BY FITSUM GETACHEW
In the past several weeks there have been persistent talks about the poor results of students at the Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Exams (ESLCE) this year. Almost all talks have directed at education quality in the country.
The concerns of the citizenry may have emanated from the value they place on education for fighting poverty and other persistent challenges Ethiopians have faced. It does not take a genius to understand that a state’s prosperity certainly has its strength deep-rooted within the nation’s education system. Education is the most powerful tool states can extensively and carefully invest on to change their people. And the essence of prosperity through education is quality. It is quality education that guarantees a solid and broader foundation for national prosperity, be it economic, social or so.
Many developing states are in fact grappling with maintaining the quality of their education system. Ethiopia is no more different. Making a transition from indigenous education system to modern education in 1940, Ethiopia’s education system has passed through changes following regime and ideology changes. As the Emperor’s and Derg’s regimes fairly attempted maintaining quality, the regime before the incumbent, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Front (EPRDF), largely focused on access to education at all educational hierarchies. It is therefore during EPRDF’s 27-year long access to education scheme that quality was compromised, as many Ethiopian scholars and pedagogics researchers argue. However, the very failure of the scheme was not unearthed until in 2022, when major change was introduced to the Ethiopian National school Leaving Certificate Examination (ESLCE) and to other assessments and evaluations.
As part of a comprehensive national reform in Ethiopia’s education sector, the education minister, Biranu Nega (Prof.) introduced many quality measures to be implemented. One such a measure being implemented since 2022 is the way of designing and administering the ESLCE for 12th graders. It is a complete decisive quality measure targeted at avoiding cheating on exams which was a contagious syndrome among most Ethiopian high school students. So, students who passed through the new evaluation procedure have for the first time in more than 30 years put the pitfalls of the general education system naked.
That is why it became one of agendas of major interest for Ethiopians. The reported results are even poorer than last year’s.
While this was widely expected due to various factors left unaddressed in the name of access to education, however, few anticipated that the results would be even poorer than the previous year’s. From 896, 520 students who sat for ESLCE in the 2021/22 academic year, only 3.3 percent or 29, 909 students managed to score 350 and more. In October, 2023, even more unexpectedly, the education minister reported out of the 845,000 students who sat for the same national exam only 3.2 percent or 27,267 of them registered the passing score of 50% and above to join universities. There were some hopes of improvement.
It is now decades since there have been talks about our education system not being outstanding and that the standard has been getting poorer and poorer as depicted with the sort of graduates produced so far. Recently, a good number of graduating class students, predominantly from private higher learning institutions, have failed exit exams prepared by the Ministry of Education before witnessing clearly that the standards need to be well checked and the system overhauled.
When at a certain point in EPRDF’s rule, the number of students in Ethiopia grew to astronomic figures, there was the expectation that the country was almost to embark on a new intellectual revolution and the country would now have all the educated class it needed. However, it did not take long to find out that these graduates were not commensurate to the exact needs of the nation and that their knowledge was mostly only theoretical with little contribution to the efforts of alleviating the problems of the country.
If education does not contribute to solving some of the pressing problems of the nation, what good is purely theoretical knowledge, it was remarked. What is more, these graduates did not even have enough theoretical knowledge because the standard was poor and it was discovered that many did not carry out their studies as they should have.
A plethora of studies have identified that the overall education system has faced a serious challenge due to such factors as inadequate number of qualified teachers, deficiency in facilities like conducive classrooms, infrastructure, textbooks and furniture; irrelevant curriculum, learning process, and inadequate funding, all of which have had a great direct impact on quality education in high schools and beyond.
For instance, recent report by ministry of education revealed that among the 47,000 primary and secondary schools evaluated against standard measures, only four were able to meet the established standards. Accordingly, over 85 percent of the primary and secondary schools were classified as far below standard.
Some other studies on the causes of this shortcoming discovered that the whole education system had more serious structural and curricular problems than we were ready to admit. It was discovered that the way the lessons were imparted was not up to standard and the way exams have been managed had its own problems. Teachers themselves were found to be not as prepared as they should have, beginning from the lower classes up to the tertiary levels. In short, it was a chain of events that have contributed to this situation we are now in. Evidently, no one had bothered to check the standards of the quality of education that was imparted in schools beginning from the elementary grades.
There were however persistent voices that were heard protesting against the level of education that was being administered and that often it was also used for political purposes in a way to support the prevailing ideology of the incumbent instead of directing the system to deal directly with the most urgent society’s problems.
The recent discussions on what should be done to reform this system and introduce new ways of administering education in the country have gained momentum when parents came to learn that their children failed in the exams and could not advance to universities. In fact, the reports revealed that only about three out of a hundred were lucky enough to reach that objective. That is why many were heard recommending to face the facts in real urgency to resolve the problems before the challenge turns to an enormous societal crisis.
The country needs more and more educated class because it is engaged in multifaceted development endeavors, with priority to its economic development. Its more than one hundred twenty million people cannot afford to remain stagnant while the population continues to grow and there are economic imperatives that require new highly qualified personnel to nurture it. Ethiopia is a dynamic society and its dynamism depends highly on its intellectual resource first and foremost.
Therefore, the recent reform that has begun in the education sector is timely and commendable. The emphasis the ministry has placed on quality education should be supported by all stakes since quality education is the base for the aspired prosperity in the country. Uniting against poor education and welcoming the commenced reform will certainly guarantee Ethiopians a prosperous country; or failing to do so will force them to endure still development. It is good to see that the Ministry of Education has begun to take meaningful measures to pinpoint where the problem lies and treat it. We can only remark that the sooner it does so, the better.