Jordan Ranks First in Education

Jordan ranked first among Arab countries in the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report for 2005. Overall, the Kingdom was 45th out of 121 nations surveyed. …the report for this year focused on four criteria — school dropout level, illiteracy rate, qualitative leap in the educational process and gender equality in education.

Some troubles facing students were also acknowledged in the report

Students cited issues of financial problems, the poor teaching quality and the irrelevance of some subjects in their daily lives as factors discouraging them from staying in school. According to Barakat, the dropout rate in the Kingdom stands at 4 out of 1,000 students. "With regard to the leap in the educational process, the ministry has introduced new curricula in four grades, trained teachers on e-curricula and has established new schools to reduce overcrowding at the schools which in return reflected positively on the educational process among other achievements," said Barakat.

the report mentioned the percentage difference of boys and girls as well as illiteracy…

Of the 1.6 million students in the Kingdom’s schools, Barakat said regarding gender parity that "the number of boys might be 1 or 2 per cent more than the girls," pointing out that this figure is much better in the Kingdom than in many other Arab and foreign countries. Barakat attributes the country’s low illiteracy rates to the 298 literacy centres in the Kingdom. The illiteracy rate plummeted from 67 per cent in 1961 to 9.1 per cent this year. [source]

You can read the report here Another interesting piece of news is in the higher education arena where the Jordanian government plans to settle the collective debts of the country’s public universities, totalling JD118 million, a bold guesture that will help the universities devolop and "concentrate on improving the quality of higher education." [source]