Reinventing school: Towards a knowledge-based society

Egypt's policy making is suffering from major dissonance. In spite of repeated statements by policy makers that emphasize the importance of education, there is a significant gap between the aspirations and promises of consecutive governments and the actual improvements taking place.

This article presents an attempt to describe and analyze the deeply rooted issues concerning education in Egypt, with recommendations on how policy should be shaped and prioritized to effect real change in the ways that we learn, teach and manage the education institution. It is not merely a description of the obvious, in terms of what is wrong with education, but more a beneath the iceberg exploration of why it is so bad and how it might be fixed.

Parents, teachers, students and policy makers are all aware of the following symptoms:

• The “Chalk and Talk” method: The majority of school teachers still use rote learning as their main method of teaching, where students are forced to memorize information rather than develop skills and acquire knowledge based on curiosity.
• Private Tutoring: Estimated to be worth at least LE9 billion, private tutoring has become a social phenomenon in the educational system; a parallel system by which teachers make much higher incomes than in schools. Egyptian families spend a significant portion of their incomes on tutoring to make up for poor teaching in schools and to prepare their children for their end of year exams, which is the most important assessment tool in the system.
• Under-use of infrastructure: Successful efforts by the government to increase enrolment rates — especially in primary schools — in the 1990s, were not matched by a proportional increase in investment in infrastructure, resulting in overcrowding. It is reported that in some classes in the more heavily populated classes, such as in Giza, classes reach one hundred and twenty students per class.
• Underpaid teachers: A study done by the Independent Syndicate of Teachers noted that the average salary of a teacher working with a temporary contract in a private school is LE250. UNESCO and the World Bank set an average fair wage of US$750.
• Limited education of teachers: Teacher training and development has also diminished a great deal.

Given the number of previous attempts by policy makers, civil society organizations and public figures to improve education, it is essential to understand the reasons behind such failures and work on the root causes of the problem.

Through deploying the Pareto principle (the famous 80/20 rule that claims that 80 percent of the outputs of a task/project are usually caused by 20 percent of the inputs), the following issues are believed to be the root causes for the failure of education in Egypt:

• Poor governance, authority and jurisdiction: The responsibility for education is distributed over more than twenty-two governmental entities, with blurred responsibilities between the various authorities at national and local levels. This produces conflicts of interest, misaligned strategies and problems with resource allocation and policy implementation.
• Decision making and autonomy: In 2003, the then Minister for Education Hussein Kamel Baha Eddin justified the state’s dominant role in the instruction of its citizens. He said the state is responsible for socialization and education, which should “enhance national unity” and the “cohesion of social constructs” within society.
• Government spending and the poor allocations of resources: There is a significant gap in spending — in absolute terms and in relation to the budget for education in Egypt and the international average, even compared with other Arab countries, especially those with higher performance levels in education. The decision to spend more money on education isn’t just related to how wealthy a country is, but on political decisions regarding priorities, such as funding health services, subsidies and national defense. Governance and budget planning/spending issues should not be examined separately.

Vivien Stewart, a long time expert on educational development, wrote a book titled, “A World Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation: An extensive study of best practices around the world,” in which she identifies the 10 best practices shown to empirically improve education. They are as follows:

1. “Long-Term Vision:” Leaders should create long-term visions for educational systems.

2. “Sustained Leadership:” Being inclusive and involving all stakeholders in problem solving, decision making and solution implementation.

3. “Ambitious Standards:” A “bottom-up” approach with regards to setting standards that allow municipalities to heed the peculiarities of their context and not become crushed between their own reality and high expectations.

4. “Commitment to Equity:” “Equitable funding,” having “common high expectations” for all students, and ensuring “high-quality teachers in every school.” She gives an example of Brazil, where the Federal government adopted an approach to rewarding high performing schools with bonuses, but not penalizing the lowest performing schools (and sometimes giving them additional funding). The rationale behind this was so that students would not be penalized twice, as variables such as socioeconomic status, the economic performance of their locality, among others, significantly affect the educational process and hence the performance of students.

5. “High-Quality Teachers and School Leaders:” A successful education system must seek ways to “attract, prepare, support, reward, retain, and advance high-quality teachers” and school leaders.

6. “Alignment and Coherence:” Policies are frequently set without providing the necessary resources and support system to implement them successfully, which creates inconsistencies and gaps. Stewart proposes that the way to achieve consistency is through aligning all aspects of the educational process, be they curriculum, teacher training or professional development, around syllabi, in order to help stakeholders achieve synergy and high levels of collaboration.

7. “Intelligent Accountability:” Centralized systems of performance management have been used by countries with poor educational quality. Stewart highlights multiple ways in which such transparency can be achieved.

8. “Effective Use of Resources:” Stewart discovered that most of the highest performing educational systems have “modest expenditures” but spend money differently. For instance, they do not allocate as many resources to “buildings, sports, administrative positions or separate special educational functions.” Also, spending is equitable for all schools and targeted towards those with special and customized needs. Although she makes a point of saying that higher spending does not necessarily mean higher performance, she still maintains “resources do matter.”

9. “Student Motivation and Engagement:” Finding the right formula to motivate and incentivize students, both through “intrinsic” and “external” motivating factors, is crucial for a successful education system. Every country has its own ways of motivating students through a combination of cultural and socioeconomic values.

10. “Global and Future Orientation:” An important approach that the highest performing educational systems have is preparing their students for the 21st Century, involving both mindset and skills.

It is imperative to perceive the aforementioned list as a pyramid structure, where each point provides a foundation for the following one and acts as a prerequisite for policy success. For instance, devising a policy to work on all the points before creating a long-term vision and creating a governance structure that enables sustained leadership would not only curtail efforts, but would possibly lead to more harm, as immense resources will be spent in vain and give the impression that repairing the education system is a far-fetched matter.

The involvement and empowerment of all interested stakeholders is the most important factor in the success of any future intervention that aims to provide alternatives to the current system, or even introduce minor reforms.