Recommendations on improving quality of education School Financing School Financing

The Government should do the following:

22. Establish sectoral neutrality, so that denominational and private schools receive State funds only as long as they comply with the same equal treatment obligations as do public local government and State-run schools.

23. Take steps to ensure that the financing of public education is also effectively based on the principle of sectoral neutrality.

24. Establish and monitor equal treatment criteria ensuring enrolment to disadvantaged children and maintaining integrated classes, and allocate funds from the central budgetary and EU funds only to schools and authorities that meet these criteria.

25. Reinforce the Ministry of Education and Culture’s powers to provide effective sanctions and remedies against all types of violations of equal treatment in education.

The Ministry of Education and Culture should do the following:

26. Calculate the allocation of all types of central budgetary support so as to cover the actual costs of public education; the level of central budgetary contribution should be maintained despite decreasing student numbers, so as to ensure quality education for all.

27. Propose the imposition of criminal liability on school maintainers if all types of State funds are not spent as earmarked.

28. Comprehensively revise Article 66 of the Public Education Act to reintroduce compulsory catchment areas and impose the costs of education on families contracting out of this system.

29. Distribute education-related EU funds in a speedy and effective manner.

Establish a central emergency fund to cover expenses incurred by NGOs and other entities applying for these funds, until they receive the actual grant.

School facilities and human resources

The Ministry of Education and Culture should do the following:

30. Ensure the integrated education of children with special needs, guaranteeing assistance from special teachers at all levels of education during and after class.

31. Offer training and retraining in integrative teaching techniques to teachers at all levels.

32. Increase the number of teachers trained to work with children with special needs.

33. Establish minimum criteria in schools and pre-schools concerning infrastructure, staff, physical conditions, and educational results. Schools or classes not meeting the minimum criteria should receive assistance from an emergency manager and shut down if underperformance continues for three years.

34. Open additional Study Halls (tanoda) with the explicit aim of improving in a measurable way the school performance of Roma pupils and their progression to higher levels of education.

35. Further develop the network of mentoring and tutoring teachers to implement the new pedagogies in which they are being trained, in support of truly integrative classrooms.

Curricular standards

The Ministry of Education and Culture should do the following:

36. Ensure that extracurricular activities, such as additional language, art and subject specialisation, are genuinely extracurricular and available to all students; funding for disadvantaged pupils should be made available for them to attend.

Discriminatory Attitudes

The Ministry of Education and Culture should do the following:

37. Include anti-bias education and/or education for social justice as a requisite pre-service and in- training course for teachers.

38. Include training on tolerance and diversity for local authorities, school maintainers and representatives of the local media, in order to prevent or counteract stereotypes and prejudices against Roma ethnic groups.

School Inspections

The Ministry of Education and Culture should do the following:

39. Bring greater cohesion to the existing review and control mechanisms for schools and pre-schools, through the publication of a decree unifying and regulating the criteria for all types of reviews of schools.

40. Ensure that the existence of all Roma special classes or catch-up classes in schools be a criteria for school reporting and the basis for penalties.

41. Retrain public education experts and other types of reviewers with a view to attaining expertise in the field of equal treatment.

42. Centralise the appointment of expert reviewers and unify the records of local reviewers to ensure that the process is objective and fair.

43. Authorise central review and overseeing mechanisms to review decisions on home schooling.

44. Develop mechanisms to monitor the rates at which children are assessed as having intellectual disabilities, to ensure that special schools do not recruit students through improper diagnosis to compensate for declining enrolment numbers.

2. B

ASIC

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DUCATION

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NDICATORS

Substantial research has been conducted regarding Roma children and their access to education in Hungary. However, each study has been conducted according to different criteria and along different methodologies, making comparison of data difficult in some cases. Official data are among the least reliable of these sources, and many believe that sociological studies may be more reliable data sources than State-sponsored censuses. Data disaggregated by ethnicity have not been collected by the Government since 1993, when it passed a law protecting citizens’ rights. However, groups exerting pressure from the European Union (EU) affirm that data can and must be collected by ethnicity, if this is done responsibly. The Government needs to do more to collect and maintain comprehensive information on Roma education.

Measures were enacted in 2002 that should support better enrolment of Roma children in pre-school, but the impact of these reforms does not yet appear to be significant. Roma generally start school later and are more likely to drop out than the national average. The proportion of Roma among school-age children has been rising over the last 15 years and research indicates that it will continue to increase.

Non-enrolment in primary schools has not been reported as a systemic or visible problem.

Segregation is officially illegal in Hungary; however, research indicates that the separation of Roma children into segregated schools and classes has been on the rise over the past 15 years. Roma are overrepresented in schools and classes for children with intellectual disabilities, and evidence suggests that this is largely due to flaws in assessment procedures; Roma children are also frequently placed in segregated classes at otherwise mixed schools, where they are likely to study a remedial or “catch-up”

curriculum. Regulations to more equally apportion children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with special needs in each catchment area, and among classes in individual schools, could counteract these trends.

2.1 Data collection

Since 1993, Hungarian law has not allowed the handling of data on racial and ethnic origin except with the written consent of the person concerned.² As researchers in Hungary have argued for over a decade, however, what makes a person Roma is not self-identification, but perception,³ and the use of data relating to people’s perceived ethnic origin is not explicitly prohibited.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) advocates the collection of data disaggregated on the basis of ethnicity in its recent report on Hungary:

2 Articles 2 (2) and 3 (2) of Act No. 63 of 1992 on the Protection of Personal Data and the Publicity of Public Data.

3 There are two major camps at loggerheads over this issue in the social sciences: those in favour of self-identity, such as János Ladányi and Iván Szelényi, and those in favour of perception, such as Gábor Havas, István Kemény and Gábor Kertesi.

ECRI is convinced that the collection and publication of data broken down according to ethnic origin can be done in full respect of human rights, provided that certain requirements are met. ECRI emphasises that such data are very useful in identifying and combating problems of discrimination.⁴

Official data on Roma in Hungary, as in many other countries, are far from complete;

in the sphere of education, in particular, only limited information is collected by the State, and other sources of data must be consulted. One of the most severe criticisms raised by the former Ministerial Commissioner in charge of the Integration of Roma and Socially Disadvantaged Children (a roma és hátrányos helyzetű gyerekek integrációjáért felelős miniszteri biztos, hereafter, Integration Commissioner⁵) relates to the lack of reliable, relevant and cross-referable educational data. The root causes of these concerns are the following:

• Not all data relating to education are collected or monitored by the Ministry of Education and Culture;

• Relevant data are provided by the schools themselves and may not be consistent;

• Data-gathering systems are not compatible across Ministries, let alone with international data collection systems.⁶

The present report quotes extensively from various research reports that used entirely different samples and have quite different levels in terms of representation. The following (in chronological order) are the most widely referenced sources in this report;

however, the selection of research data presented is inevitably limited by the length and scope of the present report.

School research conducted by Havas, Kemény and Liskó in 1999 and 2000 was reported in 2002 (hereafter, Havas, Kemény and Liskó, 2002⁷). This research reports on those schools with over 20 per cent Roma, and/or in which the overall number of

4 European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), Third Report on Hungary, adopted on 5 December 2003, Strasbourg 8 June 2004, p. 24, available at

http://www.coe.int/t/e/human_rights/ecri/1-ecri/2-country-by-country_approach/hungary/third _report_Hungary.pdf (accessed on 24 February 2007) (hereafter, ECRI, Third Report on Hungary).

5 For further details on the Integration Commissioner’s duties, see Annex 1.1.

6 Interview with Gábor Daróczi, former Ministerial Commissioner for Roma and Disadvantaged Children, 8 March 2006, Budapest.

7 Gábor Havas, István Kemény and Ilona Liskó, Cigány gyerekek az általános iskolában (Roma Children in Primary Education), Budapest: Oktatáskutató Intézet (Education Research Institute), Új Mandátum Könyvkiadó (New Mandate Publishing House), 2002 (hereafter, Havas, Kemény and Liskó, 2002).

Roma students in the school was over 80. The research was conducted in 192 schools that were selected on the basis of the officially reported school statistics in 1992–1993.⁸ Further research conducted in 2004 by Havas and Liskó (hereafter, Havas and Liskó, 2004⁹) included not only schools where the proportion of Roma students exceeded 20 per cent and the overall number of Roma students was over 80, but also those schools that applied for additional per capita support to provide Roma minority education, as well as schools maintaining special classes (eltérő tantervű tagozat) that displayed

“suspect” proportions of Roma students. According to the research methodology, the number of schools surveyed grew to 613, yielding relevant data from 553 schools.

Havas and Liskó concluded that the number of segregated schools not reached by their research in 2004 does not exceed five per cent (eight or nine schools) of all segregated primary schools.¹⁰ Therefore, in Hungary there are 178 schools in which the share of Roma students exceeds 50 per cent, most of which were included in their survey.

Babusik’s research (hereafter, Babusik, 2000, 2002, 2003) looks at enrolment in pre-schools, primary school attitudes towards Roma and chances for secondary education, and works on the basis of questionnaires sent out to pre-schools and schools as opposed to field visits. Research results quoted in this report from 2000 onward have a focus on education, but the samples are uneven – underrepresenting schools in Budapest, Fejér and Veszprém Counties – and extrapolated from the 1992 school statistics, and so this does not cover schools that at that time had a proportion of less than 8.5 per cent of Roma students. Similarly, his data on pre-schools were generated on the basis of questionnaires, underrepresenting small villages and small pre-schools. Although Babusik does not base his data on field research, his research is important, because he covers certain issues in enrolment and other areas that are not examined by other research.

Kemény (hereafter, Kemény, 1971¹¹) first conducted national level research based on a representative sample in 1971, which covered the social status, linguistic and ethnic

8 School Statistics 1992/1993, cited in “Járási és városi cigány tanuló adatok, 1970–1992”

(Regional and Town-Based Student Data 1970–1992), Chapter 7.5 in Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi, A cigány népesség Magyarországon, Dokumentáció és adattár (The Gypsy Population in Hungary, Documentation and Database), socio-typo, Budapest, 1998 (hereafter, School Statistics 1992/1993), pp. 313–431.

9 Gábor Havas and Ilona Liskó, Szegregáció a roma tanulók általános iskolai oktatásában, Kutatási zárótanulmány 2004. szeptember, Felősoktatási Kutatóintézet, kézirat (Segregation in the Education of Roma Students in Primary Schools, Final Research Report September 2004, Research Institute of Higher Education, unpublished) (hereafter, Havas and Liskó, 2004).

10 Segregation is taken to occur at the school level if a majority of pupils are Roma, and at the class level if the share of Roma children in one class in the school is 50 per cent higher than that of Roma children in another class in the same school – see also section 2.4.

11 István Kemény (ed.), Beszámoló a magyarországi cigányok helyzetével foglalkozó, 1971-ben végzett kutatásról (Report about Research Carried out in 1971 Relating to the Situation of Hungarian Roma), Budapest: MTA Szociológiai Intézet, 1976 (hereafter, Kemény, 1971).

proportions of Roma, the types of villages and towns that they inhabited, their housing conditions, family sizes, the number of children and live births, education, employment, and the impact of industrialisation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as their income. At that time he estimated the number of Roma living in the country at around 320,000, and took a representative sample of two per cent. This research was as comprehensive as possible.

In 1993 Kemény and his two colleagues Havas and Kertesi (hereafter, Kemény and Havas, 1993¹²) conducted research that aimed at mapping changes that had taken place since the first research in 1971. This research estimated the number of Roma at around 468,000 and again took a representative sample, in terms of language and place of residence, of two per cent. For this research they used school statistics from 1992, which at the time still contained information about Roma provided by teachers and therefore allowed quite a precise estimate of proportions

In 2003 Kemény and Janky’s research (hereafter, Kemény and Janky, 2003¹³) looked for the impact of the Government’s economic and labour policies, as well as the relative situation of different social classes. They estimated the number of Roma to be around 540,800 and took a representative sample of one per cent only. They covered 1,165 homes and counted 5,408 people. Kemény and Janky found that 4.6 per cent (26,220 people) of the overall Roma population spoke Beash and 7.7 per cent (44,000) spoke Romanes alongside Hungarian.

Some researchers believe that sociological studies may be more reliable for data than State-sponsored censuses. One researcher summarised the methodological issues as follows:

The theoretical and legal debates notwithstanding, and given the huge distortion of the number of Roma in Hungarian census data today, empirical sociology may come to rely on statistics based on the judgement of the environment about the ethnic status of the individuals. There has been a need to work out procedures that would simultaneously comply with both legal and statistical reliability requirements. Hungarian sociologists Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi first elaborated a method by which it became possible to estimate the actual Roma population in Hungarian settlements.

12 Gábor Havas and István Kemény, “A magyarországi romákról” (About Roma in Hungary), Szociológiai Szemle (Social Sciences Review), 1995/3 (hereafter, Kemény and Havas, 1993), pp.

3–20.

13 István Kemény, Béla Janky and Gabriella Lengyel, A magyarországi cigányság 1971–2003 (Hungarian Roma 1971–2003), Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó, MTA Etnikai-Nemzeti Kisebbségkutató Intézet (Hungarian Academy of Sciences Ethnic-National Minority Research Institute), 2004 (hereafter, Kemény and Janky, 2003).

In document Equal Access to Quality Education for RomaVolume 1 (Pldal 193-200)