It was exactly two years ago today that James A. Goldston, Executive Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, made the following statement: “Romani children will now have the same access to a good education as everyone else.” Goldston was the legal advisor to the families of 18 Romani pupils who complained in the case of D.H. and others vs. the Czech Republic.
Two years ago, the Grand Chamber of the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg decided 13 to 4 that the practice of segregating Romani pupils assigned to special schools for the mentally disabled was a form of illegal discrimination that violated their fundamental human rights. “Today the court has issued an historic verdict, according to which discrimination has no place in 21st-century Europe,” Goldston said at the time.
Two years after the verdict and those words, what is education like in the Czech Republic today?
One answer to that question can be found in a recent government report on the measures taken since the European Court verdict. The report was sent to Strasbourg as the government’s second follow-up to the verdict in June of this year.
The report presents the results of two analyses intended to gather information on the situation of Romani children in the Czech education system. This was the ministry’s first-ever study focused on pupils of a particular ethnicity and should form the basis for future measures. The analyses were performed between September 2008 and March 2009. The first analysis mapped the degree to which teachers take an individualized approach to pupils with special educational needs (performed by the People in Need organization - Člověk v tísni, o.p.s.), while the second mapped the educational opportunities for Romani pupils living near socially excluded localities (performed by GAC spol. s. r. o).
The authors of these analyses based them on a sample of approximately 100 elementary schools located directly in or near socially excluded localities. About 60 000 – 80 000 Roma live in such localities, approximately one-third of the total estimated number of Roma living in the Czech Republic, so the results cannot be generalized as representative of the country as a whole. Nevertheless, the data from both research efforts shows that the state of education for Romani pupils in Czech schools remains disturbing.
The GAC analysis found 28 % of Romani pupils are being educated in the “special schools” under investigation – in other words, outside of mainstream education. Romani pupils are three and a half times more likely to be transferred to a “special school” than are other pupils. Such children are diagnosed as having “light mental retardation”, a disability said to be suffered by between 2 -3 % of any population.
The aim of the second analysis, produced by People in Need, was to determine how various types of schools are prepared to meet children’s special educational needs on an individual basis and what kinds of approaches and resources are used by educators for this purpose. The analysis focused on teachers’ work with physically and mentally disabled children as well as on their work with socially disadvantaged children.
This analysis found that good conditions for the integration of children with special educational needs exist at only one-third of the schools researched. Good conditions do not exist at approximately one-fourth of the schools included in the research, and these schools will not be improving conditions any time soon.
Such conditions include satisfactory staff capacity, making use of special education teachers, providing adequate equipment, or including special educational needs as part of a school’s educational program. The integration of such children into mainstream education, according to the analysis, has been confined to a few individual examples rather than being a general trend.
“As a rule, the measures implemented by schools can be characterized as responding to the symptoms and not the causes of pupils’ social disadvantage, and their effectiveness is usually temporary. It is not possible for schools to eliminate the causes of social disadvantage on their own; that requires a systemic approach and collaboration across disciplines,” the government report says.
The severity of the situation
varies, depending on location. There are, however, several Czech schools doing their best to address the integration of pupils with specific needs in a reasonable way.
One such school is Lačnov Elementary
School in Svitavy, which does its best to work on integrating all children as a declared aim. One-third of the children attending Lačnov have specific educational needs, whether they are “socioculturally” disadvantaged or children with learning disabilities.
“We were inspired by the alternative programs of Montessori and Waldorf schools; we received two grants from European funds, and now children commute here from the other side of Svitavy or even from other towns,” school director Radoslava Renzová told the weekly Respekt. Four years ago the school was facing the possibility of closure.
The school employs a teaching assistant and offers many activities. There are clear sets of rules established for the children and the teachers. Rule number one for the children is: “We respect one another.” One of the teachers’ rules is: “I see and recognize the personality of each of my pupils, and I treat them accordingly, which means I never humiliate or ridicule them, but guide them using dignified means.” All of the teachers at Lačnov Elementary have participated in seminars on specific educational needs entitled “To respect and be respected”. Parents and teachers from other nearby schools have also attended the seminar.
At the start of October, the school began a three-year project entitled “Partnership without Prejudices”. Part of this project involves designing individual educational plans for each child involved. The school will also run socio-therapeutic workshops focused on skills development and/or arrange for pedagogical-psychological support for parents.
This fall Lačnov Elementary became one of four schools to receive a Fair School (Férová škola) certificate, awarded to schools that support an equal approach to all children. The certificate is awarded by the League of Human Rights organization under the auspices of the Czech Education Ministry.
Another positive example is the Lyčkové náměstí Elementary School in the Prague neighborhood of Karlín. While this school does not place any particular emphasis on integrating Romani children, thanks to its profile as a community school striving to reflect the needs of those around it, the completely natural, problem-free inclusion of Romani children into mainstream instruction occurs there.
“Approximately 10 % of our pupils are Roma. This means one or two Romani pupils are in each classroom. I believe this is how it needs to be so all the groups, including the children of foreigners, can live beside one another normally and get along without problems,” school director Jan Korda says.
Roughly 30 of the school’s 300 children work according to individual educational plans; six of them are Roma. The plans primarily concern learning disabilities with respect to Czech language and mathematics, where, for example, some fifth graders are working at second-grade level. “They can handle everything else no problem. I don’t see any reason to isolate them from the others,” Korda says.
A special education teacher and two teaching assistants work at the school, which is currently considering introducing some forms of after-school programs to make it possible for pupils without conditions conducive to studying at home to prepare their homework at school after classes are over. “The problem is money, because while I can get grants for teaching assistants, it is hard to get grants for after-school programs. It is also difficult to explain this option to some of the parents in such a way that it remains a voluntary choice for the children. I do not want to punish them with after-school,” Korda says.
This school does its best to profile itself as a community school in the Karlín neighborhood. Such a school is open to the public and its neighbors and does its best to collaborate with parents to the greatest possible extent and involve them in the running of the school. “We have succeeded with only a few of the parents of the Romani pupils. Unfortunately, there is a lot of distrust from their side and that of the other parents. Every instance in which we can break down that distrust is a big success to me,” Korda says.
There are many recipes for ameliorating the continuing segregation in Czech schools. Some of the most frequently mentioned are the greater involvement of teaching assistants, continuing education for teachers and other school staff, and more intensive collaboration with parents.
Teaching assistants are one approach about which there is no controversy. According to the GAC analysis, 6.5 out of 10 Romani pupils make it to the third grade of mainstream education in classes without teaching assistants, while 7.5 out of 10 make it to the third grade when teaching assistants are employed. During 2009 there were 430 assistants employed in the Czech education system, but this number does not meet the demand.
Neither teachers nor their assistants should focus purely on children with behavioral or learning disabilities, but should be able to work individually with every child in the context from which he or she comes, including socially excluded localities. However, very few special education teachers and even fewer ordinary teachers are familiar with the specifics of such an environment. In other words, socially disadvantaged children should not be viewed through the lens of disorder; rather, interest should be taken in the socio-cultural influences on their behavior and how to work with them.
“In practice, Czech schools have managed to work successfully only with those children whose families adequately prepare their children and teach them during the course of school attendance what the school does not. In cases where the family does not create good conditions for education, does not cooperate with the school, or even boycotts its work, the Czech education system as a rule does not know how to help such children, it has nothing to offer them,” says Zdeněk Svoboda, one of the authors of the People in Need research.
Many Romani children are faced with the following choice: Do they remain at a mainstream elementary school, where they wrestle with permanent educational failure, or should they ask to be transferred to a “practical school” where they will be educated according to a less demanding curriculum that does not prepare them for success on the labor market? At the start of July the Education Ministry launched a nationwide project, Centers for the Support of Inclusive Education, whose employees will inform schools of existing support measures and opportunities and collaborate with schools in establishing pro-inclusion strategies.
The Education Ministry is also working on other systemic improvements, one of which is their “Methodological recommendations for securing equal education opportunities for socially disadvantaged children and pupils”. “The purpose of this recommendation is to guarantee conditions for providing support and equalizing measures to socially disadvantaged children, primarily in mainstream education, and preventing the excessive assignment of such children and children from different cultural and social backgrounds into schools for mentally disabled children,” says Iveta Němečková of the Education Ministry’s Equal Opportunity Department.
The document covers preschool preparations, education at nursery school, and education at elementary schools. The recommendations should help schools collaborate more intensively with counseling facilities on how to diagnose special educational needs in relation to socially disadvantaged children.
The National Plan for Inclusive
Education, which will be ready at the end of this year, will introduce a long-term conceptual solution to this problem. The plan will establish comprehensive measures and the main changes necessary for guaranteeing inclusive education, including measures for socially disadvantaged children.
“The problem as a whole is only solvable in the context of the family as a whole. All of the support activities must be coordinated and effectively combined with those of other agencies such as social services departments, NGOs, counseling facilities, the police, etc,” Zdeněk Svoboda says.
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