Education is a critical component of any nation’s effort to prepare its youth for civic participation and a global economy. The leaders of the Arabian Gulf nation of Qatar view education as the key to Qatar’s economic and social progress. Long concerned that the country’s education system was not producing high-quality outcomes and was rigid, outdated, and resistant to reform, Qatari leaders approached the RAND Corporation in 2001, asking it to examine the kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) education system in Qatar and to recommend options for building a world-class system consistent with other Qatari initiatives for social and...

In this chapter, we present trends in expenditures and resource allocation throughout the system to help us understand how and why spending changed over time in the initial years of the reform. The first part of this chapter documents total spending on the reform, categorized as funds flowing to the various schools, institutes, offices, and contractors associated with the reform. The second part examines revenues and expenditures, including staff expenditures, across the first two cohorts of Independent schools. The information provided in this chapter serves three purposes. It addresses our first research question regarding resource allocation in the reform as...

The descriptive analyses provided in Chapter Two summarize expenditure and funding patterns in the reform throughout its first three years. We now turn to the key question of whether the reform’s school finance system is meeting the objectives of a sound system. We evaluate the system on the basis of its adherence to a set of guiding principles. A review of the literature on school finance yielded several characteristics that appeared to be related to a highly functioning school finance system.¹ We synthesized these into the following six guiding principles:

1.Transparency: A school finance system should be based on a...

To provide a useful tool to further the SEC’s ability to monitor and modify financial flows to the reform, we built a causal forecasting model to project future expenditures on Independent schools and overall reform under different scenarios. Education planning efforts have long relied on forecasting tools, dating back to the late 18^thand early 19^thcenturies (Coombs, 1970).

Generally, forecasting models may be categorized across three dimensions: (1) the type of process to be modeled (judgmental or statistical), (2) the type of information sources available (single- or multisource, uni- or multivariate), and (3) the role that theory or actors...

Qatar’s K–12 education reform has made notable progress in a few short years. It has founded a growing set of new schools and established a comprehensive infrastructure for financial support and monitoring. In this monograph, we have explored available data to understand the workings of Qatar’s education finance reform. We have documented trends in expenditures and funding of the Qatar K–12 education reform, beginning with the planning phase in 2003–2004 and extending through the start-up and operation of Generations I and II Independent schools in 2005–2006. In addition, we have evaluated the reform’s finance system by...