Education Policy: Becoming an outsider

Vladimir Dounaev

Summary

Education in Belarusian is in a state of all-around, systemic crisis that affects all three main variables of educational policy: deteriorating quality, poorer accessibility of funding, and cuts in spending on education. So far, these indicators have not been that synchronous.

Neither the reformist, nor the conservative vectors can prevail in the rivalry of the state education strategies, dooming Belarusian education to the increasing lagging behind the world leaders.

Trends:

In the face of a PISA shock

It is hard to cultivate the illusion of normality, which would maintain conservative motivation of a large part of society, when there is an opportunity to break through self-isolation and look at ourselves from another angle. In 2018, Belarusian education made this possible for the first time by gullibly opening up to the whole world. Two long awaited, yet constantly deferred events finally allowed looking at secondary and higher education through this external global lens.

In April-May 2018, for the first time, around 6,000 students of 200 Belarusian secondary schools joined the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the world’s largest international study of how fifteen-year-olds can apply their knowledge in everyday life. The Programme is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Quite often, the findings become an unpleasant surprise for governments, prompting radical changes in educational policy.

The participation in PISA was one of the conditions for obtaining a USD 50 million loan from the World Bank for modernization of the Belarusian education system. Although the test results were expected to come back before the end of 2018, the country will experience a PISA shock in 2019, and many believe that it is inevitable.

Secondary education definitely needs real reforms, instead of manipulations with state standardized test (SST) statistics. The authorities continue to solve the problem of the falling quality of education by making the tests less demanding, which is apparently supposed to reduce concerns about the ridiculous gap between the successful results of graduation exams and the discouraging results of the SST.1 In addition to the simplified tests, a new method for calculating SST scores was applied in 2018. According to independent experts, it will “pull up underperformers, and improve the average graduation scores statistics in secondary schools.”2

Even more than the tampering with test results, conscientious parents were alarmed by the abolition of exams before the fifth grade in gymnasiums. This would not agitate them so much, if it were not for the rumors about the abolition of gymnasiums at all. In 2008, there was a plan to close lyceums and gymnasiums, get back to 11-year secondary education and abolish field-oriented courses. It did not happen then, but there is every reason to believe that it can now. Explanations given by the authorities just confirmed their commitment to the egalitarianism in secondary education, the more so as the restriction of the parents’ right to choose an educational institution for their children is one of the immediate consequences of this “reform”.

In response to these threats, society began showing stronger interest in alternative models of secondary education and the opening of several pilot private schools. A gradual increase in the number of non-state education institutions has occurred before. From 2010-2011 to 2017-2018 academic years, their number increased from 11 to 16.3 But they have not yet had any noticeable effect on the diversification of education. New school projects attracted attention not so much because of their scale, as the ambitious objectives and high bills. The authorities did not see any threat to the education system in them, though.

Bologna outsider

The second event of 2018 displayed imbalances and deformations of the higher education system. Belarus very rarely gets into international statistical reviews and global rankings. Therefore, its mentioning in the Bologna Process Implementation Report “The European Higher Education Area in 2018”4 gives a reason to compare Belarusian higher education with other higher education systems in the vast area of Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

Such reports are being prepared for every ministerial summit of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as a rule, once in three years, to compare countries in terms of the achievement of the Bologna operational goals, values and tools. Bologna reforms do not automatically lead to the resolution of all higher education problems in any country, but they contribute considerably to the enhancement of the quality and inclusiveness of higher education if conducted in a comprehensive and consistent manner. The main thing is that the authorities largely coped with the challenge of mass higher education.

For quite a while, Belarus had not dared to make a choice and join the 47 members of the European Higher Education Area. And when it finally did it 16 years after the start of the Bologna process, special tools and international procedures were required in order to introduce Belarus into the EHEA. This happened for the first time in the history of the Bologna Club. However, along with the anachronistic education system of Belarus, the Europeans were concerned over the country’s reputation as a not very conscientious partner.

Nevertheless, even despite the incompleteness and sometimes untrustworthiness of the information provided by Belarus, the EHEA Implementation Report makes it possible to understand Belarus’ education policy.

The European methodology applied to analyze the higher education system in Belarus clearly shows disproportions in its structure, indicating a shift towards the availability of lower qualifications to the detriment of higher ones. It is also obvious that vocational education has been restructured by reducing the proportion of higher education.

Compared with EHEA, Belarus shortened the first-level studies without creating conditions for further education at higher levels. According to the Implementation Report, the proportion of candidates for the master’s degree in Belarus is 13 times smaller than the European average, and the proportion of third-cycle students (corresponds to postgraduate education in Belarus) is three times smaller than the EHEA average.5 This deformation cannot but affect the quality of the human capital.

The nominal replication of the Bologna architecture is depreciated by the ugly distinctiveness of its implementation. The country’s leadership does not comprehend the attempts to increase the graduate school enrolment in recent years, which puts the national innovative development plans in question. Any innovation policy will hit up against the lack of human resources.

The Belarusian education system is increasingly producing “specialists with irrelevant competencies”, i.e. gives degrees without employment options. Even official statistics shows a twofold increase in the proportion of persons with higher education among the registered unemployed from 7.6% in 2000 to 14.6% in 2017. The situation is exacerbated by the ineffective forecasting of staffing needs, the lack of an adequate graduate employment fostering system and the orientation of higher education institutions to social demand (demand for education services) rather than demand in the labor market.6

In October 2018, the Education Ministry addressed university rectors, officials and employers with a letter, in which the crisis of the system of compulsory job placement of university graduates was publicly admitted.7 A huge number of graduates just never show up at the workplaces they are assigned to. Beside the call for more repression, the letter contained the proposal to discuss ways to reform higher professional education based on European practices, particularly those of Germany, where employers cover part of the training costs. This is especially relevant in a situation when the quality of education is impaired by chronic and progressive underfunding.

In Belarus, the crisis of the education system is not least due to the alarming reduction in national spending on education. From 2013 to 2016, spending on higher education decreased 44.0% in USD equivalent.

The comparative analysis of the higher education is, among other things, based on the number of university students. The EHEA statistics provide for such a comparison in terms of annual public and private spending on the training of one full-time student, taking into account the purchasing power standard (PPS). This is especially important amid a significant reduction in the number of students in Belarus: 36% from 2010 to this day.

Between 2010 and 2016, consolidated budget spending per student remained far below the European median (EUR 7,009). In 2014, Belarus spent a little more than the three countries that bottomed the EHEA list (slightly over EUR 2,000). In 2016, Belarus was among them. Spending on education decreased 25% between 2013 and 2016, having dropped to EUR 1,726.9.8

Higher education was not the only sector that experienced problems caused by underfunding. From 2014 to 2016, spending on all education levels (from pre-primary to tertiary education) in USD terms at the average annual official exchange rate dropped 38% from USD 3.80 billion to 2.36 billion.9 A certain increase reported in the following two years did not significantly change this situation.

Eight to ten years back, the Belarusian government could justify the low quality of higher education and lower academic standards pointing at the one of the world’s highest accessibility to tertiary education, and now they cannot do that, since the university enrollment rate is falling.10 In other words, the proportion of young people admitted to universities is decreasing. This situation differs from that in Europe, where a reduction in enrollment not always results in the reduced availability of higher education.

Accessibility of higher education for socially vulnerable groups in Belarus (graduates of rural schools, people with disabilities, orphans, etc.) is even declining due to the cessation of some privileges and the general insensitivity of the system to EHEA’s inclusive education commitments. The gender imbalance and the vertical segregation in the teaching staff still persist in most education specialty areas.

In 2018, another topic of inclusive education–countering discrimination of the Belarusian language in universities–was manifested in the struggle for a national university. The private Nil Gilevich University was finally officially registered on March 15. However, this victory is rather symbolic, since the university was denied a license for educational activities.

Conclusion

In the EHEA Implementation Report, Belarus looks like a European outsider, who has not yet decided on an education development strategy and applicable tools. Over the last three years since Belarus’ accession to the European Higher Education Area, the country failed even to begin most of reforms promised in Yerevan in 2015.

Unlike other EHEA members, the application of Bologna tools is a systemic challenge for Belarus, which requires not only technical, but also (above all) value-based and political solutions. Regretfully, no intelligible solutions have been provided. The eclectic agenda that results from the tangled international commitments of moderate reformers and conservative interventions of the top leadership paralyzes or, at best, slows down the upgrade of the system.

Nevertheless, the Bologna vector is not rejected completely. The inclusion of the Strategic Action Plan on the Implementation of the EHEA Principles and Tools proposed by the Belarusian Ministry of Education in the final documents of the EHEA Ministerial Conference held in May 2018 in Paris gives some hope for modernization of the higher education system under European control.

A similar situation is observed in secondary education. The egalitarian trends that camouflage the crisis of education in Belarus under populist slogans have to compete with the commitments to the World Bank to modernize education in exchange for a USD 100 million loan for these purposes.

However, neither the reformist, nor the conservative vector can yet prevail in this rivalry of strategies, dooming Belarusian education to an ever greater lag behind the world leaders.