Morocco’s Education System: A Sinking Ship Undergoing Maintenance

Rabat – With most Moroccan parents turning to the private sector to secure quality education for their children, Morocco’s public education system has often been labeled over the past two decades as a failing system.

This perception of failure has been given renewed vigor amid the ongoing deterioration of economic indexes and living conditions as a result of the COVID crisis and the Ukraine war. Faced with the disruptions of the global supply chains, some Moroccan households have had to give up on their children’s private education to make ends meet.

The number of students registered in private education establishments in Morocco has notably dropped by 7% in the 2022-23 academic year amid rising inflation.

Despite the decades-long promises of successive governments to improve the quality of education, particularly in the public sector, Moroccans have remained skeptical about the success of the various strategies adopted by different ministers and governments.

Over the years, many critics have noted that the adopted reform approaches do not respond to the specific needs of the Moroccan socioeconomic context, stressing a detachment between the acquired knowledge and the required skills for the job market.

Empty promises?

The current Moroccan government has established a new strategy founded on the urgent need to reinforce teachers’ performance and build student competencies through language learning and the use of state-of-the-art technology.

Speaking this past Monday at the Transforming Education Summit in New York, Morocco’s Head of Government Aziz Akannouch reiterated his vow to reduce student dropout rates by one third, increase the number of students with basic skills by 70%, and double the number of students benefiting from extracurricular activities.

Earlier this month, Morocco’s Minister of National Education Chakib Benmoussa announced his ministry’s plans to increase the number of English teachers this academic year, particularly in middle schools.

With English being the dominant language in the global economy, the minister appeared to suggest, boosting Moroccan students’ mastery of English should be an essential feature of the country’s education strategy.

He stressed that preparing Moroccan students for the global labor market is a central reason behind his department’s ongoing education reforms seeking to increase young Moroccans’ familiarity with and mastery of foreign languages.

To finance these reforms, Morocco has allocated this year MAD 62.45 billion ($5.88 billion) for the national education ministry, up by 6% from 2021.

While the recent governmental promises related to education reform appear to be relatively up-to-date with the global sustainable development agenda, the Moroccan public is tired of what it views as empty promises.

A January survey by the Arab Barometer reflects the public concerns regarding the vital sector of education. The report stated that public satisfaction with the sector in Morocco dropped from 54% to 45% between October 2020 and April 2021.

70% of respondents from Morocco noted that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted primary education, said the report, adding that 24% argued that COVID-19 is the biggest or second-biggest challenge for children’s education in the country.

Brain Drain

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the structural flaws of the Moroccan education sector, the local aspiration for migration persists, particularly among youth wishing to pursue education abroad and secure a stable and profitable job.

Aware of the deep-cutting effects of brain drain on the quality of services available to Moroccans in a wide range of sectors, the Moroccan government has expressed its determination to address the issue in key sectors such as medicine.

While the government’s apparent determination to tackle Moroccan hospitals’ chronic issue of staff shortage is much-needed and welcome news, an equally crucial move would be to ensure the high-quality of teaching in Moroccan universities.

But such a move would entail retaining the vanishingly few brilliant, world-class researchers and experts that Morocco produces. Even more fundamentally, such a step would call for a policy of persuading overseas-trained Moroccans to come back home to contribute to the training of a new generation of Moroccan leaders, experts, and thinkers who can carry on the never-ending task of developing Morocco while proudly representing it on the global stage.

Yet the current policy of limiting the migratory flows of Moroccan brains seems out of reach at the moment as the country’s research and development infrastructure remains lacking, except in some private higher education institutions such as Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P). This calls for the urgent need to advance partnerships in higher education for better knowledge and expertise exchange and better student training.

Having understood this urgency, some Moroccan higher education institutions, particularly private or semi-public ones, have established partnerships with foreign universities. Still, the issue remains prevalent as most Moroccans pursue public and free education, meaning they do not have access to such life-changing opportunities.

Where did it all go wrong?

Emerging as a newly-independent country, Morocco’s quest for independence led the ancient yet young state to establish the foundation of a Muslim and Arab country where Arabic is the official state language. The decision was fiercely criticized by the Amazigh activists for decades. Yet, they have only recently succeeded in introducing the native language to public institutions.

Despite the dominance of the Arabic language, Morocco’s ruling elite which predominantly received French education during the protectorate or/and post-protectorate era pushed for the use of French as an elitist language in the North African country. As a result, the majority of French-illiterate Moroccans were left out of important policy conversations and critical decisions for decades.

In recent years, there have been notable signs of an apparent struggle to rid Morocco of the self-entitlement and the apparent supremacy of Morocco’s French-speaking elite, which critics insist is a “colonial relic” of France’s “cultural arrogance.”

A key element of that ongoing struggle has been some Moroccan youth’s relentless calls for the replacement of French with English to provide a more inclusive education system.

For the most outspoken proponents of what has now been christened the “shift to English movement,” getting Moroccan institutions — including schools and universities — to ditch French is a crucial step toward completing the decolonization of Morocco’s political and socio-cultural landscapes.

As the language debate continues within the corridors of Moroccan institutions and in public spaces, however, Moroccans continue to suffer from the accumulated consequences of the “structural reforms” recommended to Morocco in the 1980s by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

In 1983, Morocco launched its IMF and World Bank-supervised reform program to stabilize the national economy. The measures included severe fiscal austerity, freezing of civil service salaries, and cuts in subsidies for basic goods such as food, water, petroleum, and electricity.

The structural reforms further called for reducing social expenditures on health and education, leading to the deterioration in the quality of public services in the face of a growing population.

While the Moroccan government “made a firm effort to protect social expenditures” during the structural reform period, political economists Hamid El Said and Jane Harrigan said in a 2010 paper, the national education budget dropped from 6.2% of GDP to 5.3% between 1982 and 1991.

Dealing with Morocco’s left-behinds

As the IMF and World Bank reforms advocated for privatization, the market of private schools bloomed in Morocco. However, many Moroccans were left behind as they were unable to enroll their children in the private sector.

As a result, Morocco has today an average of 64.9% of children under the age of 10 unable to read a simple text. The underperformance of Moroccan children in basic skills makes them unprepared for the job markets.

A recent UNICEF report found that Moroccan youth hold medium to low levels of mastering the secondary-level, digital, job-specific, and entrepreneurial skills.

While most young Moroccans lack the skills required in the global and local job market, Moroccan girls and women are facing double constraints as they have difficulties to integrate the labor market and complete their K-12 education. This painful reality is particularly acute in rural and remote areas, due to the lack of transport and the persistence of child marriage despite legal reforms.

As the Moroccan government seeks to patch the holes in the sinking ship of the country’s national education system, a main takeaway from social media comments and reactions to news coverage of the education sector is that the large majority of Moroccans are just fed up with empty promises.

As they see it, Morocco needs an inclusive educational system that celebrates local languages while embracing foreign ones as they open new doors for the new generation of Moroccans, especially those from socio-cultural and economic backgrounds that have long been left out of the conversation about the country’s present and future.