Georgia: Government Faces Political Test with Firing of National Exams Director
Georgia's standardized university admissions tests could be in trouble after the controversial sacking of the national point-woman for the exams, a decision that prompted much of her staff to resign in protest. As with most big news here in Georgia these days, a connection to billionaire/opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili was immediately made.
The surprise May 28 firing of Maia Miminoshvili, the head of the National Exams Center, came at a very inauspicious time – on the eve of university admissions tests and the morning after a large anti-government rally hosted by Ivanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. Saakashvili skeptics quickly linked her dismissal to the fact that her son and daughter-in-law had attended the rally, which marked the kickoff of preparations by Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition for this October's parliamentary vote.
A terse statement on the website of the Ministry of Science and Education indicated that Miminoshvili's dismissal was motivated by her policy disagreements with Minister of Science and Education Dimitri Shashkin.
Mininoshvili has been the face of Georgia’s progress away from the age of notoriously corrupt, university-specific exams, when a call to a professor friend and offerings of cash, cakes and roasted pigs opened the doors to higher education. The introduction of tightly monitored standardized national tests helped do away with that tradition, but some of the school reforms have not been very popular.
Education Minister Shashkin installed police supervisors in schools, a measure the government claims has significantly reduced school violence and truancy, but sparked accusations that the government wanted to turn Georgian schools into prisons and earned Shashkin the reputation of a tough disciplinarian. In a video making the rounds on Facebook, students in one Tbilisi school parody the strong-fisted management of their school principal and the principal-in-chief, Shashkin.
The minister, however, has dismissed as "dementia" the suggestion of any connection between the Ivanishvili rally and Mininoshvili's firing. Mininoshvili conceded that she, indeed, has had disagreements with the minister. The 60 National Exams Center employees who resigned in support of their former boss, though, say the minister owes them an explanation.
Meanwhile, always eager to provide support to government drop-outs, Ivanishvili has met with Miminoshvili to inquire about her situation. Miminoshvili said that at this stage she is not considering switching to the Ivanishvili side and is only worried about how the national tests are going to come along.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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