EurasiaNet Civil Society - Education Reform Rocks Georgia

CIVIL SOCIETY

EDUCATION REFORM ROCKS GEORGIA
Molly Corso 4/13/05

Hunger strikes, street protests, public arrests. After nearly 15 years of inertia, education reform in Georgia is making headlines. And the changes are just beginning.

In December 2004 parliament passed a law to overhaul the country’s higher education system without a hitch. Three months later, however, the reforms designed to root out pervasive corruption in universities and institutes � a key target of the Saakashvili anti-corruption campaign -- are meeting with growing opposition.

Protests held by State Medical College students in mid-March outside of parliament illustrate the case in point. The education law passed last year provided for entrance exams, administered by the government, as a requirement for admission to institutes of higher learning. Under the previous system, however, 14-year-old students could pay an annual fee that would allow them to study in a three-year college that specialized in their chosen field of study. Upon graduation, those students could automatically enter Tbilisi State Medical University as third-year students.

Critics � and the government � call it a recipe for corruption. Colleges like the State Medical College, according to Gigi Tevzadze, director of the ministry’s reform project, are nothing more than a façade. "Many higher education institutions created these so called colleges," Tevzadze said. "They are not colleges in the European or American understanding, but [are meant]� just to engage in corrupt activities with a good face."

At a March 21 news briefing Education Minister Alexander Lomaia presented photos of several residences owned by State Medical College Acting Rector Ramaz Khetsuriani, including a five-story house in Tbilisi’s most prestigious district, Vake. "How could Khetsuriani acquire such property that cost some million laris, when his [monthly] salary during these years has been no more than 150-300 laris [$82 - $163)?" the television news channel Rustavi-2 reported Lomaia as asking.

Officially, tuition to the State Medical College cost parents $615 per year. Unofficially, according to Lomaia, bribes ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 were routinely forked out to ensure enrollment. Khetsuriani has denied the charge of bribery, dismissing Lomaia’s accusations as "political oppression." Khetsuriani has since been removed from his position, and replaced by David Telia, whose two children are among the protestors.

The minister has said that the government will force the college to return the fees paid by students, but protestors say that they just want what they paid for: entrance to university as juniors. "We want to finish the college and program like we started it," Nona Margvelashvili, a student protestor, said. "Let pupils who haven’t started college participate in the exams."

On March 17, dozens of protestors went on a hunger strike to protest the ministry’s refusal to drop the exams. Some 63 students have since been hospitalized, according to the newspaper Rezonansi. As a compromise, the government has said that it will allow students to proceed directly to the second year of university upon passing the exams, but the offer so far has not been accepted.

For a government that came to power in November 2003 with the help of student protestors, handling the students’ demands could prove tricky. Popular sympathy for the students is running relatively strong, and the opposition has begun to try and ally itself with the protestors. After a March 22 proposal by The New Rights Party to impeach Education Minister Lomaia failed to pass parliament, party members staged a walk-out to protest the education reforms.

The reform campaign has so far proven an arduous process. The first reform bill, passed in December 2004 and signed into law this January, established national state admission exams for universities as a means of curtailing the corruption associated with the old entrance exams, which were administered and graded by the universities themselves. One recent government study found that at least $18 million per year was spent on private "tutors" for the exams who also sat on the university admission boards. Under the new system, the 4,000 top-scoring students for the entrance exams will receive state-sponsored stipends to attend university � a considerable drop from previous years. The idea, Lomaia stated in a recent interview with the American Chamber of Commerce magazine, is to prompt universities "to compete for the students."

Administrative changes have also been launched. In January 2005, President Mikheil Saakashvili laid off all state university rectors, and stipulated that no one over the age of 65 would be allowed to hold that position. A power-sharing mechanism has also been introduced: students will hold 30 percent of the seats in university oversight bodies.

But the reforms are meant not to just curtail corruption; they are also designed to punish those who practiced it. Directors from 11 different schools have reportedly already been dismissed this year, and one has been arrested, though later released following massive protests. On February 16, Merab Beridze, the rector at Tbilisi State University’s Akhaltsikhe campus was arrested on charges of corruption related to the university’s military service department at the university. The government claimed that Beridze did not have proper authority to open the department and charged him with pocketing 60,000 lari (roughly $33,000) from its budget � funds that Beridze claimed were spent on department employee salaries and with the permission of Tbilisi State University Rector Roin Metreveli.

After decades of guaranteeing professors a job for life, finding new, qualified instructors to inject fresh life into the system could prove a serious challenge for the government, some observers say. "There is a crisis," said Giorgi Meladze, a lawyer with the Liberty Institute, an NGO involved with education reform. "If there is a professor, he is not qualified to teach in the 21st century. If there is a student, he is motivated to receive a diploma, not an education." The government expects to complete the reform process by 2012-2013.

According to Tevzadze, it all comes down to a question of quality control. Buildings are in total disrepair, electricity and heating sporadic at best, and teachers often uncertified. "The quality of education is not the outcome of corruption, but corruption is the outcome of the quality of education," he said.

Meanwhile, far-reaching reforms are in the works for general education, as well. A draft law currently under consideration by parliament would create a national curriculum designed to ensure that topics taught in Georgian schools have practical applications. To prepare for that change, standardized tests for mathematics and Georgian language have already been introduced at the fourth and ninth grade levels.

Once a revised structure is in place, Tevzadze said, the emphasis will pass to allowing schools greater autonomy in deciding how best to teach individual disciplines, such as the sciences. Parent-teacher-student councils will also be created that would have a say in the way that schools are run.

Lela Tsikarishvili, acting director at Tbilisi’s elite First School of Classical Education, says the reforms should have occurred "long ago," but cautions that implementation will be far from a snap. "The director will be like a manager," Tsikarishvili said. "It will be very difficult. The level and [understanding] of democracy in our society is not very high. The inertia from the Soviet regime has not gone anywhere."

A fierce battle in November 2004 over the role of religion in school curricula illustrated the stakes involved. Many schools, in violation of the Georgian Constitution, teach the theology of the Georgian Orthodox Church. When rumors began to spread that the government planned to ban religious instruction altogether from public schools as part of its education reforms, some 70,000 Georgians signed a petition for Lomaia’s resignation. As a compromise, the ministry settled on instruction in religion as a social sciences course.

Outside of Tbilisi, the government’s education reforms promise to encounter even further challenges. Nona Goguadze, a mother of two school-aged children in the western Georgian town of Supsa has not heard anything about the new reforms, nor imagines that they will make much of a difference. "Education is even worse than it was before," Goguadze commented. Teachers still go unpaid for their work in Guria, the region where Goguadze lives, and electricity and heat supplies are unreliable. In the winter months when temperatures drop, very few students even show up for school, she said.

Though the current reform plan sidesteps issues related to the physical condition of schools, education ministry officials say that it is intended to minimize bureaucracy. If the current draft law is passed by parliament, education funding for the regions will bypass local governments and pass directly from the education ministry to the schools themselves. Approximately 100 so-called resource centers, designed to oversee reform implementation in coordination with local schools, will also be created throughout the country’s regions, with roughly for one center for every 20-25 schools.

Yet despite the protests and the petitions, the leaky roofs and the pervasive corruption, Tevzadze believes there is hope that the education system will survive the reforms. "There is a large [amount of] respect for education in Georgia. Total respect," he said. "Our goal- and our task- is to make sure people know what kind of education is important. Our goal is to give an understanding of what is real education."

Editor�s Note: Molly Corso is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Tbilisi.

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