WHAT MINISTRIES ARE DOING IN THE ARAB WORLD TO DEVELOP A HIGH QUALITY EDUCATION

Although Arab countries have been orienting towards providing high quality education for the past twenty years, it is still considered of low quality according to the Education For All report (2015). The research examines how ministries of education in 5 Arab countries –Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco- address quality in their education strategies in order to improve on the quality of education in the Arab countries. Reports of ministries in the 5 countries were analysed to look into strategic actions and programs proposed and implemented there regarding the provision of a good quality education. The researcher then conducted benchmarking of these programs against quality education definition of the UNESCO. Three elements of education quality that are relevant to quality education were derived from the definition and used in the benchmarking: Quality curriculum, Education systems and Professional development and the programs in each country were categorized into these three units to align occurrences between the programs and the definition. The researcher have found that the 5 countries have slight differences in their perceptions of quality education elements that are also not perfectly correspondent to the UNESCO education quality definition. This result might have been the cause of assessing education as of low quality in the 5 countries by the EFA report. The results have significant implications on the need to put up a unified operational definition of quality education for the ministries to work on and to put up more focused plans and actions for development implied for educators and policy makers in those countries.