By Safaa Abdoun
CAIRO: In the beginning of 2010, a presidential decree appointed Ahmed Zaki Badr as the new Minister of Education — a ministry that is often closely followed by controversy and is inevitably blamed for most of the country’s troubles.
Although the removal of former Education Minister Yousri El-Gamal came as a surprise, the public and the media had been calling for his resignation since 2008. The leaking of Thanaweya Amma exams, the notoriously difficult mathematics examination, along with a media frenzy about corporate punishment in schools triggered by the tragic death of 11-year-old Islam Badr — who was kicked by a teacher at school — increased public skepticism of El-Gamal’s leadership abilities.
However, the appointment of Badr, who is the former president of Ain Shams University, also set off negative reactions. Numerous blog posts at the time of his appointment named him “the worst university president in history” due to his lack of experience; he was appointed the university’s president after only serving a mere six months as vice president.
Many bloggers attributed Badr’s ministerial appointment to the fact that his father, Zaki Badr, was the Minister of Interior Affairs when Atef Sidky was still serving as the country’s prime minister.
Badr took the helm of the ministry at a time when it was experiencing a handful of problems — the most prominent of which was the widespread outbreak of swine flu, which disrupted almost every school’s academic year. Luckily for Badr, virtually all precautionary measures regarding the battle against swine flu had been taken by his predecessor, who ordered the suspension of any classroom where a case of swine flu was reported.
Educational reform
A couple of months into his tenure, Badr took serious measures to reform the country’s educational system. He conducted regular surprise inspections of to schools, the first of which were at schools located in the Helwan governorate, where he discovered major violations that included the absence of the headmaster and teachers who did not follow the daily schedule. After the visit, he issued an order to relocate 98 different teachers, headmasters and school administrators of the schools he visited in Helwan — an action considered to be a form of punishment for the violations he discovered.
Furthermore, he fired Yousri Afifi, the head of the Syllabi Development Center, for writing books for private publishing houses. Ten other Syllabi Development Center officials had their contracts terminated for the exact same reason. Badr also imposed fees for the license to print supplementary textbooks, which spurred publishing houses to file a lawsuit against him. However, the lawsuit was later dropped when an agreement was reached to provide four of the publishing houses with a license.
“Badr has been active since he became the Minister of Education,” said Mohamed El-Taweel, the principal of Yehia El Rafie Language School. “Being available … on the field, with his surprise visits and inspections followed-up by serious consequences such as firing and demoting people, is very effective.
“However, the education system as a whole is in dire need of restructuring,” added El-Taweel, who has been working in the public school system for over 20 years. “You … find [that] problems in the educational system [are usually] a result of larger problems in society. For example, private tutoring and violence could be a result of poverty and the hardships the students and teachers face at home.
“What is needed is strong long-term strategies to reform the educational system — not decrees and decisions which change with every new minister,” El-Taweel noted. “Consistency will give stability and, [therefore], success.”
Badr also joined forces with UNESCO and UNICEF Egypt to advocate the importance of education as part of the international Education for All (EFA) week. Part of the initiative involved touring the various governorates of Egypt by school bus in order to raise awareness of the six EFA goals.
“We are planning to use all the different ways possible to bring people back to education,” Badr said in April in reference to those who have dropped out of school or are illiterate. “We are going to support innovative means in order to make up for past [failures].”
For the new academic year that started last September, Badr announced that 300 new schools around the country will begin operation for the very first time. In addition, he announced that all maintenance and repairs for schools that were included in the Ministry of Education’s renovation plan were completed, that no tuition fees were increased, and that the tuition fees for specialized technical education was reduced in order to encourage students to pursue disciplines that are in high demand to further Egypt’s development.
“The school is the [foundation], where students learn not only [academics but also] ethics, such as integrity … good behavior and citizenship,” said Deputy Minister of Education Reda Abou Serea. “However, for this to be instilled in the young generation, we need the support of all other segments of society — especially the media.”
Bumps in the road
The Thanaweya Amma exam season under Badr also experienced a bit of controversy, though for different reasons than what occurred under El-Gamal’s leadership. Instead of headlines alluding to the difficulty of the examinations and reports of cheating, the headlines under Badr’s tenure included violence and bullying in the examination halls.
Twenty-eight teachers who were monitoring Thanaweya Amma exams organized a sit-in protest in front of a police station in the Daqahliya governorate after they were attacked by five bullies and a student in the examination halls they were monitoring. There was also a complaint filed to the Prosecutor General against Badr, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, and Minister of Health Hatem El-Gabali for negligence in providing the necessary support services for those monitoring the Thanweya Amma examinations, which resulted in four deaths.
Badr proposed a new system for the Thanaweya Amma exams, under which students could have the choice of either going straight to college or taking more exams in order to quality for the workforce. The proposed system is still currently being drafted and will be proposed to legislative bodies soon.
However, the newly proposed system has not sat well with several pundits. Parliament Speaker Ahmed Fathi Sorour pointed out during a People’s Assembly discussion of an Education Committee report that a new Thanaweya Amma system proposal is a tradition that every new educational minister practices.
Sorour, who is a former education minister himself, said that a decree was issued while he was in office to take a year out of elementary school and to add one year to Thanaweya Amma. However, the succeeding ministers have discarded this decree and have pushed ahead with their own strategies.
Therefore, Sorour explained, decrees and policies should be bound to the state and not to a particular minister or government, so that the policies wouldn’t change if either the minister or the government changes and thereby disrupts the set strategy for the educational system.
The problem of violence in schools also came into play again under Badr’s tenure in November, when three students at Misr El-Gedida School for Boys were found guilty of raping a classmate, Mohamed Abdel Fattah, on the school’s premises. The boy was dragged to the school’s basement where he was forced to take off his clothes, and each of three students took turns raping him and videotaping it on their cell phones.
When Abdel Fattah reported the incident to the police, he also reported the headmaster’s negligence, who stated that he was content with deleting the cell phone video and beating the boys. However, the headmaster was put on trial, along with the three students, and was transferred to an administrative position.
Following the incident, Badr examined the school and held talks with its workers, students and teachers.
