East of West: Rearguing the Value and Goals of Education in the Gulf

Social justice leadership, instructional leadership, and the goals of schooling

“…Findings of these studies, which are intended to provide information about how national education systems perform academically compared to those of other countries, are widely utilized by national governments to inform educational policy and funding (Baird et al, 2016;Engel and Frizzell, 2015). Although the goals of education are to some extent context-dependent (Telafici et al, 2014), educational policy around the world today requires that schools focus primarily on assuring student learning and academic success (i.e. on the school's qualification function), particularly in a small number of curricular domains deemed crucial for twenty-first century success, such as language, science and mathematics (Hannaway and Hamilton, 2009;Hargreaves and Braun, 2013).…”