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Schools in Crisis: Role of School Volatility on Education in Lebanon

Mon, March 11, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Orchid A

Proposal

Background
Over the past decade, the Lebanese schools have faced numerous challenges, including the Syrian refugee influx, economic collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, political unrest, and frequent teacher strikes. These compounded and prolonged crises affect schools in every way imaginable. For example, resource and funding constraints threaten the schools’ capacity to operate with basic electricity and heat. The composition and number of teachers and students rapidly shift, with increases in temporary contract teachers, an influx of private school students who can no longer afford school fees, Syrian refugee children enrolling and dropping out, and teachers and students leaving the schools and even the country to avoid insecurity and crises.
However, there is little evidence on whether and how such rapid and drastic changes - what we term school volatility - disrupt the schools’ capacity to provide quality education in crisis-affected countries. Drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks (e.g., Kim et al., 2022; Tseng & Seidman, 2007) and empirical research on the how setting-level changes affect teacher and child outcomes, including those on school organizational climate (e.g., Grant et al., 2019; Hoy, 1990) and household chaos and income volatility (e.g., Marsh et al., 2020; Morris et al., 2012), this study seeks to conceptualize and examine how school volatility predicts school, teacher, and student outcomes.
Methods
The QITABI consortium and the research partners collaborated to identify a set of indicators of school volatility in the Lebanese context. These included: student enrollment and composition, teacher retention, types of teacher contracts, school infrastructure and finance, and other challenges.
Based on this initial conceptualization, we identified data sources and developed survey tools to capture school volatility from: (a) historical school administrative data collected from the MEHE in the past 10 years; (b) the nationwide principal survey on school volatility and barriers to school functioning, conducted in July 2023.
Teacher and child outcomes are captured via a nationwide survey targeting all public primary Arabic, Math, English/French teachers to assess teachers' classroom practices, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction; and acdemic performance data in Arabic literacy, second language proficiency, and math from a subsample of students in all public schools.
Results and discussion
Preliminary analysis suggests that many schools in Lebanon have experienced drastic changes. For example, from 2014 to 2021, there was an average 43% increase in school size, in the number of students. However, we also found a lot of heterogeneity between schools in these changes, e.g., some schools saw increases in student body by as much as by 1408%, while others saw decreases as much as by -78% (SD = 112%). Once the outcome data are collected, we will examine how these volatile changes to schools predict teacher and student outcomes.

The findings will reveal the role of school volatility in teacher and student perceptions, practices, and performance, providing valuable information on identifying schools in additional need of support, in the midst of severe and rapidly changing crisis contexts. The results will be used to inform MEHE and our partner organization in Lebanon on their policy and practices.

Authors