeled at one of these centers.

Rewarding professionals

Earlier thinking put teacher training at the center but that's too narrow, Ezzine points out. There are a dozen policies to get right from hiring to managing, rewarding, encouraging good behavior, professionalization. “Nobody has a recipe for this in a political context with strong teacher unions,” he adds. “Thus the role of institutions which can have regional influence like the Queen Rania Academy of Teacher Advancement, for example, as a potential focal point, a center of excellence for this particular aspect of the mix.”

A second center will focus on research and evaluation to build the quality of education and the ability to measure it, a third will look at curriculum development and 21st Century skills and a fourth the critical underpinning of all this, early childhood education and the associated health needs.

ALECSO, headquartered in Tunis, is envisaged in the role of coordinator and observatory, a hub for these different centers of excellence.

From the World Bank’s perspective, the reason this work falls under the umbrella of the Arab World Initiative is the critical knowledge-sharing aspect of collaboration. "We don't have ready-made solutions, clear recipes,” says Ezzine. “We need to work together, learn together. If countries bring their efforts together to say determine the key 21st Century skills and how to teach them, we can get there. If we work alone, we will not."

He stresses the huge advantage of the Arab world to make collaboration work: a common language, a common culture and that there are strong emerging examples of this advantage working in Latin America already. “Learning together and augmenting the knowledge every country brings to the table can help everyone face some very complicated and tricky issues,” he says. “The World Bank is not really a knowledge broker in this because we don't claim to know the answers. We are rather knowledge catalysts."
(© 2011 The World Bank Group, All Rights Reserved)

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