Contributing to the debates on quality

Abstract

I am pleased to introduce the December 2011 issue of Prospects, which brings together research articles on topics as seemingly varied as selective teacher attention and student achievement, girls’ performance in primary education, in-service teacher development for rural teachers, links between higher education and the labour market, and international education and peace and human rights education. Although this is not a special issue with a specific topic, these articles do share an underlying focus on improving the quality of education in various ways. The authors move the research agenda forward with respect to quality by presenting evidence, analyses, and contextual differences that highlight key policy challenges today. They do this by raising attention to girls’ performance progress in the EFA Fast Track Initiative (FTI) countries (the poorest countries where it is hardest to achieve the EFA goals); by questioning the pervasive effect of teacher inattention that marginalizes the poorer performing students when it should seek the opposite; by pointing at the need to develop more sophisticated measures of teacher capacity, such as knowledge of subject matter in studies of teachers’ effect on achievement; and by highlighting the need for curriculum changes in higher education in countries like Egypt and Oman, to address the mismatch between education credentials and employment requirements. A second set of articles directly addresses the relevance of quality in content, thus focusing on UNESCO’s core mission: ‘‘building peace in the minds of men and women’’. They do this in three ways. One considers dilemmas in the integration of human rights values within peace education programmes in conflict and post-conflict societies. Another conducts a discourse analysis of the 1974 UNESCO Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, recognizing its full force today as an international normative guide that was collectively constructed and therefore allows politically, economically, and culturally different actors to find their own solutions based on their own