Teacher’s quality in public schools in Afghanistan: exploring the perceptions of public schools’ stakeholders

Abstract

Teacher quality appeared to be the main concern not only in developing countries but also in most developed ones. This is because education as the basic human right should be provided for all equally; as the SDGs and Millennium Development Goals established and emphasized by the UN and countries all over the world, however, quality education is a must and matters a lot. Therefore, teacher quality is the key in reaching these important goals and objectives and has been the center of attention in most education systems universally. Teacher quality is a broad and general term which encompasses quite different characteristics and features and everyone’ definition will differ from the rest based on his/her education context and practices. This study is conducted to explore teacher quality in public schools in Afghanistan with a main focus on Zebak public schools and their stakeholders’ perceptions in this regard. The study relied on qualitative approach and the data were gathered employing semi-structured qualitative interviews and FGD aimed to collect enough in-depth insight about the topic being studied. The thematic analysis has been used to interpret the data and present the result of the study. The key findings of the study are that public schools’ stakeholders have a good knowledge of teacher quality compared to the literature review about, however, perceptions are different, and the opportunity is not available to embark on their quality development. In addition, teachers are experiencing and struggling with various challenges including a lack of facilities and resources as well as lack of recognition and support system. Another major finding of the study is that besides all these problems public schools in the rural areas of the country initiated some sort of interventions and innovated some effective ways of improving their quality such as collaborative works and creating educational circles to respond to their needs. As a result, this is the government and educational authorities’ responsibility to allocate budget and resources in education particularly in developing teachers’ quality throughout the country to lead the country towards progress and prosperity.