Public education in my country is BROKEN

LETAIEF YASSINE
Nov 7 · 7 min read

Education in Tunisia is a big deal! or at least we say so.

The conventional wisdom in my country is that public education is a national asset because the country’s main source of wealth is its human capital. However, I believe that our public education system is broken and that we should as a nation take urgent action to transform it into a real growth engine.

What do we expect from our schools?

I believe that the most important skills to acquire at school are Learning to Learn and complex problem solving. This is critical because in most situations “that matter” no one has the answer already figured-out for you. You need to adapt what you know, explore new ideas, invent or learn to use new tools to solve the problem at hand.

Skills like creative thinking, data analysis, formulating a problem accurately and communicating findings clearly are not at all “nurtured” in our public schools in their current state.

What is wrong with our Education right now?

Photo of colored lockers in a school —  Photo by moren hsu on Unsplash
Photo of colored lockers in a school —  Photo by moren hsu on Unsplash
Photo by moren hsu on Unsplash

The content: school curriculum is boring, outdated and repetitive

There is one core characteristic of the national education program through the 13 years of school: Repetition!

From Literature to geography to math, the methods used are old and the content itself is quite boring and repetitive to say the least. In the meantime, core competencies are not well developed: most students are not well written, and most students have major issues in verbal communication in their mother tongue let alone other languages. Debating, conveying and nuancing complex ideas with ease remains out of reach for most students.

To take math as an example, courses are very calculus intensive and many courses are repeated endlessly through the years: trigonometry, space geometry or function analysis are basic examples of this phenomenon. A more detailed study of the mathematics curriculum will certainly prove that there is ample room for optimizing the content and helping students understand the essence of mathematical thinking not just applying some formulas mindlessly.

The space: classrooms are in poor condition

Classrooms around the country are not all the same, however there are many schools in dire need of maintenance and modernization. The blackboard is often unusable, and the seats and tables of the students are very old. Schools without electricity, running water and clean toilets are not as rare as we want them to be. The classrooms are too cold in the winter because of poor/no isolation. No collaborative work spaces are to be found anywhere. Access to computers is also not homogeneous and not guaranteed.

The timing: school schedule has very long hours

Basic and secondary education span 13 years (6+3+5) in comparison to 12 years or less in most countries, with no ability for high performance students to skip levels. The Tunisian system is also atypical because it has a very short school year — around 8 months of actual school days — and a very long school day: students spend around 8 hours per day sitting in classrooms. We need to ask ourselves how much of that 8-hour content got into the student’s brain? I would argue, not a lot but making a quantified statement on this topic requires a rigorous investigation and extensive data gathering and analysis effort.

The people: students, teachers, and parents in disconnect

Interactions between teachers and students are most of the time one way: emitter -recipient. I would say, this holds true for at least 80% of the in-class time. You are expected as a student to copy in your notebook what the teacher says or writes on the board and then give back what you have “learnt” during the exam. This is an over-simplification, but the core of the process is really based on this idea. Parents are mostly absent from the whole process and mainly get involved when they receive the score sheet of their children or when they are requested to come to school when their child is in some trouble. They are not heard, nor do they make the effort to be heard and involved in the school life. Culturally in Tunisia, this is not something that parents do but maybe they should think about what they can do in schools to make the learning experience of their children more enjoyable and more efficient.

The money: rising costs and declining quality

Public education is supposed to be free in Tunisia but increasingly students are taking private tuition courses. It is common for a student to be taking these private (and costly $$$) courses in two to three subjects, for example: Math, Science and French. These courses can represent a large portion of the parent’s monthly income. The rise of private tuition in Tunisia is a complex phenomenon because it is caused by an aggregation of many structural issues but can be boiled down to this: The sharp decline in quality of the courses provided in public schools incentivizes students and parents to seek complements in the form of these costly (and lucrative for teachers) private courses.

The results: poor Performance in PISA tests and TIMSS tests

The Performance of Tunisia compared to other nations is not something to be proud of in international bench marking tests, for example in the 2011 TIMSS Mathematics benchmark (which is the last one Tunisia participated in) we are always near the bottom of the ranking as you can verify for yourself in this detailed report. Here you have a link to the 2015 PISA results tool. With this tool I compared Tunisia with the OECD average and generated the graph below. As you can see, Tunisia does very poorly in Science, Mathematics and Reading compared with the OECD average.

Tunisia vs OECD Average performance in PISA 2015 results
Tunisia vs OECD Average performance in PISA 2015 results
Tunisia vs OECD Average performance in PISA 2015 results

What transformational measures can we take?

The picture painted above of our educational system is not a bright one. Sure, some of aspects of this image are to be backed with more data and clear metrics — if they are publicly available — but I believe it is quite close to reality. So, if this is the actual situation, it becomes clear that serious transformational actions should be defined and executed urgently. Coming up with these actions is obviously a difficult task in itself. It requires a collaborative effort from many stake-holders, but I think that some actions are quite intuitive already:

· Reduce to a maximum the amount of non-essential subjects, chapters and topics to keep the curriculum as light and focused as possible! Less IS more. This will make the student more able to digest, understand the content that is thrown at him/her and will provide him/her also with extra time to practice sports, read books, socialize, or simply go out and have fun. In addition, it will reduce the need for private tutoring and relief the parents from this heavy financial burden.

· Give students time and context to problem solve, explore, innovate in-class and outside of the class, both individually and in groups. Being a simple receiver of a static content and “giving it back” in exams is not the skill we need to build an innovation-based economy, country and culture.

· Provide students with the opportunity to verbally communicate and present the results of their work. Individual presentations and group presentations are equally important. Offering a space for debate and free exchange of ideas within the classrooms is a healthy choice that will allow critical thinking skills to “grow” in the young minds and make critical thinking a second nature.

· Build IT systems to give students a voice, give teachers a voice and bring back the parents into the loop, some of those systems can be as simple as a mailing list to start with.

· Take a Data driven approach in following the performance of the system both at macro level and micro level: national exams result per region, per city, per school can be a first estimator of success. Having these key performance indicators available to the decision makers as internal reporting dashboards and to the public as website APIs for maximum transparency can help all of us have informed decisions. These dashboards can be a way to reduce in-efficiency and improve “success rates”.

· Be aware that national exams are only a part of the image. In a connected world where the best ideas compete at a global level we must constantly measure and improve ourselves against other nations. Unified testing such as PISA and TIMSS tests are a good way of doing that. Participate regularly in African and International math, Physics and informatics Olympics is also a good way to measure where our top students stand against other nations in these subjects and should be surveyed closely.

To sum up

We must be vigilant with time: Education is the business of shaping the minds of the future. This cannot be done with outdated tools, content and methodology. We must be honest with ourselves, face the facts and acknowledge that the situation is dire. Only at that moment we can sit together and define our goals for the future of Education in Tunisia. This will shape our vision of what schools should be and what they should do. Once the vision is clear, decisions must be made then rigorously and quickly executed to build an educational system worthy of our aspirations.

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