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Ingredients for successful educational policy

Ingredients for successful educational policy
Hossam Badrawi
The ingredients for the success of any educational policy must depend on a number of foundations, the most important of which are:
Education and learning are two continuous processes, starting from birth until the end of life.. However, formal education represents its most important links, and plays the main role in providing the individual with communication skills, knowledge of language, mathematics, arts, computers, the ability to obtain information, self-learning and behaviors related to all of that and the ability to adapt. with future variables.
The development of education is a quiet and gradual process, and it should not happen suddenly, and it is necessary to pave the way for it between implementers and beneficiaries, but this should not hinder the importance of speed of movement in changing the ways of central administration, enabling the management of educational areas and schools, modernizing their methods and developing and modifying their responsibilities (decentralization). Starting with education and health care).
Also, the development of education in the Egyptian society should not be isolated in any way from the development taking place in the systems and means of learning in the whole world. And we have to remember that the school is still the basic unit of education, and we have to develop its existence and concept, and the teacher is its living cell, and its management is its nervous system, and any development must depend on the teacher’s preparation, as he is the first development maker and is his means, and his conditions must be reviewed. Social and material and work to raise his literary position in society.
Wisdom says that “the level of education in any nation is not above the level of its teachers.”
Every success must have a strategy, and in nations with a large population such as Egypt, it must be gradually implemented and a critical amount of achievement must be achieved. It has a self-motivating force for the rest of society that makes it desire the same success, and the gradual development must be legally protected.
Sometimes societies create challenges for themselves and drown in them, and consume the energy of the state, for example, the challenge of the bottleneck of secondary education, and overcoming it, in my opinion, is based on providing places for all students in higher education and making the supply wider than the demand.. We have an orientation and strategy that preserves the rights of Young people in learning.
In order to achieve the vision of developing education in Egypt, we must take into account the importance of accurately defining the current state of education in a comparative perspective with what is going on around us at the regional and global levels, honestly, and not to satisfy oneself or satisfy the political leadership, and that this is done within a framework of responsibility supported by an educational policy Transparency, announced and realistically activated in a decentralized manner, within a known time frame, with constructive evaluation accountability from stakeholders and the media, and respect for agreed-upon values ​​that allow building a normal conscience for young people who are proud of their country and have hope for their future.
I repeatedly stress the importance of sustaining adherence to a stated benchmark and strategy, which are reviewed every number of years. In the vision of development, we suggested the formation of a higher education council to ensure the sustainability of the application, no matter how governments change.
Within the framework of this vision, we must shift to digital as an integrated intellectual approach in management, teaching, assessment and follow-up. Everyone has to think digitally, interact digitally and acquire knowledge digitally or else we will be out of the global competition.
Since the central examinations represent a societal challenge, the use of student assessment can be a means to support development rather than an end in itself nor a problem. Science confirms that the foundations and philosophy of evaluation do not change with the change of its method, because it depends on international standards, which are:
Validity: that is, the exam actually measures what is required to be measured according to the specified curriculum.
– Reliability: that is, the exam gives the same results to students even if its methods change.
Justice, equity and equal opportunities.
The perception of the concept of evaluation has changed, so we see it as a description instead of a performance measurement, a business file instead of a score for an instantaneous measurement in a specific time, a constructivist rather than a judgmental one.
In fact, success in exams is an indication of the success of the school and the teacher, not the student, because all students and students have the ability to succeed if they are well educated.
We must admit that the transition from vision and policy to implementation always faces new developments, and that we must stand in front of them, confront them and discuss them with reason and objectivity, striving to overcome them, to reach the desired results, and we must share with the community in understanding these challenges and persistence on development policies So that we can move from the place where we are standing to the place we are going.
Among the challenges are:
(First): Weak society’s confidence in the official government educational institutions, the emergence of parallel irregular patterns of the educational system outside the school, and the large spread of private lessons.
(Second): Weak confidence in the main pillar of the educational process, which is the teacher, the decline in his social capacity, and the reduction of his powers in evaluating and evaluating the student.
It should be noted that the decline of teacher leadership and the decline of the enlightenment role of the school comes at the forefront of the challenges that must be faced.
(Third): The low degree of language proficiency, including Arabic, the poor level of mathematics and science, and the reluctance of young people to specialize in them.
(Fourth): The volume of student activities is reduced or absent in many cases, with all the negative meanings that build the personality.
Fifthly: The existence of a large gap in the educational curricula and their failure to follow the acceleration in knowledge, and the necessity of linking them with the needs of society, the labor market, and the technological development taking place in the world.
Sixth: The unprecedented geographical spread of schools all over Egypt, including its positive availability, but it constitutes a major challenge in centrally managing them, and extremely difficult to raise their level and evaluate their performance.
(Seventh): The presence of more than one study period in about 20% of schools, and consequently the decrease in school hours and the noticeable increase in the phenomenon of students’ absence, especially in the secondary stage, which marginalizes the role of the school in building the students’ personality and wastes the educational value of its existence.
(Eighth): Not dealing with politics
Positively with stakeholders to be partners and not enemies… with the central ministry alone responsible for bringing about and managing change, from its point of view, and without a declared strategy.
(Ninth): Inadequate infrastructure for digital transformation in education for students in their homes, teachers in their classrooms, and school administration that is far from digital. (Investing in providing the Internet to all schools and all homes of the poor is an investment in education).
The human factor and the lack of teacher training on digital and educational interaction will remain a major reason for the delay in development.
I believe that the slowdown in confronting these challenges with a strong will and according to a announced integrated plan will directly lead to a negative impact on the rights of children and youth through greater marginalization of the poor, and the inability of education in its current state to support positive social mobility as a direct or indirect outcome of it. It will also lead to the transfer of the most financially able groups to private and foreign education inside and outside Egypt, which may create societal imbalance and large class differences.
Assigning the poorest groups more costs than they can afford in private lessons, and public education institutions not benefiting from this private spending means many lost and unrealistic opportunities, and a negative social impact on public sentiment.
The question is: Can we get past all of that?
The answer: Yes, we can.
The most important question is: How is the application?
Some of the needs may be:
1- Providing the necessary budget and monitoring how to spend.
2- Announcing and sticking to a time-bound strategy.
3- Achieving a critical size of rapid, vertically integrated success in all development strategies in a number of governorates during the occasional application in all countries, which may require a longer time.
4- Marketing the development strategy among all stakeholders, including: service providers, students, parents and the media.
4- Starting with school principals (an important key), which requires the implementation of decentralization.
5- Commitment to the declared international quality rules.
6- Developing language, mathematics, science and technology curricula in accordance with international standards.
7- Training teachers, raising their academic level, social care for them, and the colleges they graduate from.
8- Protecting development legally and legally.
9- Creating competition between governorates, with financial and moral stimulation to enter the list of governorates that enjoy rapid vertical development.
10- Continuity and repetition of the announcement of the political determination to achieve development, and the indicators that must be reviewed with the community to ensure success.