Quality Issues in Rural Schools in Kazakhstan

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program 2018-2020

A rural school is not just the most important public institution that serves as a “rallying point for services to poor families and children but it also represents the economic lifeblood of the [rural] community” (Malhoit, 2005, p.4). Providing quality education to children, particularly those in rural or disadvantaged area, has been one of the major endeavors globally during the last few decades. Every country is responsible to provide quality education to children as an obligation for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Kazakhstan became a signatory to the Convention in 1994 and since then it has taken encouraging steps to improve access and quality of education in the country. However, 57% of the public schools are ungraded rural schools, lacking facilities required to offer quality education. The Resolution of the Government of Kazakhstan 2012 states that ‘Submission to the standard core content of the secondary curriculum provides… equality of opportunity and access to secondary education for all students’ (par 26.2). However, the results of the Unified National Test 2012, in which 63,788 students from the rural schools and 53,545 children in urban schools participated, show that the results of the students from urban schools were twice as high as the results of students from the rural schools. There are several other evidences of the gaps and inequities between the Kazakhstani urban and rural schools discussed in this proposal. This study aims to explore quality of education in rural schools from the perspectives of the rural school leaders, teachers, students, parents, and concerned officials from the Ministry of education and Science and district level education administration. These stakeholders’ conceptions of, and perspectives on, the quality of education will be explored by taking a broad definition of quality involving quality of learners, curriculum / content, processes, environments and outcomes (UNICEF, 2000).