Unrewarded Addis Abeba's Brightest Drafted to Save the Failing Many

Nov 8 , 2025.

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Addis Abeba’s education chiefs cherish bold schemes, yet their latest scheme may prove the boldest and riskiest. Keen to repair the city’s bruised reputation after disappointing national exam results, education officials led by Zelalem Mulatu have unveiled a “cluster class” project meant to propel the brightest students to even greater heights and, by a trickle-down effect, lift everyone else.

On paper, it looks like a technocrat’s dream. Select the best 25 students per class from every public and private secondary school, sweep them into 57 “Saturday cluster” classes, add extra tutorials across the city, and watch exam scores soar. More than 42,000 youngsters, officials boast, will take part this academic year, moving the city’s pass rate seven percentage points higher to 60pc.

Such ambition is hardly new. Addis Abeba already trumpets its relative success. In 2024, 10pc of nearly 50,000 pupils passed the national exam, well clear of the national average. Acclaimed private schools, such as St. Joseph’s and Bisrat Gabriel, offer proof that excellence is attainable. Yet, the bragging masks a widening gulf between well-resourced private classrooms and cash-starved public ones. Cluster classes could deepen that chasm.

Concentrating resources on the elite, hoping their laurels inspire others, is a strategy with a chequered past both in Ethiopia and elsewhere.

Objections come thick and fast. Parents ask who will pay for transport, especially for students travelling from the sprawling suburbs. Many already struggle to cover weekday journeys. Saturday shuttles may break household budgets. School administrators wonder who decides which teachers should surrender their weekends. Some feel the plan was delivered as a “fait accompli”, sprung on families with scant consultation. Private-school heads grow sharper still. They would argue that the focus on top performers neglects the pupils most likely to fail or drop out. Indeed, chasing statistical gains is no substitute for serious improvement across the board.

Even deeper doubts question the policy’s intellectual footing. Cluster classes cannot mend frail foundations of chronic under-investment in teacher training, threadbare learning materials and an exam system that prizes minimum competence over genuine understanding. Similar experiments have floundered before. Past special classes for struggling students stumbled over discipline troubles, uneven teaching quality and lukewarm family support.

Without lessons from those misfires, the new programme could repeat old mistakes on a grander scale.

However, peer-to-peer learning can work wonders, only when it is voluntary. Global and local research finds that tutoring achieves its best returns when students choose to participate and are rewarded for doing so. Compulsion, by contrast, breeds resentment and saps motivation. High-intensity tutoring projects elsewhere have raised test scores by 0.25 to 0.42 standard deviations, equivalent to gains of up to 20 percentage points in pass rates, when mentors volunteer their time.

Zelalem’s plan flips that formula on its head. Top students, many from private schools, are dispatched across town at their families’ expense, with no pay or formal recognition.

Evidence from abroad is instructive. Governments trying to tame a booming “shadow education” industry have tended to curb commercial tutoring and protect students, rather than drafting teenagers into an unpaid teaching corps. Where officials have forced compulsory tutoring, backlash comes swiftly. Parents withdraw children from advanced classes, teachers buckle under extra duties, and students lose heart.

Data from the World Bank and UNESCO show that voluntary schemes outperform compulsory ones on almost every measure, including higher participation, lower dropout rates, and greater gains for disadvantaged learners.

Legal frameworks tell a similar story. Few countries grant education ministries the power to commandeer students to participate in unpaid tutoring. Statutes usually regulate commercial coaching and set standards for professional tutors. They seldom force students to teach peers at other schools. The gap is no accident. It mirrors a broad consensus that sound reform respects choices and cultivates trust. Coercion is not merely unpopular. It rarely works.

Addis Abeba’s plan thus stands on shaky ground. The city’s finest students risk seeing their achievements recast as obligations. Their weekends will vanish into classrooms far from home, while their own studies may suffer as a result. Teachers would juggle unfamiliar timetables. Families on the margins would stump up transport fares they can ill afford. The risk is a downward spiral. Resentment will rise, attendance slip, learning stall, and the headline target of a pass rate will float away.

A wiser course would flip compulsion into incentives. Offer genuine rewards, including academic credit, university admissions points, certificates, public acclaim, and even modest stipends, and tutoring becomes an opportunity, not a burden. Broader incentives would widen the pool, attracting not only straight-A prodigies but also students keen on teaching or community service. Training, curriculum alignment and steady support would lift quality. Most importantly, parents, teachers and pupils should help design and refine the scheme.

Reforms imposed from above seldom take root. Those shaped by stakeholders stand a chance.

None of this denies the urgency for change. Schools face overcrowded classrooms, underpaid teachers and scant learning materials. National exams expose the rot. New ideas are overdue. But education improves through patience, dialogue and steady investment, not crash programmes that chase quick statistical wins. The present gamble will be judged less by the next round of exam scores than by its effect on daily life for tens of thousands of families.

Does it narrow gaps in opportunity and achievement, or widen them? Does it build trust, or corrode it?

Zelalem and his team now confront a choice. They can persist with compulsory tutoring, courting the same disappointments that felled earlier experiments, or shift to voluntary and incentivised partnerships that promise steadier gains. History favours the latter. The best lessons, like the best tutors, inspire by invitation, not by official edict.

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PUBLISHED ON Nov 08,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1332]

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