TUNESS Chart of the Week (TCW), Monday April 01, 2013
“Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation”, JFK has once said. Using the recent survey conducted by the OECD we constructed the above dashboard to highlight the performance of certain education systems worldwide (75 countries) including Tunisia.
The purpose of those regular surveys, as pointed out by the OECD, is to be able to monitor over an extended period of time the evolution of the education systems and assess their quality, equity and efficiency.The present short note is a first contribution (which will be followed by more in-depth analysis from our team over the next period), toward a clear understanding of the underlying factors that explain the performance of local schools in the country. Understanding those factors (whether economic, social and/or political) will undoubtedly help in designing the appropriate public policy necessary to tackle the root of the problems and to ensure that our students are benefiting starting from their young ages from adequate conditions of schooling to help them succeed in their life.
Mean Score of Tunisian students in Science compared to their peers in the world
As of 2009, the three indicators assessing the performance of 15-year-old students in the key areas of education that is, Reading, Science and Mathematics point unfortunately toward a lower scoring of the Tunisian students. These different scores fall consistently at the lowest quartile of the range suggesting a relatively limited capacity of our educated youth to meet certain international standards of performance in their education. It’s interesting to notice (not shown in the chart) that according to the result of this survey, girls outperform boys in reading skills in every participating country, while boys outperform girls in mathematics by a larger margin than for instance in the case of science. Overall, the ranks of top-performing students are equally distributed between girls and boys. The gender gap that was frequently found in past surveys have thus significantly narrowed in the recent years which has contributed toward more equality between the two sexes in both schooling and professional environment in particular for more developed countries.
Mean score of Tunisian students in Mathematics compared to their peers in the world
There are many reasons that prevent Tunisian students from achieving optimal performance. One of those reasons is the high number of pupils per teacher in elementary schools which we believe is substantially limiting the time and attention our young students are receiving as part of the effective transfer of knowledge and the improvement of their comprehension and memorization capacity.
As can be seen in the chart below, while this ratio remains outside the alarming zone in the case of Tunisia and is currently averaging around 17:1(due, inter alia, to recent changes in the demographic trend in the country and also as a result of the construction of several schools in particular in inland regions) a comparative analysis using the peer group that took part in this survey reveals that Tunisia continues to have relatively high ratio. As we stated above, while this factor is by no means the only reason explaining the underperformance of our students in their schooling environment, one cannot ignore the findings of numerous empirical studies that have demonstrated a negative correlation between the size of classroom (in terms of the number of students) and the learning performance of a given student.
Mean Score of Tunisian students in Reading compared to their peers in the world
We end this note by recalling that while no one can argue with the significant achievement our country has done since independence in terms of improving its schooling and education systems, recent studies show that the road is still long ahead for us before we bring the performance of our young students to the level of their international peers. Today the big challenge facing local authorities is to be able to secure a decent work for a growing educated young generation that unfortunately despite the academic degrees continue to lack some required skills that is necessary for this young generation to compete in a global environment with much more prepared international labor force. To achieve this goal, public policy should start giving more importance to securing the adequate level of human and financial resources available to schools in particular in inland regions. The latter have been left in the past decades outside the scope of the development process of the country. The authorities should also put in place more efficient tools to tackle some of the socio-economic problems relating to the backgrounds of certain students which multiple reports have unequivocally demonstrated their impact on the school dropout rates, student performances and juvenile delinquency, to name only few. Last but not least, national authorities should have the vision and the courage to explore some alternative and creative ways of youth education by “learning” from some of the best practices that have been successfully implemented in more advanced countries. To continue with some of the educational techniques from the 60’s or the 70’s is simply no longer acceptable given all the changes that have been taking place in the society and around the world.
Do classroom conditions impact the performance of students?
Chart prepared byTUNESS Research team
Data source:OECD (PISA Survey 2009) and Worldbank