Educational Transitions Among Girls in Rural Upper-Egypt: A Comparative Study of Students in Community and Government Schools

• In Event: Lived Experiences of Youth navigating school systems in the Middle East

Proposal

In 1992, UNICEF re-introduced community schools into Upper-Egypt (Zaalouk 2004). Following a successful year, the Ministry of Education started a program that now involves community, one-classroom, and multi-grade schools (henceforth referred to as CS) based on the UNICEF model (MoE 2000, 2007). By 2014 there were more than 5000 CS throughout the country (NCERD 2014). The CS program continues to play a small, but important, role in extending access to education for all Egyptian children.
While the CS program was expanding, mainstream government primary schools (MPS) were being built throughout the country. By the beginning of this century, virtually every village in Egypt had an MPS; access to education was no longer a constraint, even in some of the communities served by the original UNICEF CS (World Bank 2002; Szucs and Hassan-Wassef 2010). School construction continues under the current government (Anonymous 2018).
Previous work has shown that in the early years, CS students had greater academic success than did students in the MPS. Graduates of the CS had a very high (greater than 90%) and increasing likelihood of continuing into preparatory (middle) school (Farrell 2008; Zaalouk 2004). Their scores on formal examination often exceeded those of MPS students (Zaalouk 2004)
Much of the earlier work is based on research conducted early in the current century (Farrell and Hartwell 2008; Sidhom 2004; Sultana 2008; Zaalouk 2004). However, with the change of the educational environment in Egypt (Authors, forthcoming); with MPS found in virtually every village, often in close proximity to CS; the quality of education provided by the CS has been questioned (Authors 2022). In this work we will compare educational transitions of girls in CS with girls studying in the MPS as encouraged by Marcus and Page (2016). We use more recent data to examine transition rates across levels of schooling by type of school, assess scores on critical exams when available, and consider reasons for dropping out of school.

Data
In December 2017 we collected data from students in the 3rd through 6th years of primary school, and the 3rd year of preparatory (middle) school in two villages in Upper-Egypt. Because of the small number of CS students, our research included all girls in 3rd through 6th primary in the CS in both villages. For the MPS, in each village we selected 50 girls in 3rd and 50 more in 6th primary for a total of 100 girls in each grade. There are no community schools at the preparatory stage. For 3rd preparatory, we included 101 girls from the two villages – 72 had attended an MPS, while 29 had attended a CS. In the spring of 2019, a follow-up investigation was conducted. We returned to these two villages to learn whether these girls had progressed in their educations. Did those in 3rd – 5th primary advance; did those in 6th primary and 3rd preparatory make the transition to the next level of education?

Results
Of the students in 3rd through 5th primary in 2017, all but three were still in school in 2019. All but one of the students still in school had advanced. The Arabic language skills of many advancing students were far behind grade level (Authors 2022). The three students who left school were either married, or engaged; all three had attended a CS.
Twelve of the 147 students in 6th primary at the baseline dropped out of school between 2017 and 2019 – 9 (18.8% of all 6th primary CS students) had attended a CS; 3 (3.0%) had attended an MPS. Only one 6th primary student, a girl who had attended a CS, had married.
By the time girls complete preparatory school, they are generally 15-16 years of age, and at greater risk of marriage and of dropping out for other reasons. By 2019, two of the 101 third year preparatory students had been lost to follow-up. Of 28 CS graduates identified in 2019, 9 (32%) had dropped out, and 19 continued in one of the two tracks of secondary - 3 (11% of all CS graduates) in general (academic) secondary, and 16 (57%) in technical/vocational (T/V) secondary. Among the 71 girls who had attended an MPS, 8 (11%) had dropped out, 41 (58%) were in general secondary, and 22 (31%) were in T/V secondary.
Lack of an accessible, appropriate secondary school may be an important factor causing dropout after the preparatory level. Qualification for general secondary depends on achieving a good score on the preparatory school leaving exam. The study villages have a mixed (girls and boys in the same classes) general secondary school. The single-sex T/V secondary schools serving these villages are in the district town some 20 kilometers distant. We have preparatory leaving scores for just one village. All of the dropouts got low scores. Some quit because of issues (cost and/or safety) with travel to the district town. All girls who achieved scores qualifying for general secondary continued their educations – though two of them chose to enroll in T/V secondary. Marriage is another major cause of dropout following preparatory school. By 2019, 3 (11%) of CS graduates were married; another 3 (11%) were engaged. Among MPS graduates, 4 (6%) were married by 2019; none were currently engaged.

Conclusion
The literature on CS in Egypt, largely based on the UNICEF community schools program found that Egyptian CS provided an education superior to that of the MPS. CS students were found to transition through the levels of education at higher rates than MPS students. CS education was said to empower girls to resist early marriage and to complete their educations (Zaalouk 2004). In the current educational environment, the results of our small study of girls in two Upper-Egyptian villages do not support these earlier findings.
In the immediate future we will carry out additional analysis, including use of math and Arabic scores, to further examine our results

Author

• Ray Langsten, Social Research Center / American Univ in Cairo