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education POLICY: CuRTAILING modernization
Vladimir Dounaev
Summary
The year 2017 did not see significant changes amid a deepening crisis in education. Funding cuts and demographic problems exacerbated education policy imbalances manifested in the reducing quality of secondary-level and tertiary education against the backdrop of populist policy of accessibility of education. The authorities chose to conceal problems instead of resolving them, setting lower requirements, falsifying statistics and engaging in empty social rhetoric. The most important international commitments to update the education system were removed from the agenda or pushed into the background. Legislation reforms were stalled. This policy did not encounter substantial public resistance or criticism, as public attention was diverted to minor issues.
Trends:
• Curtailed or delayed modernization of education;
• Imitation of public discussions and the use of state-controlled NGOs and councils to legitimize government's decisions;
• Decreased government's sensitivity to international assessments of education policy;
• Public expectations shifted towards civic initiatives to upgrade tertiary education and reduce Russia's dominance in education.
Arbitrariness and uncertainty
On November 29, 2017, the education minister issued order No.742, approving 'conceptual approaches to development of the education system of the Republic of Belarus until 2020 and for the long term until 2030'. This document claims to determine the tasks, main areas, priorities of government education policy, and tools for their achievement. This 'mutiny of the bureaucracy', which encroaches on the president's sole prerogative to single-handedly determine state education policy (paragraph 107 of the Education Code), can only go unnoticed in an atmosphere of total legal nihilism. One can speculate about the true motives behind this usurpation of power by the minister, but, apparently, no one suspected Communist Karpenko of a lack
of loyalty. There was certain awkwardness, though. Later, the minister had to refer to the authority of the Republican Pedagogical Council and public debates, without however adding legitimacy to the ministerial order.1
Of course, no one any longer expects the president to intelligibly and conscientiously determine future education policy. Even an in-depth analysis of his statements would not help to make its sustainable goals and priorities clear and unambiguous. In this state of uncertainty, officials have to produce programs, concepts and roadmaps, which they cannot but doubt themselves.
Although the president's arbitrariness devaluates the programming potential of ministerial exercises, they have a diagnostic value, as they allow measuring the depth of the crisis of the Belarusian education system.
Even the official statistics, which used to flatter national vanity by reporting leading global positions with respect to the number of students per 10,000 population, do not warm hearts with good news anymore. This indicator dropped from 467 students in 2010 to 299 in 2017. The total number of students also dropped from 442,000 to 284,000. The number of foreign students in Belarusian universities decreased for the first time in recent years.2 This mostly concerns fee-paying students. State support possibilities have shrunk as well.
Legislative reform
2017 was marked by ebullient discussions of back-burner issues and the usual lack of results. As in previous years, a draft of a new version of the Education Code did not reach the legislators. Parliamentary hearings on the Education Code scheduled for November 29 did not take place, because there was no draft in the House of Representatives. Announced innovations have been
«Образовательные новации — 2018. Онлайн-конференция.» БелТА. 21 Mar. 2018. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <www.belta.by/onlineconference/view/ obrazovatelnye-novatsii-2018-1024/?_utl_t=tw>.
Статистический бюллетень «Образование в республике Беларусь (2017/2018 учебный год)». Минск: Национальный статистический комитет РБ, 2017. 6,38, 41. Print.
unable to break through the barriers of departmental approvals or presidential censorship since 2013.
The Public Advisory Council at the Education Ministry, the formation of which had been postponed for years, joined the discussion of the draft. Along with public consultation on draft amendments to the Code in February and the August 24 session the Republican Pedagogical Council, it was supposed to imitate public involvement in decision-making.
Quality or accessibility
The persistent proclamation of education quality as a priority in all policy documents only shows that the education system has not been approaching a solution to this painful problem for many years. This is not surprising, because instead of solving the most urgent problems, the authorities have been inventing ways to conceal them for the sake of populist accessibility policy.
Year after year, centralized testing results have been tarnishing successes of Belarusian secondary education. Attempts to camouflage the problem by classifying the official statistics of pupils' average academic performance were devalued by depressingly low university admission grades.
A solution was found in 2017. Following the president's instructions to bring centralized testing tasks closer to the school curriculum, the government decided to improve the statistics by removing challenging questions from the tests (to be more exact, questions for advanced students, which are included in the school curriculum, but regularly spoil the statistics of en-rollees' average CT scores). The authorities decided to make higher education quality criteria dependent on the mass results of secondary education.
This 'democratization' of centralized testing fully agrees with other steps taken by the government to reduce the requirements to education quality. Since the situation with employment of university graduates has markedly worsened, the authorities continued falsifying the data on compulsory job placement as they practiced in 2016 and began to force employers to give j obs to graduates. It's no secret why university graduates are in no demand in most industries. The reason is the poor competence
of degree holders. However, the government still chooses a statistical mirage and intimidation of students and university heads over restructuring the system of professional qualifications, which would ensure education-labor market linkages. Secret ministerial restrictions on free employment of government-subsidized students upon graduation have been talked about in previous years. In 2017, for the first time, Deputy Prime Minister Vasily Zharko announced a categorical ban on 'free diplomas' (without compulsory job placement).3
Apparently, this statement was addressed not only to the internal audience. It was supposed to indicate the end of old policy of bringing Belarusian education closer to the standards and values of the European Higher Education Area before the assessment of compliance with the requirements set for the accession to the EHEA. Belarus openly refused not only to reconsider compulsory job placement of graduates. In 2017, the country failed to fulfill other obligations on the implementation of the Bologna roadmap for reforming university education. None of the 9 socially significant targets, including the obligation to develop a National Qualifications Framework (NQF), was achieved in time.4
Another EU's program — Employment, Vocational Education and Training in Belarus — which provides for establishment of the NQF for blue-collar occupations5, has not been launched since 2015.
No response was given to the appeal of the Republican Council of Rectors to the Ministry of Education and other departments to speed up NQF development and introduce
Жарко, Василий. «В вузах Беларуси должно быть стопроцентное распределение без свободных дипломов.» БелТА. 29 Jan. 2018. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <www.belta.by/opinions/view/v-vuzah-belarusi-dolzhno-byt-stoprotsentnoe-raspredelenie-bez-svobodnyh-diplomov-6016/>. «Итоговый мониторинг имплементации Дорожной карты реформы высшего образования Беларуси.» Общественный болонский комитет. 16 Oct. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <bolognaby.org/index.php/issledovanija-analitika/679-monitoring6>.
«Занятость, профессиональное образование и обучение в Беларуси. Соглашение о финансировании.» Национальный правовой Интернет-портал РБ. 14 May 2016. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <http://pravo.by/documen t/?guid=12551&p0=I01500071&p1=1>.
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European standards in tertiary education. However, the subsequent replacement of seven university rectors could well be interpreted in the academic community as a repressive response to the appeal of university heads, even if it was not meant as such.
These replacements of rectors unequivocally point at the government's priorities. Of all Belarusian universities, only the Belarusian State University run by then Rector Sergei Obla-meiko managed to show certain successes in global university rankings, which is regarded as evidence of quality and successful management. New Rector Andrei Korol, who achieved notoriety by subjecting Grodno State University faculty members to mass repressions, disbanded the scientific methodological center, which supported the participation of the university in international academic ranking programs.
Even when the authorities correctly diagnose the problem, proposed solutions can only aggravate the crisis. The acknowledgement of the poor applicability of vocational education results in ridiculous remedies, like the idea of reducing the duration of university education to three years.6
Crisis of financing
Accessibility of all levels of education has been maintained, but its high quality can only be ensured through a significant increase in public spending. The funding of education in 2017 was scarce. The finance minister said that in 2018, the state will allocate 9.6% more funds for education than in 2017. This may seem encouraging, but, in fact, the promised USD 2,86 billion is almost 25% less than five years back.7
In the face of a GDP decline, the promise to increase spending on education to 5% of GDP should not be misleading either. The authorities would like the nation to forget that the
«"Он должен на первом курсе в это г...но окунуться". Лукашенко
о сроках обучения и лишних предметах.» TUT.by. 24 Aug. 2017. Web.
13 Apr. 2018. <news.tut.by/society/557325.html>.
«Лукашенко подписал Закон о республиканском бюджете на 2018
год.» БелТА. 31 Dec. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <www.belta.by/president/
view/lukashenko-podpisal-zakon-o-respublikanskom-bjudzhete-na-
2018-god-282752-2017/>.
Law on Education (in effect until 2011) envisaged 10% of GDP for education, and Lukashenko promised to achieve this by 2010.
underfunding is also noticeable on particular education levels. Contrary to international recommendations on support for tertiary education at 2% of GDP, Belarus cut it from 0.78% to 0.57% between 2005 and 2017.8
Belarusian education suffers from inefficiency of public spending even more than from underfunding. In 2013, the World Bank stressed that solutions to education problems require further measures to optimize the school system, gradual transition to funding per student and increased responsibility for results.9 Capitation funding has been mulled since 2012, but the pilot phase still continues. In 2017, the experiment involved 642 out of over 3,000 educational institutions.
No noticeable increase in efficiency of government spending has been achieved. Only 10% of schools have gone through optimization over all these years. The teacher/pupil ratio — the main indicator of the cost effectiveness per student — was changing slowly from 7.63 in 2013 to 8.68 in 2017. Contrary to parents' belief, these low indicators do not mean a higher quality of education. In developed economies they are much higher than in Belarus, for example, in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development this ratio stands at 13.10
The abundant number of teachers in Belarus results from the populist policy of preserving small schools in rural areas, which cannot provide high quality and effective education, but annually request thousands of graduates justifying and preserving the feudal system of employing young professionals.
Bohdan, Nina. "Belarusian Universities Challenges and European Higher Education Integration." Http://Www.bseu.by, BSEU, 3 Nov. 2017, Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <www.bseu.by/russian/news/docs/20171103-Беларусь и ЕПВО_Богдан^^.
«Обзор государственных расходов в Республике Беларусь.» Всемирный банк. 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <documents.worldbank.org/ curated/en/550301468014421797/pdf/741480ESW0P123032700PUBLI C00Russian.pdf>.
"Education at a Glance 2017." OECD Publishing. 12 Sept. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2018. <read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2017_eag-2017-en#page360>.
Conclusion
In his annual address to the nation and the parliament President Lukashenko shared his view on the tasks set to the education system: to simplify secondary education programs, shorten the training and reduce the number of universities, and strengthen the link between education and industry (in short, make it all simpler and cheaper). This means that the state stops fulfilling a number of its social commitments disguising this with populist promises.
When inventing strategies and roadmaps, education administrators sometimes try to curb this onslaught of populism, having less and less chance to maintain stability, let alone an upgrade.
Bologna transformations are off the agenda, despite international pressure and attempts to keep this topic in the Belarus-EU dialogue.
Supported by the World Bank, the program to modernize secondary education was mainly limited to the renovation of school buildings, whereas management reforms are not even close to the top of the to-do list.
Education-labor market linkages, which the authorities are so concerned about, are not supported by any real steps to reform the system of professional qualifications and involve employers in education quality management.
Attempts of some civil society leaders to expedite the implementation of national university projects enlivened this bleak picture to a certain extent in 2017.
For the first time in a long while, not openly resisted by the authorities, civil society reached a consensus on the need for a national alternative to the Russian domination over Belarusian education.
