The former Minister of Education, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, has said the problem with Nigeria’s education system is not more funding but accountability and transparency.
She spoke at the just-concluded 3rd Lagos State Education Summit, Ezekwesili said the fundamental challenge of education in Nigeria is the many decades of poor sector governance and entrenched dysfunction with no mechanism of accountability and performance.
“For the administrators and managers of the education sector, funding is an important input that is often considered the single solution to all education system and sector problems.
The agitation is usually persuasive and while it is true that the sector does not yet have the optimal funding level, it has benefited from increase in yearly budgetary allocation to education both at the national, state and local levels.
“The fundamental challenge of education in Nigeria is the many decades of poor sector governance and entrenched dysfunction with no mechanism of accountability and performance.
Evidence supports this because in 2006, the budgetary trend for the education sector was analysed which showed an incredulous inverse relationship between more budget allocation and performance of pupils and students.
“It also showed that the more the budget of a given year to the sector, the lower the academic achievement of the students at both state and federal levels. This fuelled my resolve to lead a root and branch reform of a deeply dysfunctional system.
Therefore, if government at all levels simply chose to throw more money at a dysfunctional system rather than addressing the systemic, structural and institutional bottlenecks in the sector; it will ultimately discover that throwing more money at a problem does not solve it but lead to increased well-funded dysfunctionality.”
Commending the Lagos State Government for sustained education reforms which has led to some early positive results, the former Minister of Education said the nation still confronts a number of dysfunctions in the education sector.
She listed such dysfunctions to include low enrolment, completion and progression rates at all levels of education; low numbers in school and poor quality of learning outcomes; inappropriate curriculum for the needs of a modern society which seeks to create a competitive and efficient economy; schools are not well managed and are not operating as effective education service deliverers; the education sector displays serious inequities in terms of gender (females are under-represented in both pupil and teacher numbers), geographical zones, states, local governments, and schools.
There is a sharp divide between rural and urban areas and between the Northern and Southern states.
Others are insufficient attention being directed towards early childhood care and education with insufficiently prepared teachers to handle this age group; basic education is failing to provide many pupils with adequate levels of literacy, numeracy and life skills; the sector suffers from and helps to create socio-cultural problems, and this is most evident in the prevalence of examination malpractice and cultism; planning, management and monitoring is made ineffective through weak systems of data collection, analysis and dissemination.
Dissatisfaction with the public education system is leading to the expansion of private schools with a consequential exodus of influential stakeholders in the state sector; political intrigues impeding education reform, leading to non-implementation of vision and plans; poor governance and management of sector, ineffective and inefficient allocation of resources; weak information base, among others.
Continuing, she said “Lagos is actually modeling the right approach to education reform and the trend is positive and I applaud the early results so far recorded.
I was very proud to have led my former team at the World Bank in the partnership that resulted in the Lagos Eko Education project.
“Specifically, the two outstanding results are improvements in pass marks continued in the externally-administered WASSCE examinations.
June 2012 was regarded as the litmus test for the Project as the first cohort of senior secondary school year 3 students under the Lagos Eko Project sat for the externally administered WASSCE examinations in June 2012.
38.53% of students who sat for the examination obtained five credits and above including English Language and Mathematics as against 10.41% at baseline in 2008.
“Public-private partnerships in the five Government Technical Colleges (GTC) with grants intended to improve the quality of teaching in the nation and skills development at the technical colleges and make them more relevant to the demands for employment, entrepreneurship and further education.”
0 comments :
Post a Comment