School-based leadership in the education reform agenda in Morocco: an analysis of policy and context

ABSTRACT

Public education in Morocco occupies the center stage of the development efforts spearheaded by the North African Kingdom. Yet, little, if any, improvement in the quality of education has been achieved over the last two decades. Public schools continue to suffer huge shortages in human and material resources despite several successive waves of reform initiatives. This state of affairs has led many to question the efficiency of top-down educational leadership that has prevailed for years in the country, giving rise to calls for more discretion for actors within schools in shaping what and how students learn. A bottom-up approach to the education reform, in which administrators and teachers work closely together to lead change from within schools, is arguably better-suited for responding to everyday challenges in a timely fashion. By investigating the official reform agenda in Morocco, embodied in the National Charter of Education and Training (NCET), this study seeks to determine the extent to which educational policy enables or constrains the practice of school-based leadership. The article also examines official records concerning the conditions at public schools to reveal how these are likely to impact the emergence of leadership among administrators and teachers across public schools.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Abderrahim Amghar

Abderrahim Amghar is an Assistant Professor of the English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Euromed University of Fez. His research interests include educational leadership and system change.