Free Fall of Education in Iran; Average High School Graduation Score Drops Below 11

On Saturday, October 7, Tasnim News Agency reported that the average score of high school seniors in various fields in the final exams of June 2024 was 10.98; an event that experts and analysts refer to as the free fall of education in Iran. This news agency, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported that the average score for 11th grade was 10.62 and for 10th grade was 11.59, stating that this situation 'reflects the disastrous state and quality of education in schools across the country.' Tasnim emphasized that despite claims made regarding educational achievements by the former Minister of Education, 'the average scores of students in the country remain low, and this decline in scores has been observed for at least the past six years.' According to this news agency, alongside the low quality of education, the mismatch of final exam questions with the content taught could also be one of the reasons for the low averages. Tasnim also highlighted that an examination of student scores in various provinces of Iran shows that, as in previous years, the highest scores and changes belong to the provinces of Yazd, Semnan, Mazandaran, and Tehran, while Sistan and Baluchestan recorded the lowest scores. The report from Tasnim continues the downward trend of education in Iran, as the newspaper Etemad also reported in January of last year that the results of the final exams in June 2023 were 'extraordinarily strange' and indicative of a worsening public education situation. The report stated that about half of the students, or perhaps more, had an average score below 10, and it was announced that comparing the figures of this report with the average scores from 2019 onward shows a very concerning trend, with a decrease of about 20 percent in the average scores of four subject groups from 2022 compared to 2019. The collapse of the educational system has occurred at a time when the Ministry of Education has, in recent years, made extensive and ideologically driven revisions to textbooks at the request of Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic. Accordingly, the head of the Research and Educational Planning Organization announced on December 7 of last year that the Islamic Republic's plan for substantive changes in textbooks had been finalized and would be experimentally implemented for first graders starting from the beginning of October 2024. The changes in curriculum content provoked protests from a newspaper close to the IRGC, and after the publication of a report titled 'The Nonsensical Compilation of Textbooks!' on May 23 of this year in the newspaper Javan, the Ministry of Education explained that these changes were made in response to Khamenei's demands in the 1990s and also in November 2022, stating that the changes were 'based on higher-level documents, guidelines, and Khamenei's demands, needs assessment studies, and comparative studies.' Experts believe that with the approach the Islamic Republic has taken in the field of education and the prevailing atmosphere in society, one should expect an increasing disconnection within the educational system. Preventing sin from entering the textbooks of girls' schools; part of the program at the end of the first month of October in Iran; the school bell rang amid a shortage of more than 176,000 teachers. On the first day of school, the ceiling of a classroom in Urmia collapsed, injuring two students. Continued criticism of the Minister of Education in the government of Pezeshkian; making individuals religious is not your job. The Coordination Council of Teachers' Trade Unions in Iran criticized the expanding influence of the Basij in the education system.