Czech Education Minister not interested in Roma children, but the Council of Europe is

The Council of Europe is not satisfied with the regular reports of the Czech Republic on measures to reduce discrimination against Roma pupils and wants Czech Education Minister Josef Dobeš (Public Affairs) to achieve concrete results. At tomorrow’s cabinet session, Dobeš will be presenting the Government with materials on how inclusion has been proceeding, but for the time being he is unable to boast of any success. A plan to improve conditions for Roma pupils was approved in March of this year, but the ministry says the measures have not been in effect long enough to produce any noticeable progress.

The ministry created its integration plan on the basis of the 2007 European Court of Human Rights judgment according to which the Czech Republic violated the right to education of 18 Roma children by unjustifiably sending them to “special schools”. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, an organization of 47 states whose main aim is to protect human rights, supervises the implementation of ECtHR judgments.

The plan counts on reducing the number of Roma children attending today’s “practical” (formerly the “special”) schools, where they have often ended up not on the basis of their actual intelligence, but because of their poor social backgrounds. “Given the date on which the National Action Plan for Inclusive Education was approved, only the opening coordination/organization phase of the plan has taken place so far,” the ministry’s materials say.

Dobeš also cannot boast that the two decrees regulating the education of children with special needs and the operation of educational psychological counseling facilities at schools have been amended. The ministry has postponed the submission of the amendments, designed by experts on equal opportunities in schooling, until April of next year, supposedly due to the number of comments it has received regarding the proposed changes.

The ministry is not even able to submit statistics comparing the number of Roma pupils past and present. “At this moment, significant changes are not to be expected compared to 2009, when an investigation into the percentage of Roma pupils in mainstream elementary school programs compared to programs for those with light mental disability was conducted,” says the report. The ministry calculates the first results of its Roma inclusion measures might not become apparent until 2014.

According to research conducted by the ministry, two out of every 100 non-Roma children attend “practical” (formerly “special”) schools. For Roma children the number is 30 out of 100. The backward approach of the ministry to this issue has already been criticized by the international human rights organization Amnesty International and the NGO initiative “Together to School”.

One week ago, the director of the ministry department which is supposed to address this issue, child psychiatrist Viktor Hartoš, resigned. Education Minister Dobeš first said Hartoš left after only six weeks because he had been unable to withstand the political pressures at the ministry. However, ever since the following quote from Hartoš’s resignation letter was published by the news server Aktuálně.cz, Dobeš has been silent on the issue:

“As the team leader I cannot identify, either professionally or personally, with the current approach of the Education Ministry toward fulfilling the obligations flowing from the judgment of the European Court from 2007. No genuine effort is being made to contribute to resolving this serious problem that affects society as a whole; rather, there is a tendency to be satisfied with mere formalities,” Hartoš wrote.

Klára Laurenčíková, former Deputy Minister to ex-Education Minister Ondřej Liška (Greens), resigned together with Hartoš. During her time at the ministry, Laurenčíková helped to change the illegal mechanism of automatically assigning Roma children from disadvantaged environments into special schools from the start of their compulsory attendance.

After the fall of the Topolánek government in spring 2009 and the installation of a caretaker cabinet, Laurenčíková succeeded in gradually rebalancing the system towards its original aim (i.e., that special needs education should be for intellectually disabled children only), but the situation soon came to a head due to political agitation and lobbying by directors of the former “special schools” fighting to preserve their jobs. In April of this year, Laurenčíková lost her influential Deputy Minister position and was demoted to the head of the team handling social programs.

Over the months that followed, her team was gradually reduced in size, a trend that continued after Viktor Hartoš took office in September. Even though Hartoš was supposedly the “minister’s man”, once he learned that a version of the special education concept on which he was supposed to work had in fact already been completed but was being ignored by Education Minister Dobeš, he preferred to leave.