Priorities for Educational Reforms
in the Middle East and North Africa Region

by Sue Berryman

For a small number of countries, there remain serious shortfalls in the provision of basic educational inputs (for example, in Yemen) or in access to primary and lower-secondary education (Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Filling these gaps should be an education priority for these countries. But a problem that all countries in the region share — and one that will increasingly claim the attention of policymakers — is the poor quality of education. By "quality," we mean the learning performance of the educational system (relative to its learning goals), as measured by students’ learning achievements.

The greatest current obstacle to efforts to improve quality is a lack of information: Countries in the region have little evidence on the quality of their educational systems, measured against either national learning objectives or international standards. Only Jordan, Oman and, to a certain extent, Egypt have attempted to assess the performance of their students relative to national learning standards. A few countries have participated in international assessments of students’ learning achievements in mathematics and science. The results have not been reassuring: Both types of assessments show mediocre levels of learning for the region’s students.

One approach to diagnosing the source of these educational problems is to analyze what children learn — in particular, by studying secondary school exit examinations for what they indicate about the content and performance expectations embedded in school curricula. A recent analysis compared exam questions in mathematics and biology in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia with questions on the French baccalaurŽat examinations. The results offer some clues to the sources of quality problems. In mathematics, the MENA tests indicated a conception of school mathematics as a subject largely devoted to the recognition and repetition of definitions and theorems and the performance of algorithms and other routine procedures. Tasks evaluating examinees’ abilities in problem-solving were largely absent from the region’s mathematics tests, whereas the French baccalaurŽat assessed students’ abilities to solve, predict, verify, generalize and apply mathematical principles to real-world problems.

In biology, all of the tests from the region try to evaluate a very large array of topics, many more than those evaluated in tests in the French sample. Given their broad scope, it is not surprising that these tests embodied very limited performance expectations; students were expected primarily to understand and remember simple facts, with some attention given also to the use of scientific principles to explain phenomena. By contrast, the French baccalaurŽat focused on higher-order tasks — mastering complex and thematic information, abstracting and deducting scientific principles, constructing and using models, designing investigations, and interpreting investigation data. Together, these assessment data suggest that performance expectations for students in the region are low, students fail to meet even these low expectations, and teachers in the regional use traditional pedagogical methods that discourage active learning.

Quality reforms should aim at generating the types and levels of skill that students will need in an internationally competitive economy. The greatest need is for higher-order cognitive skills, such as those in learning, problem-solving and making judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Countries in the region will have to take several steps before they can effectively pursue the goal of educational quality.

Measure student performance and other characteristics of the system. This step requires conducting routine national assessments and participating in international ones; improving educational statistics to make them policy-relevant and accurate; and routinely evaluating reforms for the effects of new policies on the educational system.

Build a diagnostic and experimental capacity that will allow learning about how to improve student achievement. This diagnostic and experimental capacity refers to a country’s ability to understand how raw inputs are transformed into learning. The cultural dimension present in any learning process implies that each country should be responsible for diagnosing the reasons and developing the remedies for weak achievement. Policy analysis, applied research, experimental trials and evaluations should help reveal why students perform the way they do and how to leverage improvements. Of course, this cultural dimension does not prevent countries from learning from each other’s mistakes and successes. In fact, it is highly desirable for MENA policymakers and analysts to cultivate a dense network of working relationships with education policymakers and analysts in other developing and developed countries.

Hold the system’s actors accountable for student learning. In MENA, accountability for learning is typically assigned to the student, not to the system. Thus, the quality of education is not seen as a property of the system (measured by the learning achievements of its students), but as a property of the students (measured by their performance on selection examinations). Accountability for the adults in the systems seems to mean solely conformity to rules, edicts and regulations. To promote quality improvement, policymakers will need to shift accountability from rules to student learning. In the process, they must keep in mind that basic education is embedded in a larger education system, which in turn reflects the country’s economy, labor market structures and configurations of power. Levers for improving quality can lie outside the basic education system itself, as distortions in other parts of the system can undermine efforts to improve basic education.

Gaining some analytic control over their educational system lets a country’s policymakers identify and take actions that can plausibly improve children’s learning achievements. To make strides in this direction, policymakers in the region must face the challenge of generating reliable information on the quality of their countries’ educational systems.

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