The study aims to find some good practices of school improvement at lower secondary education in Ethiopia. The author has been conducted field research in several schools in urban and rural Ethiopia from FY2013 to FY2016. The methods of research were mainly interview and classroom observation survey.
The government has produced several education policies for example the National Education and Training Policy: ETP (1994-), General Education Quality Improvement Program: GEQIP (2008-) and so on. However, the scholars regarding Ethiopian education have shown as negative side or difficulties of improvement quality of education in their research results. One of the problems is that Ethiopia is multi ethnic and multi linguistic country. This situation invited twisted relationship between Addis Ababa as capital city and Oromia state as local area. There are some diversification in terms of language used in classrooms. Moreover, there are some political tension or conflict between ethnicities.
Nevertheless, the research tried to find good school improvement practices at lower secondary education in rural and urban areas. Furthermore, the study try to analyzed policy recommendations for what are unsatisfied elements in rural area compared to urban area by using claudicatory comparative analysis. The research results are following three.
(1)GQIP were contributing to more reliable education environment. In the target six schools, they successes reduction of teacher student ratio from several years back due to schools mushrooming in their previous catchment area. However still its number is 50-60 students in a classroom.
(2)One secondary school in rural area successes tutorial program in the classroom in 2014 and its effort fructified as rapid improvement of passing rate preparatory school exam (End of class 10). The school was willing to take initiative, effort and time compared with the other target schools. So far, quality improvement must rely on such a “can-do” approach.
(3)Comparatively, urban area had advantages such as budget, environment and so on, compared with rural area within the country. The most important point was the language difference. Usually, a medium language is going to change from local language to English in Ethiopia. The timing of change in urban area is earlier than rural area. This difference created disadvantage of rural area in terms of academic result or passing rate of important examinations.