Mapping the Education Ecosystem in Malaysia

• In Event: Improving teaching and learning in low- and middle- income countries – what works? Evidence from studies in Ghana, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Proposal

School leaders have a significant role to play in addressing the “learning crisis” for students in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The emerging evidence suggests that leadership and management practices of headteachers are important factors in bringing about changes to education service delivery and learning outcomes for students (Grissom et al., 2021; Scur et al., 2021). In addition to working with teachers and students within schools, school leaders engage with multiple actors in the larger education ecosystem, including public sector bureaucrats, politicians, school-management committees (SMCs), and parents, to deliver improvements in their schools. Research suggests that school leaders’ attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making with regards to those improvements may be influenced by the larger ecosystem in the form of reporting structures, through which they are monitored and held accountable for their actions (Honig and Pritchett, 2019; Levy et al., 2018; Verger et al., 2016) and networks of cooperation, which may foster a culture of learning and trust within the ecosystem (Leithwood and Jantzi, 2006; Levy et al., 2018; Sabarwal et al., 2021). Yet, there is little empirical evidence that maps these structures and networks that school leaders are embedded in or unpacks how they influence decision-making for delivering improvements in LMICs.
In partnership with Global School Leaders (GSL), an organization with more than five years of on-ground experience in school leadership development in five LMICs, we study the education ecosystem and its influence on school leadership in Malaysia. Using the RISE systems framework, we study the principal-agent relationships of accountability within the education system, from the vantage point of public-school leaders. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, we first identify key actors in the Malaysian education system, who interact with school leaders and influence their decision-making; specify the principal-agent relationships between key actors across the educational hierarchy; unpack the primary alignment(s) as well as the incoherencies within the system; and explore ways to address the misalignments that hamper improvements in teaching and learning (Spivack, 2021).
Our preliminary findings from qualitative data collection from 8 focus groups with a total of 30 participants suggest that school leadership in Malaysia has undergone significant transformation over the last decade. Capacity building for leaders, along with flexible and adaptive programming, has early indicators of success in improving policy implementation. However, efforts for full-scale structural reform of a highly centralized education system, while well-intentioned, are proving to be harder to implement given the cultural, bureaucratic, and contextual aspects of the educational system. A survey of a representative sample of approximately 400 school leaders is underway. The survey will allow us to generalize our findings about how school leaders perceive directives from the centralized school system, how they understand them, and what they implement. We will have a complete working paper at the time of the conference.

Author

• Minahil Asim, University of Ottawa