Studying the Problem: Preparing the Ground for Educational Reform

In late 2001, the RAND Corporation, based in Santa Monica, California, was contracted by the Qatar Government to examine its Ministry of Education-provided public education system. At that time, there seems to have been something of a collective consensus among Qatar’s leaders that: 1) the existing Ministry of Education system of public education was not producing quality educational, social and economic outcomes for Qatari learners and society as a whole; and 2) the system appeared to be out of alignment with the educational needs of a wealthy country seeking twenty first century global competitiveness. I will return to the importance of this issue in the following chapter.

The RAND Corporation is a not-for-profit institution which sees itself as helping to improve policy

and decision-making through research and analysis. RAND derives its name from research and

new development. RAND asserts that for nearly 60 years is has conducted research and analysis for

decision-makers in the public and private sectors in the US and has addressed the some of the challenges facing the nation and the world. These challenges include such critical social and economic issues as education, poverty, crime, and the environment, as well as a range of national security issues.

At the time when RAND carried out its study, Qatar’s public education system served about

100,000 learners, over two-thirds of whom attended government-financed and government- operated schools. The RAND Corporation’s study was conducted by Brewer et al. (2007: xviii).

The study reported that it found significant weaknesses in the existing Ministry of Education public education system in Qatar, viz:

 it had no vision of quality education and the structures needed to support it;

 the curriculum in Ministry schools was out-moded and emphasised rote learning and memory, leaving many learners bored and providing little opportunity for learner-teacher interaction;

 the Ministry system lacked performance indicators and there was no attempt to link learner performance with school performance;

 the scant performance information provided to teachers and administrators meant little to them because they had no authority to make changes in the schools; and

 the national investment in education in Qatar was small in relation to its national budget - teachers received low pay and little professional development, many school buildings were in poor condition, and classrooms over-crowded.

In order to address the weaknesses found in the Ministry of Education public school system, Brewer et al. (2007) proposed the following alternatives:

 a modified centralised model: a government-led system that would allow some school- level flexibility with or without parental choice of schools;

 a charter school model: a partially de-centralised and partially privatised i.e. a corporatised system. Schools operated by non-government parties could apply for and be subject to, a charter. Parents would be allowed to choose schools, and an independent monitoring body would be established; and

 a voucher model: the most radical approach. This would require the development

of a highly de-centralised/privatised school system which would allow parents to choose any school using government-issued vouchers.

The alternatives recommended by the RAND Corporation, i.e. charter schools that were partially

de-centralised and partially privatised, stemmed from an implicit but otherwise un-stated belief, that it would not be possible to reform Qatar’s Ministry of Education and its schools in a sufficiently short time to achieve the outcomes sought for public education. Apparently the RAND

Corporation also regarded the Ministry of Education as so bureaucratic that it could not change and adopt innovative practices, despite evidence from elsewhere that such reforms could take place – Singapore and Hong Kong for example - and result in very successful outcomes. Moreover, the likely costs and other factors involved were very likely to militate against successful reform.

Having turned its back on the possibility of reforming the Ministry of Education, the RAND

Corporation’s main recommendation was that Qatar should create new, essentially corporatised Independent Schools, closely modelled on charter schools in the United States. This alternative was recommended because at the time, the RAND Corporation regarded introducing a voucher-

based system of choice as not sustainable in Qatar i.e. it was too radical a change to be accommodated.

Within a model of apparently increased self-determination, and without reference to the prevailing social, cultural or religious underpinnings of Qatar’s education system, the RAND

and choice (Brewer et al., 2007). Certainly in my detailed analysis of all the publicly-available and accessible documents about Education for a New Era, I was unable to find any information or discussion indicating or otherwise suggesting that staff from the RAND Corporation had taken

into account Qatar’s unique circumstances. Rather, it struck me that in proposing the corporatised schools approach developed to meet issues within public education in the USA, the RAND Corporation simply assumed that this could be ‘transplanted’ or ‘implanted’ into Qatar and

that it would work.

What is important here is that the RAND Corporation presented these opinions to the Qatar

government without detailed justification or reference to successful educational and public policy reforms outside the United States. Moreover, it did so from a perspective constructed entirely within the conditions obtaining for public education in the United States, a country noted for the mediocre performance of its learners on critical international studies such as PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS.

Further, it is clear to even the most casual observer, that the particular challenges facing public education in the United States are not mirrored in Qatar, and nor is there a real possibility of comparing the dimensions of the issues involved given the vast differences and complexities of the United States, and compact geography, size and make-up of Qatar’s population.

While the RAND Corporation did make broad recommendations about the need for Qatar’s new

corporatised schools to have new curricula, teaching and learning materials and professional development, the detail was left un-addressed. Similarly, in its recommendations and writings, the RAND Corporation simply did not attend to the myriad operational, logistic and educational

details which a reform of this scale demanded. While on the one hand, a sweeping strategic vision might be seen as a good feature, failing to support that vision with practical, sustainable steps to ensure its enactment must be seen as a serious shortcoming.

As initially planned by the RAND Corporation, the Supreme Education Council would not exercise

direction over the new curriculum or over associated teaching and learning materials, or over teacher professional development. These were seen as the province of individual schools which would somehow make appropriate decisions about the matters involved. This position may also have arisen because the RAND Corporation focused on a systems-based approach which largely

ignored or marginalised the human factors involved i.e. it over-looked the teachers as agents in the development and implementation of reform. It was as though the RAND Corporation believed

that if the system changed, teachers and others would change by osmosis or some other implicit process. The issues involved here are more fully discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.

To sum up, I would like to mention that as an integral part of this study I carried out a thorough search of all non-classified papers and other information made available to me from the RAND

Corporation relating to Education for a New Era. This process was limited due to the classified nature of many of the RAND’S materials associated with Education for a New Era. My

perspectives on Education for a New Era and the manner in which the RAND Corporation carried

out its policy functions in Qatar are informed by the following: a review of non classified documents; the opportunity I had as a Summer Intern at the Rand Corporation’s Santa Monica headquarter in Summer 2007; and close working relationships with the RAND employees who

were most closely associated with its work efforts and policies in reforming Qatar’s public education system.

Additionally, during my empirical field observations, I maintained a daily journal where I noted each day’s activities, meetings with my RAND Corporation mentor, and conference calls arising

Era. Unfortunately, I found the usefulness RAND Corporation material somewhat limited by

availability and accessibility. And the manner in which the material was framed did not lend itself easily to systematic and rigorous examination. Again, from an empirical field observation perspective, I come to my interpretations through the subjective lens of a Qatari as someone who has worked for some years as an educator in the Ministry of Education, and as a parent who has a vital interest in the success of Education for a New Era.