Abstract
In 2001 the State of Qatar decided to take the lead, in a region where education does not often make it to the top of the policy agenda, and reform its K-12 public education with the goal of building a world-class system that prepares its students to enter distinguished universities and compete in the global market. “The project…reflects the region’s aspirations and its commitment to building a sustainable future for generations to come” (Brewer et al. Education for a New Era: Design and Implementation of K-12 Education Reform in Qatar. Doha, Qatar: Rand-Qatar Policy Institute, 2007). This is how Dr. Sheikha Al-Misnad—then the president of Qatar University and a member of the Supreme Education Council, described Qatar’s grand reform project, “Education for a new Era.” The project had the highest political leadership in the young emirate backing it up through personal monitoring, unlimited resources, and a solid political will.
After more than 13 years after launching the reform, there is one common sentiment that underpins the reaction of the educators interviewed for this chapter: bitterness. There is bitterness about what their dream project could have achieved but hasn’t, as well as bitterness about their genuine efforts and good intentions that have been misinterpreted or forgotten in the midst of the public outrage that accompanied the educational process during those years. All of the initial reform policies have been completely reversed after causing unprecedented social controversy and after years of policy instability. Whether this policy reversal indicates the reform’s failure or whether it indicates a retreat from a reform agenda, in both cases it is an indication that something went wrong at one or several points.
The chapter draws a portrait of the K-12 educational scene in Qatar and its development over the years. It then concentrates on the internal processes and governance structures of the system during the 2001–2014 period.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time it used to be called Wizarat Al-Ma’arif. Over the years, this name has changed several times.
- 2.
Brewer et al. (2007) mention those attempts in a couple of lines without giving any details about their content and the circumstances that surrounded them.
- 3.
Provided during the interview with Dr. Abulaziz Al-Horr (May 13, 2014), a prominent Qatari Educator. When he participated in developing the strategy, Dr. Al-Horr was the Director of the Development Office in the Ministry of Education.
- 4.
Principal of Omar bin Al-Khattab Educational Complex (Boys Scientific School) since 2002.
- 5.
Principal of Moza bint Mohammed Elementary and Preparatory School for girls. Moza bint Mohammed started as a Developed School for the elementary level in 2001. Shiekha Al-Monsoori was the founding principal of the school. Later on the school was converted to become an Independent School in 2008.
- 6.
Principal of Jo’an bin Jassim Elementary School for boys. Jo’an bin Jassim started as a Developed School in 2001 and was converted to become an Independent School later on.
- 7.
Concluding that the previous attempts have all failed might not be very precise, especially since most of these attempts were not fully realized. The 1990, 1996, and 1997 attempts, along with the 2000 ten-year strategy, remained in the initiation/design phase, but no decision was made to allocate the necessary resources and to start implementing. The partial reform attempts like the Scientific Schools and the Developed Schools (Al-Madaris Al-Mutawara), on the other hand, started implementation in 1999 and 2001 respectively, which means it was premature to evaluate their success or failure when the Education for a New Era designers started their study in 2001. In fact these two models are still, as these lines are being written, considered among the best performing schools in the public system. This is not to suggest that prior reform attempts were necessarily going to succeed had there been enough resources and time, but rather to suggest that the conditions, tools, and criteria of “evaluation” were somehow absent when the judgment on the previous reform attempts was made.
- 8.
Also, what was known as System Support Organizations were assigned to the reformed schools to provide support (Zellman et al. 2009).
- 9.
The SEC provides financial allotments to independent schools (public schools) per pupil. So, if the parents decide to send their kids to an independent school instead of a private one, the financial support for which the student is eligible goes to this independent school. On the other hand, not all private schools, at the moment, are eligible to receive SEC vouchers.
- 10.
The descriptive part which describes the original model of the reform in this section is mainly based on RAND’s monograph (Brewer et al. 2007), which describes the reform’s design phase and the early period of the implementation phase between 2001 and 2004.
- 11.
Known as Education for a New Era or the “Independent Schools System,” as indicated earlier.
- 12.
Until 2014, when I carried out the field study, after ten years of implementation, most schools did not undertake this comprehensive school assessment more than once. These assessments include assessing teachers, facilities, curricula, and finances, which make them resource-intensive.Therefore, this might have affected the newly established SEC’s ability to carry them out regularly. One characteristic, which this chapter claims, of Qatar’s education policies during the analyzed period is instability or “over-dynamism.” “Every day there is something new,” as most interlocutors explained, which makes it hard for the systems and regulations to stabilize and start accumulating. The chapter will come back to this point in its concluding section.
- 13.
A current advisor at the office of the Minister of Education. Served as the Director of the Evaluation Institute from 2003 to 2010.
- 14.
Those implications and what they actually meant on the ground were not necessarily clear to the designers and implementers during the design and implementation phases, as will be shown in the rest of the chapter. Please refer to the “Theoretical & Practical Critique” section.
- 15.
An educator and a prominent “professional development” trainer. Operated one of the independent schools for five years.
- 16.
This vision was never realized, as will be shown in the rest of the chapter.
- 17.
When I carried out the field study in 2014, all interlocutors were referring to the principles as part of the early stages of the reform; there was a shared sense that these principles had been overridden. The chapter addresses policy reversal and counterproductive results below.
- 18.
Teachers are fundamental to the educational process. Add to this that the reform gave more authority and freedom to the teacher to play a greater and more creative role. So in other words it was inevitable for the implementation to interact with “teachers” as a main player, whether the designers decided to remain silent about it or not.
- 19.
The number of schools’ administrative staff in the same year was 2571.
- 20.
At the beginning, the legal status of the independent schools was yet another issue. Are they private entities owned by the operator and subsidized by the government, or are they government entities operated by individuals who don’t work for the government but work with it through a contract? (Al-Sayed, personal communication, May 14, 2014). At the early stages of the implementation this was not clearly decided. Staff of the contracted schools had to sign contracts with the new operators, which confused many teachers and caused anxiety among those who insisted that they work for the government and not for a private owner. The SEC then confirmed that teachers are public servants, yet many of the practices like signing a contract between the school operator and the teachers and allowing the former to specify salaries and benefits continued until the SEC centralized the recruitment and HR processes again by 2013/14.
- 21.
The public sector is dominated by Qatari national employees and like most countries, discharging public servants is not easy. Add to this what the rentier state theory perceives as the role of the public sector in redistributing the country’s wealth. According to this view, nationals in the public sector are receiving their portion of wealth, which is monopolized by a small unelected group, in the form of a monthly salary.
- 22.
A school principal. Her husband Mohamed Hilal Al-Khulaifi (February 1, 2012; 21 March 2012; 11 April 2012) published a number of articles that constitute important critique of the reform and the educational system in Qatar during the early years of the reform.
- 23.
A school principal of an elementary and a preparatory girls’ school.
- 24.
Some conservative families still don’t approve of a mixed-gender (to use the Arabic expression) workplace.
- 25.
Principal of Qatar’s Education Complex, which comprises all pre-university schooling levels from K to grade 12. The school was in the first cohort of independent schools. Al-Thawadi had been in the field of education for over 30 years.
- 26.
Jabr Al-Nu’aimi (Ph.D. in physics from Imperial College London) and Afaf Al-Mu’dadi are a husband and wife team who won the contract of one of the Independent schools in the academic year 2004/2005, but they left after a couple of years. They then decided to establish their own private school, Newton International School. Today, the school has around six branches in Qatar.
- 27.
The Minister was heading the SEC as well, through his position as the General Secretariat of the SEC.
- 28.
The founding director of the Education Institute for a year and a half. Witnessed the late planning phase and early implementation phase of the reform. Dr. Al-Emadi is currently the Director of the Social and Economic Survey Institute at Qatar University. He led several surveys that looked into education in Qatar and has thankfully provided the results of a couple of these surveys (Al-Emadi 2012a, b).
- 29.
In April 2015 the SEC announced exempting non-Qatari students from paying school fees in the public system. Due to the rapid changes in the education system in Qatar, one cannot anticipate if this decision will still be in effect after publishing this chapter.
- 30.
Please refer to the issue of hiring and firing staff that was discussed at the beginning of this section.
- 31.
This does not mean that the charter schools model in the USA is trouble-free. In fact many of the issues that appeared in the Qatari experience exist in the USA as well. Issues include gaming the system (Ravitch 2010), the massive administrative burden on teachers, and emphasizing the process over the content (Fuller 2002).
- 32.
Evidence-based decision-making became one of the used terms in the policy-making circles in Qatar. For example, it was used around 17 times in the Qatar National Development Strategy 2011–2016. Also one manifestation of this “evidence-based” growing trend in Qatar’s public policy is the unprecedented amount of data that the government is collecting and publishing about the different sectors.
- 33.
“The essence of a logic model is a narrative of what the program is targeting, how it works, and what it is trying to achieve.” (Pal 2014: 277)
- 34.
Annual standards-based assessments that all public schools had to undertake under the reform. Interestingly enough, the students’ performance baseline was determined in 2004 before finalizing the standards.
- 35.
Publishing all the results is a politically charged issue. Therefore, most interlocutors believed that the failure rates were generally higher than what was published.
- 36.
The author participated in a commissioned study in 2013 to design an arts-oriented school in Doha. The landscape survey showed that independent schools, especially starting from 2012, were receiving detailed instructions from the Education Institute, including the weekly teaching plans. This came as a reaction to the students’ weak performance.
- 37.
Principal of the technical school for boys.
- 38.
Some examples are Qatar-Finland International School, SEK International School, Sherborne Qatar, and others.
- 39.
It is somehow ironic that the policy instability and the system’s misuse by some school operators which accompanied the reform led to problems in the students’ Arabic reading and writing skills. The assessment that preceded the reform stated that the system was not producing the required English language skills, but the assessors did not seem specifically worried about the status of the students’ Arabic literacy at the time.
- 40.
There were eight years or less between the two decisions as the first batch of independent schools—reformed schools—was announced in 2004 and the decision to shift back to Arabic was made in 2012.
- 41.
At that point, the director of the International Education Office at the Supreme Education Council. Al-Tamimi had been an educator for over 40 years and was among the first generation of Qatari teachers who have ever taught in a modern school. He graduated from Dar Al-mo’alimeen, the first post-secondary institute in Qatar to prepare local teachers. Later on, he became a school principal and assumed several positions after that, such as working for the Ministry of Education and the Supreme Education Council.
- 42.
The previous director of the Education Institute. Al-Heidous served in office from 2004 to 2012; hence she oversaw most of the reform program.
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Alkhater, L.R.M. (2016). Qatar’s Borrowed K-12 Education Reform in Context. In: Tok, M., Alkhater, L., Pal, L. (eds) Policy-Making in a Transformative State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46639-6_4
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