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Quality and Public Education

Dr. Fathia El-Hamadany

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Many countries, with their various political and economic entities, seek to pay attention to education, especially public education, as it is the first early educational stage that any child in any country must be enrolled in, with the exception of the early education stage (kindergarten), which is not compulsory for all children.

In addition to the fact that public education represents the entrance to the main gate for building and advancing peoples, and that is because it is comprehensive for most of the age group (7-18), which is the target group for building peoples in any country. Given the importance of this group, it was the subject of many studies and researches that confirmed the importance of reforming public education lines to face the several technical, technological, economic, demographic and political changes that are affecting various countries of the world. Therefore, many contemporary administrative trends to reform and improve the outputs of public education have been established, and among those directions is quality management.

Quality in the educational aspect is a pivotal and contemporary trend in many countries, especially in the field of performance evaluation, development and improvement, in order to ensure the quality of the educational product. Allah has guided us to Islam, which represents quality with its teachings and directions, and what it aims to as a modern administrative term in various educational and industrial fields. The Islamic religion urged us to perfection and quality at work, and instructed us to do so in many verses of the Qur’an. The Almighty said, “The work of Allah, Who perfected all things, Who perfected all things, verily, He is well-acquainted with what you do”. (An-Naml: 88). God loves if one of you does a job to be good at it, and perfection is the work valve of the quality system.

Quality as an administrative trend appeared in the forties of the last century, and the focus was on the economic and industrial sphere in the first place, as many of those interested in quality and specialists in it see that quality and its standards are the third revolution after the industrial revolution and the technical revolution, or what is known as the computer revolution. The success of quality in the economic sphere led to appearance of many of implications and justification for the application of quality in the educational field in different levels as the most expensive human resources in the world. Among those justifications that the majority of developing countries adopted the quantum strategy to accommodate the children of the population flow to the education system. This strategy was a drain on the quality of the outputs of the educational process, the comprehensive technological revolution based on the scientific and cognitive flow, which represents a challenge to the human mind, which made societies compete in raising the qualitative level of the outputs of their educational systems, the weakness of the outputs of public education in many countries of the world, and the weakness of the infrastructure for public educational schools, the urgent need to pay attention to the student who represents the final product of the educational process, the need to invest the potentials and energies of all individuals working in the educational process and improving administrative work within educational institutions to achieve the goals with high efficiency.

Quality in education is defined as: performing work correctly according to a set of educational standards and specifications requirements to raise the quality of the educational product unit with minimal effort, cost and high efficiency.

Quality in education includes many principles, the most important of which are: Focusing on the client (the student) and trying to satisfy his current and future expectations, support the leadership at all of the lower - middle - higher levels to work to reach quality, achieving goals, encouraging employee participation and changing from authoritarian style to participatory style, delegating and granting powers to eliminate tasks in the educational institution, continuous improvement and work to provide distinguished educational services, concern for human relations and teamwork and the development of a system incentives so that it takes into account the organizational justice of the educational institution.

Thus, quality in education is a diverse management philosophy (humanitarian - educational - technical - administrative) and that to apply many processes aimed at developing and improving administrative and organizational work within the Educational organization, by defining the tasks, goals, activities, and means necessary to develop various administrative work, its levels to raise the quality of educational outcomes. This requires developing a vision that integrates all perspectives of personnel in the educational institution about the nature of educational objectives, means of achieving them and standard and behavioral levels expressed, with everyone realizing their responsibilities and duties, and the educational leadership's keenness on developing strategies to implement administrative and educational tasks to achieve pre-set and announced goals for all components of the educational process inside or outside the educational institution, in light of a leadership climate characterized by teamwork and team spirit, to achieve a high level of performance that is reflected in the quality of results (educational outcomes).

The educational quality standards focus on standards related to curriculum and subjects, standards related to teachers, standards related to school administration, standards related to financial capabilities and standards related to the relationship between the school and society. Such standards include many quantitative and qualitative indicators through which the effectiveness or failure of the quality management system in the educational institution.

 Public education represents the main tributary in developing countries to the labor market, and the only one for university education institutions in all countries of the world, and this requires many reforms and modern administrative trends, to improve the quality of these outputs in an administrative environment characterized by flexibility and transparency, working in a team spirit and optimal utilization of available resources to achieve the goals of educational institutions with the least effort and cost.

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