Despite voluminous evidence for the social and economic benefits of increased education, there has been little investigation in the developing world into what elements of school quality influence the number of years children remain in school. Population Council social scientists Cynthia B. Lloyd, Barbara S. Mensch, and Wesley H. Clark previously evaluated the effects of teachers’ attitudes, gender inequities, the condition of school facilities, and other factors in Kenya. These researchers, along with Sahar El Tawila of the American University in Cairo and other investigators, recently revisited these issues, this time in Egypt. The assessment confirmed the importance of first-rate schools and overturned a widely held belief about gender-based disparities in the dropout rates of Egyptian students.
The researchers drew data from two surveys: the Adolescence and Social Change in Egypt survey, a nationally representative sample of 9,128 adolescents aged 10–19 conducted in 1997, and a survey of 75 nonreligious public preparatory schools undertaken during the fall semester of the 1998–99 school year. (Compulsory schooling in Egypt is divided into two phases: primary, which runs from grades one to five, and preparatory, which runs from grades six to eight.) Using both interviews and observations, researchers collected data on physical facilities, staffing, school-based tutoring, gender-role attitudes of teachers and administrators, pedagogical methods, and student–teacher interactions.
The school environment
The Egyptian Education law limits the size of government-school classrooms to 36 students. Only 20 percent of schools comply with this law, however. In 37 percent of schools sampled, classes contained 45 or more students. In an effort to reduce class sizes, about 30 percent of schools have instituted double shifts. But the analysis showed that 69 percent of double-shift schools have 45 or more students per classroom, whereas only 24 percent of single-shift schools have classrooms with 45 or more students. Sixty-six percent of schools experience teacher shortages.
The researchers were particularly interested in investigating gender-based differences in the Egyptian schooling experience; the research in Kenya revealed a number of gender-based inequities that greatly increased the chances that girls would drop out of school. One major distinction between the curriculum taught to boys and the one taught to girls in Egypt is that only girls learn about home economics and only boys learn about agriculture and industry. Sixty-one percent of school heads and 48 percent of teachers disapprove of this policy.
In contrast to the situation they discovered in Kenya, where girls are often harassed and disparaged, the researchers found that in Egypt boys are significantly more likely than girls to report being called a failure by a teacher (34 percent vs. 14 percent). A similar percentage of boys and girls said that they had been punished the day before the interview. And, to the extent that teachers believe one gender has more trouble learning than the other, the prevalent belief is that boys have more difficulty than girls.
Odds of dropping out
The researchers were surprised to find that, contrary to popular belief, girls in Egypt are no more likely to drop out than are boys. This belief arose because of a recent narrowing of the gender gap in school enrollment for younger children compared with adolescents. This situation has left many observers with the impression that girls are more likely than boys to drop out as they get older. The age-specific enrollment data demonstrate that older girls are less likely than younger ones to have attended school, not that girls are more likely than boys to drop out during adolescence. "It's a myth that girls in Egypt drop out of school more than boys," says Lloyd. "In fact, we found that once in school, the probability of dropout is roughly the same at each grade for boys and girls."
When Egyptian boys and girls do drop out of school, they do so for different reasons. While boys' greater likelihood of being physically punished contributes to an increased chance of dropping out, boys' dropout rates are more often affected by their families' socioeconomic status. Greater household wealth (in rural areas) and more years of schooling for mothers significantly reduce the likelihood that boys will drop out. Girls' dropout rates, on the other hand, are more often affected by the school environment. The most significant factor for girls was the number of shifts offered at their school. The dropout rate was five to six times greater among girls who attend double-shift schools, where time to learn is shorter and classrooms are more crowded, than among girls who attend single-shift schools.
"This research and our work in Kenya highlight the fact that the features of school quality that matter can vary from place to place and also differ between boys and girls," says Lloyd.
Sources
El-Tawila, Sahar, Cynthia Lloyd, Barbara Mensch, Hind Wassef, Zeinab Gamal, Wesley Clark, and Rania Sakr. 2000. The School Environment in Egypt: A Situation Analysis of Public Preparatory Schools. Cairo, Egypt: Population Council.
Lloyd, Cynthia B., Sahar El Tawila, Wesley H. Clark, and Barbara S. Mensch. 2001. “Determinants of educational attainment among adolescents in Egypt: Does school quality make a difference?” Policy Research Division Working Paper no. 150. New York: Population Council. (PDF)
Outside funding
The Canadian International Development Agency, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Development Research Centre, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United States Agency for International Development
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