Liberia's educational sector improvement efforts are multi-layered and necessarily require a diverse collection of skill-sets vital in meeting the reform and development challenges facing the sector.
Reframing the sector will require, among many other things, the institution of a new vision, devoid of politics, that is contextually relevant and intricately constructed and strategically aligned to the country's development goals.
Today, based in large on the lack of leadership, not war, efforts aimed at improving education is stifled by the absence of a national consensus on education. History shows that the Church, more than Government, over the years have held greater responsible for education service delivery.
CWA and Lott Carey Mission stand monumentally in favor of the Church in this regard. The MCSS pilot commissioned from the project led by San Francisco State College in 1961 remains essentially the pilot it was meant to be.
Despite the number of Special Commissions and the intervention of Liberia's foreign partners, there are imperatives for a comprehensive review of the country's educational landscape, in terms of the national goals ( short, medium and long) and the sector’s logical contributions towards the attainment of national goals.
Constructing responsive national framework will firstly require a psychological transformation amplifies cooperation and ownership by government, and reflected in the quality and management of responsive policies and programs affecting the sector.
Furthermore, the centralized nature of public sector education service delivery is archaic and in need of critical alteration. Operationalizing the National Decentralization Policy remains in limbo as the country lacks a national strategy of action to implement the policy.
Liberia ought to begin courting the idea of education democratization, intrinsic in the NDP, which gives greater voice to districts and counties over the political authorities. The systemic defect visible in Liberia’s education system has its roots in the very founding of the state and its institutions.
To correct the defects will require critical national soul searching wherein evaluators are enabled to logically assess current policies and programs from the view point of relevance, responsiveness and costs. The findings emerging then are utilized to inform operational details of an envisioned scheme.
In the coming weeks, this blog will identify and investigate the construct of educational governance in Liberia from a recommendation standpoint.
