COUNTRY PROFILES

School Improvement & Turnaround in the Arab Region

Hala Al Khalifa, PhD Candidate, Department of Learning & Leadership

Across the Arab region efforts towards improving schools have been heightened by unsatisfactory student standard achievements and the collective realization that schools have been failing to reach their most important goal – that of student learning (Al-Barwani, 2011). Schools across the Middle East face key challenges that can be summarized by three main points according to the UNDP (2016): an increase in educational disparity between countries; a persistent decline in the quality of education (despite a constant increase in per capita education expenditure) and finally a mismatch and gap between labor market needs and educational outputs.

School turnaround in the Arab region is a relative concept because the improvement and development of schools across the region is still an ongoing issue. Furthermore, in the majority of Arab states and more specifically countries of the GCC, planning and decisions related to the school curriculum, syllabus, teacher recruitment, training and examinations are highly centralized in ministries of education. The hierarchies established in a centralized system ultimately give little power or accountability to teachers or school communities (Chapman & Miric, 2009). This centralization makes school turnaround a difficult notion to achieve on a school level, and instead is mainly linked to overall systemic education reform and school improvement initiatives across the districts or governorates.

Educational reform in Arab countries, as mentioned previously, is seen as the sole responsibility of governments and ministries of education and not of educators at the school level (Akkary & Rizk, 2014). Hence, planning for education reform and ultimately school turnaround and improvement is left to government officials, politicians and educational consultants. As such educators and school leaders simply act as executors of top-down educational reform initiatives without displaying a real sense of accountability in the school improvement process (El-Amine, 2005).

As educational reform and school turnaround policies are mainly rooted on perspectives taken from Western literature and practice, educators across the Arab region question their applicability in their local contexts because these reforms disregard many local values and social perspectives in education (Oplatka & Arar, 2017). Furthermore, numerous scholars argue that the majority of the current reform initiatives across the Arab region are driven by political agendas that are not linked with the priorities and needs of educational practitioners and school cultural contexts (Abi-Mershed, 2010; Akkary, 2014; Mazawi, 2009).

Over the past thirty years, countries across the Arab region have adopted neoliberal economic policies to various degrees that included privatizing state owned industries, opening up to foreign investment flows, relaxing trade barriers and reforming tax regimes (Hanieh, 2015; Morgan, 2017).

According to Bogaert (2013, p. 215) “this shift away from state-developmentalism to neoliberal governance has undermined the quality of public schools, eroded the teaching profession, and contributed to increases in social inequities”.Additionally, the shift to market oriented economic policies is linked to the emergence of an educational market place in the Arab region, the spread of privatization of education and the decrease of public expenditure on education (Hartmann, 2013; Sobhy, 2012).

Class and social inequalities are intensified when families purchase education in the form of private schools and tutoring, where parents across the Arab region believe that private schools deliver an enhanced learning environment and instruction as opposed to public schools (Buckner & Hodges, 2016; Morgan, 2017). As such socio-economic and geographic inequalities are exacerbated across the Arab region when students from disadvantaged backgrounds are concentrated in low-quality public schools while more well off students attend private schools (Jorman & Murray, 2010).

Yet while there is general agreement that the quality of education in the Middle East region poses a problem, there is little research into why this is the case (Chapman & Miric, 2009). As such teachers within the region have come under increasing scrutiny, for despite the lack of available data on education quality in the region, teachers are continually viewed as a key issue (UNDP, 2016). Classroom instruction across the GCC public schools remain largely teacher dominated with a focus on rote learning (Kirdar, 2017).

According to a study by the World Bank, as reported by Rugh (2002, p. 408):

Education in the region does not impart the higher-order cognitive skills such as flexibility, problem solving and judgment needed by workers who will face frequently changing tasks and challenges in increasingly competitive export markets. Instead, the systems teach students how to learn and retain answers to fairly fixed questions in problem situations with little or no meaningful context and thus reward those who are skilled at being passive knowledge recipients.

It is true that teacher quality and background can be highlighted as one of the main indicators of low performing schools across the region, however, not enough research into this has been established to fully confirm the notion (Akkary & Rizk, 2014; UNESCO, 2016).

In conclusion, despite the sense of urgency to improve the failing educational system across the Arab Region, reformers have to address this transformation patiently and according to their local contexts and challenges. For as Akkary and Rizk state (2014, p. 329) “Arab reformers need to allow time for the process and accept failures as opportunities to learn, remembering that it is a process that does not develop without normal growing pains and that it takes time to show results”.

References

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In this article I would like to present some of the most important consequences that left the pandemic in the educational system of my country, and how these profound challenges are at the same time a great opportunity to develop a new approach of