The new education policy is a disappointment. It is not a good
policy. That is the opinion of most our leading educationists and
academics. The Government does not agree with this opinion because it
has gone ahead and released the policy. Who is right?

We should make a serious attempt to answer this question because the
quality of a national policy has deep and wide-ranging implications
including the ability of the country to compete for investments,
generate jobs, raise productivity and create the wealth to increase
the standard of living of its citizens.

I have two suggestions to address this important issue. The first
proposes an objective and fair test of the quality of the new
policy. The second proposes a simple mechanism to help improve the
quality of policy proposals in the future.

I propose that the Government identify forty to fifty leading
educationists from around the world. These should include experts in
teaching, research, educational planning, educational administration,
educational financing, educational philosophy and primary, secondary,
higher and vocational education. The experts should come from a
cross-section of countries including Islamic and non-Islamic countries
and industrialized, newly industrialized and industrializing
countries. The Government can make the identification with the only
condition being that each expert identified should have a national, or
better yet, an international standing in his or her field. Such
standing can be confirmed by generally accepted criteria like
publications, citations and membership of international societies.

Let the new education policy be given to these identified experts with
a summary statement of the objectives which the Government hopes to
achieve through the implementation of the policy and the resources it
is willing to commit to the implementation. Let the experts rank the
policy on a scale of one to five with one representing very low
probability of achieving objectives, two representing low probability
of achieving objectives, three representing reasonable probability of
achieving objectives, four representing high probability of achieving
objectives and five representing very high probability of achieving
objectives.

If more than two thirds of the experts give the policy a rank of three
or higher it could be taken as a strong validation of its quality
given the objectives. On the other hand, if less than one thirds of
the experts gave it a similar ranking, it could be concluded that the
policy needs serious revision. If more than one thirds but less than
two thirds of the experts give the policy a rank of three or higher,
one would conclude that there was room for genuine disagreement.

If the Government does not subject the policy to this or a similar
independent and objective test, one would be forced to conclude that
it really did not have confidence in the quality of the proposed
policy. In that case, the test could still be arranged by a private
group or institute. In fact, given the dearth of independent policy
institutes and think tanks in the country, it would be an ideal role
for a newspaper group in Pakistan to pioneer such critical reviews and
evaluations of policy prescriptions with far reaching implications for
national welfare.

My second suggestion follows from the above and seeks to improve the
quality of future policy proposals drafted by Government agencies or
task forces. The agencies assigned such responsibility for producing
policies relating to health care, labour, industrial location,
transport, legal reform, etc., should be notified in advance as part
of their terms of reference that their proposals would be subject to
the kind of independent and objective review described above. My guess
is that the mere prospect of such an independent review would
significantly improve the quality at entry of future policy proposals.

It should be recognized that specialized expertise does not exist at
present within most government agencies to put together policy
proposals of adequate quality. Ideally, the Government should delegate
such tasks to credible national experts while maintaining its
representation in the preparatory group to ensure that its priority
objectives are taken into account. However, if the Government desires
to prepare the policies itself, the kind of independent review
proposed in this article should be arranged either by the Government
itself or by some other group within the country. This could be an
interim measure till such time as the Government’s credibility is
restored by its policy proposals getting high quality rankings on a
routine basis.

The kind of measures proposed in this article are necessary because
Pakistan is competing in a global market and progressively falling
behind. National policies on issues such as education, industry,
agriculture, etc. will have a crucial impact on national
competitiveness and welfare. The luxury does not exist to experiment
with bad policies and in fact the laggard position can be attributed
to many poor policies in the past.

The objective of this article is not to argue against controversial or
radical policies. It is possible to differ on objectives. But there is
a difference between being controversial and radical and being
sloppy. There is no excuse for a national policy proposal to be based
on poor problem analysis, have incoherent objectives and to prescribe
unrealistic solutions. With good intentions on all sides, such
sloppiness, if it exists, could easily be prevented. It is time to
demonstrate our good intentions.