Quality of education and teacher evaluation in Niger: A paradigm shift

Abstract

Since the first MLA initiated by UNESCO in the 1990s, educational institutions in developing countries have been questioned about the quality of education. The Conference of Ministers of Education of the Francophonie, through the PASEC program, initiates and publishes comparative studies of student performance in different member countries. The latest PASEC study showed that schools only lead to learning for an average of 10% of students. Regardless of which side of the problem one approaches, the notion of waste is evident. Niger's response was to conduct an evaluation of some 60,000 teachers and sort out those who are excluded from the system and those who are kept in it. Until now, it has been a question of the teacher's level and no longer the student's level. It seems that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the notion of quality and that of academic level. The experience of Niger challenges all stakeholders on the approach to quality. When in 1989, Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet published their admittedly controversial work, "Le niveau monte", it was believed that it was indeed the refutation of an old idea concerning the "decadence" of schools and that reality would dictate that each generation, by comparing its path with the generations that follow it, finds in the new generations a decline in academic level. Until then, the criteria used to measure levels were limited to comparisons of student performance in certain areas such as dictation for example. Since the notion of measurable competence has been accepted as a benchmark, the ways to measure student performance and compare it have multiplied. In our case, in Niger, the notion of level as such is the product of the international initiative of monitoring learning achievement (MLA) initiated by UNESCO almost at the same time as Baudelot-Establet's work was published. Indeed, the World Conference on Education for All (EFA) held in 1990 in Jomtien admitted the widespread recognition of a deterioration of education systems. EFA then set itself the goal of enabling 80% of students in a cohort to achieve a specific level of learning achievement in measurable areas (reading and writing, mathematics, and everyday life skills) (EFA World Forum, 2000). All countries were then committed to measuring their students' learning achievement using four types of systems: internal assessments, public examinations, national assessments, and international assessments. It was hoped that States' knowledge of the results of assessments would enable them to take the necessary steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning by adjusting curricula and public policies, particularly their objectives, and by increasing public budgets allocated to education.
Since then, a multitude of studies on the quality of education have flourished. These include the Southern African Educational Quality Assessment Group (SACMEQ), the Continuous Monitoring of Educational Achievement (MLA), and the Laboratory Latin American Educational Quality Assessment (Laboratorio), the Third International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), the Programme for the Analysis of Educational Systems in CONFEMEN Countries (PASEC) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). All these studies have highlighted the existence of low levels of achievement in developing countries. The EFA monitoring reports, which are housed under the heading of "quality", regularly provide evidence of problems, changes in student performance, disparities within and between countries, regional disparities, etc.