Combining the concepts of “quality” and “equity” to examine school system performance across regions in Namibia

Type Conference Paper - International Invitational Educational Policy Research Conference, Paris, France, 2005
Title Combining the concepts of “quality” and “equity” to examine school system performance across regions in Namibia
Author(s)
City Paris
Country/State France
Abstract
After independence in March 1990, the aim of the Ministry of Education in Namibia was to eradicate the huge educational inequalities that were inherited from the colonial government and to provide equality of opportunity to learn for all children regardless of their socio-economic background. Namibia participated in the two SACMEQ projects in 1995 and 2000 respectively, in order to establish a post-independence baseline for inputs to schools; to measure the quality of education and level of equity; and, to track changes over time. For the SACMEQ II study, the traditional approach to comparing learner performance across the 13 regions of Namibia indicated that regions that had high SES performed better than regions that had low SES. However, by applying the alternative approach which looks at quality (adjusted), social equity and distributional equity, it was only two regions that could be deemed to be good regions for reading because they satisfied all three criteria. No region satisfied all three criteria for Maths. Therefore, the challenge for the Ministry of Education in Namibia is to use a combination of both the traditional as well as the alternative approaches to comparing learner performance across regions in order to devise innovative ways of allocating educational resources to schools to provide every Namibian child with equal educational opportunity to learn as envisaged in the Education and Training Sector Improvement Plan (ETSIP) and “Vision 2030”.

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