Education in The Middle East and North Africa - Recommended Changes and Future Reforms

Recommended Changes and Future Reforms

Stephan P.Heyneman identifies six major areas for change:

1-meaningful compulsory education:

A meaningful compulsory education implies the necessity to treat 'basic education' and 'compulsory education' equally. This means that education should be universal during the period of compulsory basic education. Compulsory education needs to be universal for all children regardless of their social class, gender, or ethnic group. Such a process requires the redefinition of examinations goals. This signifies that exams need to be used as an evaluative tool rather than a means by which students are selected according to their memorization skills.

2-coherent quality assurance mechanisms:

There are four mechanisms that enable the assessment of education's quality. They include "curricular objectives, examinations and other assessment, teaching materials and classroom teaching". However, in the MENA region, schools lack the resources to facilitate fulfilling educational goals. For instance, textbooks are inadequately organized in ways that do not consider students' varying educational capabilities. Consequently, the coordination between curricular objectives, mechanisms used by teachers, and appropriate selection of examinations can be efficient in conveying a functional and coherent educational system.

3-professionalization of teachers:

In the MENA region, teachers are not selected for their competence, creativity, and teaching performance. Rather, they are identified by virtue of their educational attainment. However, salary scales do not differ between teachers at different levels of experience. This very fact has discouraged proactive improvement of teaching and subsequently has reduced the quality of teaching in general. An effective solution to such a challenge would be to introduce continuing evaluations and examinations in order to assess teachers' performance in the classroom. Instructors who succeed in these evaluative examinations may move to a higher salary scale. This process would not only motivate teachers to perform but would positively influence the quality of education in general.

4-educational materials:

In the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, there is a general consensus that that educational facilities are rare and inappropriately used. However, due to the changing nature of market demand, there is an urge necessity to provide students with professional and technical skills. Indeed, introducing computer software educational programs should be encouraged, organized and implemented. It is suggested that such a process would produce an up-to-date educational system that produces an internationally competitive labor force. Consequently, this does not only improve the quality of education but also creates a valuable and efficient work force.

5-higher education:

Most MENA countries have not changed the policies whereby they manage their higher education since the intervention times of central governments in the 1960s and 1970s. In other terms, the financing and delivery procedures have been identical for more than thirty years. This explains the reason why the quality of higher education has decreased. Nevertheless, in order to avoid such state of stagnation in higher educational institutions, there is a need to improve educational delivery materials through the use of modernized teaching strategies, raising access to higher education while providing both qualitative and structural reforms.

6-educational information:

Information about the quality of education in MENA is scarce and the available data is often inadequate and unreliable. Nevertheless, in order to be able to adapt to the global open market, governments in the region need to encourage the use of statistics and different data analysis tools that aim at uncovering the status of education for both local responsible authorities and international bodies. Such a process allows an effective assessment and evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of education in the region. Conversely, as a result of the shortage of information about these evaluative data, it is very difficult to determine the reasons for the failure of educational systems in MENA.