Mustapha HMIMO
In his speech on the occasion of the anniversary of the Revolution of the King and the People, on August 20, 2013, the sovereign said: “Nevertheless, it is heartbreaking to see that the current situation of education has deteriorated. degraded even more, compared to what it was more than twenty years ago. This setback has led a large number of families, despite their limited income, to bear the exorbitant costs of enrolling their children in educational establishments belonging to foreign missions or in the private sector, in order to avoid the problems encountered in public education and allow them to benefit from an efficient education system”.
Thus, while waiting for the definitive reform of public education, private schools remain a godsend for two reasons. On the one hand the parents’ option for its dearly paid services should have been a mere luxury if the public school was deemed to be so effective and efficient. But unfortunately many of them, if not most, choose his services out of sheer necessity and make huge sacrifices to pay a high price.
The various public school performance evaluation reports, national and international, give them reason, not to accuse them of poor judgment. And this is how the private school has saved and still saves relatively well a good part of Moroccan children from the consequences of the proven inefficiency of the public school.
On the other hand, in addition to the international assessments PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA, the best performing private school serves and will always serve, in real time, as a witness and reference to gauge the effectiveness and performance of the public school. And this, even after the good reform hoped for. It is distinguished from it nowadays, by its good performance with however the same programs and with teachers often trained on the job, that is to say without initial training, and less well qualified than those of public education. .
For the performance needs demanded by its customers and under the pressure of competition, the private school judges its teachers on the basis of efficiency without blind bureaucratic formalism. So that an effective baccalaureate is for the private school much better than a license but ineffective. It is the same for her of a teacher trained on the job and efficient rather than the teacher who graduated top of his promotion from the training center, but ineffective.
With the same programs and with more qualified teachers and better trained in principles, if the public school were effective it would have all the assets to compete well with the most efficient private school. But what does it lack for being and therefore makes the difference in constituting the determining factor(s) of its inefficiency and, by extension, of that of the rest of the public education system?
The Court of Auditors wisely puts its finger on the first determining factor of inefficiency in our public education system. This is the famous public service that manages it. The Court devoted an entire report to it. A report which recalls that civil servants are only responsible for the execution of the tasks entrusted to them, without any regard for the resulting results. He recalls this when he says in substance: “Responsibility is a central value of the public service enshrined in Article 17 of the General Statutes of the Public Service which provides that: “All civil servants, whatever their rank in the hierarchy, are responsible for carrying out the tasks entrusted to him”.
However, there is a big difference between being responsible for the simple execution of a task and being responsible for the result that results from it. When, for example, you have your car repaired, you only pay the mechanic after checking the result of the task performed. It is that subconsciously you know that simply performing the task does not necessarily lead to the desired good result. Yet here is what it is according to article 156 of the constitution of our country: “The public services are with the listening of their users and ensure the follow-up of their observations, proposals and grievances. They report on the management of public funds in accordance with the legislation in force and are subject, in this respect, to the obligations of control and evaluation”.
And this is what it is in practice according to the same report of the Court of Auditors which says: “If the Constitution thus defines the public service, this ideal does not correspond, however, to reality in the sense that the image of the Moroccan Administration in public opinion is not always up to the values it is supposed to convey”. By the Moroccan Administration we must always understand the civil service. But there is no reason to be surprised when we know that the tradition in the public service guarantees this famous privilege of article 17 of the SGFP. Not without reason, moreover, because in the absence of infallible and objective means of evaluating the performance of the civil servant, the famous article 17 is supposed to protect him from any arbitrary judgment.
Except that this results in an unbalanced balance of power in favor of the public service provider and the citizen-user. The Court of Auditors notes this and points out in these terms: “The user of the public service remains helpless in the face of the complexity of the procedures and his relationship with the Administration is experienced as a balance of power which is unfavorable to him in the sense that the Administration is not under an obligation to report… Users of the public service (citizens and businesses) find that the appeal or complaint mechanisms against the public administration are cumbersome, unreliable and inefficient and this, because of the absence of sanctions in the event of failure of the civil servants with their missions or with ethics”.
Thus, according to its intrinsic nature, the public administration cannot therefore be effective in managing the various public services and satisfying the interests of the citizen-users who are entitled than is, for example, the administration of the public limited company for the benefit of its shareholders. The Court of Auditors confirms this when it speaks of the reason why the State, for the sake of making its investments profitable, never entrusts the administration of the supervising ministries with the management of commercial public services which are chargeable. She says in this case: “In general, the creation of an EEP [Etablissement et Entreprise Publics] is decided to respond to situations where the Administration proves to be inadequate or incapable of accomplishing certain of its missions under conditions of effectiveness and efficiency”. Yet it does so willingly and everywhere in the world when it comes to public service supposed to satisfy the legitimate and prepaid interests of citizens.
And the same report of the Court of Auditors persists and signs to say that the nature of the status of the public service is unsuited to the needs of modern management of the human capital of a strategic public establishment with performance and result obligations. He says it when he criticizes the status of the staff of the Office National Des Aéroports (ONDA) as a public enterprise of a commercial nature. He says it in these terms: “The staff of the ONDA is governed by a statute similar to that applied in the civil service. It deviates significantly from the practices in force in the sector. The recruitment, remuneration, evaluation and motivation procedures are unsuited to the needs of modern management of the human capital of a strategic public establishment with performance and result obligations and which is in competition with other operators for the ‘attractiveness of quality executives’.
What then of all the public services prepaid by society willingly or by force and due to the legitimate interests of citizens? Do they deserve to be handed over to the management of the same Public Administration which is not so trustworthy for the State to entrust it with the management of paid public services? Do they not also deserve to be entrusted to management systems which must necessarily be effective, efficient and effective? In this case, does the education system not also deserve to be considered as a highly strategic public sector with obligations of performance and results, to also entrust its management to public establishments whose staff status is different from that of the public service? This is the subject of our reform proposal for an effective and efficient education system published in Arabic. We give a summary in this SLIDESHOW for the Ministry and the Higher Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research.