Education specialists are of the opinion that you cannot build a centralized, unique scholarship system that meets all the needs and situations you encounter in the territory.
The issue of granting scholarships remains on the back burner this year as well. Education expert Daniela Vișoianu is of the opinion that town halls and local councils have legislative space to contribute expenses in educational units.
The education system is not free PHOTO Shutterstock
“Weekend Truth“:
dditch last year’s ramblings regarding scholarships, repairs done this summer upset again. It is the performance athletes who are left without scholarships. How could things have been done better?
Daniel Visoianu: Already the scholarship process is being improved. My opinion is that you cannot build a centralized, one-size-fits-all system of scholarships to meet all the needs and situations you encounter in the territory. I give the example of single-parent families. Sure, there can be a single-parent family where the single parent who is raising and supporting the child has a very high income, but being a single-parent family involves a lot more than one or two incomes. It presupposes support and attention to homework, presupposes two relationships, presupposes exposing the child to two value systems, presupposes preparing the child for life, for independent life, to observe what happens in a relationship, what happens in a couple.
So we can think that a child who lives in a single-parent family is a child who, by the nature of the absence of some elements in his current life, has a knowledge deficit. And then, if I propose to reward with a social grant certain types of family – a single parent, for example, who has a low income -, I should think: what I offer as a grant is support for the absence of income from the basic family, regardless if she is a single parent or not? Or what I offer as support is a compensation for the lack of knowledge and understanding and support that the child has in a single-parent family? However, we did not have these discussions, just as we did not have the discussions, for example, about the children who are adopted and who are considered with weapons and baggage in the adoptive family regardless of whether it is a single parent or not.
Regarding athletes, things are as follows: the ministry says that it does not have the capacity to see all individual cases and that where certain additional requests are well founded there is currently the capacity at the level of local public authorities. Municipalities and local councils still have legislative space to contribute to expenditure in educational establishments, with financial transfers to educational establishments on all types of expenditure except teacher salaries. So they can give additional scholarships, they can give scholarships to additional categories of children, they can give material endowments, whatever they consider necessary, to the extent of the funds they have, and they decide this at the level of the City Council.
The money, from the ministry to the mayor’s office, via the union
Most likely, this additional funding will translate into reality very differently – usome administrations are more inclined to this kind of spending, others are not.
It will be transposed differently, but the principle is that of decentralization. In many European countries, teachers’ salaries come from the local public authority, with a supplement or foundation from the state budget, but with transfers, highlights, including sometimes negotiations at the level of local public authorities. Because as long as there are significant differences in the cost of living in certain localities, sometimes income differences are also needed. A teacher in Bucharest, same seniority, same type of chair, same salary, has a higher cost of living, compared to a teacher from, I give a generic example, Mizil. Then, Law 1, the old law, when it was passed, provided for transfers from the City Council. Salaries went to the town halls until 2018, until Liviu-Marian Pop (former Minister of Education) who recentralized them. There are mayors in Romania who, even now, would like, for example, to carry expenses related to human resources in schools. And these expenses are in the following area: in after-school programs, for the area of counseling and psychologists.
And I cannot legally support the expenses today...
Exact. It is a limit that unions strictly maintain, because it is simpler to build their power on the negotiation of a collective labor agreement at the national level than to fragment the negotiation and power through the teachers’ union in Prahova County, which negotiates directly with the Council County, which establishes a unique norm for town halls in Prahova county, for example. It’s generic, but we have to understand that they can’t, how can they not do more for everything called summer vacation. The mayors of Bucharest, for example, would like to offer more nurseries and kindergartens open during the summer for the summer kindergarten program. Because no parent has three months of vacation, and then, for all those who work and have small children, the summer vacation is a big challenge. And then the maintenance of their type of services – nursery, kindergarten – during the vacation, even at low costs, must be supported by the town halls.
The town halls want to support this, because it is a direct relationship between the citizen and the mayor. Probably the hardest job in the area of public services is that of mayor. No one settles directly, through the vote of the citizens, more clearly and simply than the mayor. And then, if the mayor looks at the demographic dynamics of the town and finds that it has a good dynamic, so it will have citizens, and that it has many children for whom it would like to provide public services, and it also has paying parents, because the parents who would like to leave their children at daycare and kindergarten, they are working parents, so they pay fees and taxes, part of this money goes back to the town hall and builds the budget, then the decision appears that from the town hall budget they support services for those families, but not maybe.
We have administrations that are not prepared and that have never made such a plan that you are talking about in the big cities. Who should ask? To bee the parents more vehement or school? But if the director is also appointed with the approval of the mayor, he is probably tempted to ask as little as possible and disturb the administration as little as possible.
The education system, unlike the health system, for example, is in a situation where the direct beneficiaries, the children, the students, cannot support their rights directly. The National Council of Students rather represents high school students, so we go to the majority urban environment. There are now Junior Student Councils for the middle school, but they are still not everywhere.
Board representation, a difficult commitment for parents
What is the role National Council of Students in connection with the teachers, for there has been some discussion in this regard.
Even though the National Union of Students has now been created, with the partnership between these associations, students are often put aside on the grounds that they are minors. It is said that they do not know how to evaluate a teacher, as if they should evaluate the teaching process. On the contrary, students have to evaluate the atmosphere in the classroom, the trust they have in the teacher, the relationship they build with him, the fact that he keeps them on task, they are busy, that he sees everyone, he rewards them. There are other kinds of things that children can rate. For other discussions, their representatives remain, the parents, who in some places are active, transform schools together with the principals, in other places their choice was made in combination with the principal, and maybe they don’t understand their role very well, maybe they don’t understand how to -represents all students, maybe they don’t have space or don’t know how to say what they want more clearly.
How important is the involvement of parents in such roles?
Things can be complicated. In the absence of parents who are actively involved in the decisions of the board of directors, participate in the meetings – so allocate time for school and know what to do – it is clear that the students are not represented and not even the teachers and the director, the board, they have no challenges. That is, they are not asked questions to answer. I’m not accusing anyone of bad intent, I just think that in certain contexts, people don’t know how to do things differently. Last year, when the scholarship mechanism with the top 30% of each class came out, a high school principal gave me feedback that he didn’t like the methodology, because traditionally in their high school they have two classes per cycle, every year, and- place the children in the order of the environments. It is clear that it is a question of initial training and continuous training of teachers, respectively of principals, who are not prepared for the job of principal.
School preparation PHOTO Shutterstock
But there are enough studies around the world right now that you can find very easily to understand that there are significant advantages in working with classes of children of different levels, particularly in high school, in the context where in high school it can be used very easily peer to peer (trans. – peer learning) and you can stimulate both the one who is quicker in the mind, and the one who may have things to catch up on. You can build learning together – there are studies that say you learn better if you teach someone else, explain what you’ve learned to someone else. Now, the principal who had raised this issue and was unhappy last year with the methodology obviously couldn’t be blamed for the way he set the classes because he didn’t have the knowledge, he didn’t happen to have the knowledge that it’s better to mix them . Well, here a rule of the ministry that applies from this year intervened: as from 2020 preparatory classes are built randomly – that is, if you go to a certain school, with or without a floating visa, you have no way to have a control which teacher you end up with -, the high school classes will be similar.
What do you think of the student’s portfolio?
The student portfolio also existed in Act 1 and was never implemented. We should have less paper in the education system and more learning for everyone, because similar to the student portfolio we have, for example, the file for merit grading. A file in which the merit salary is taken exclusively on the basis of papers.
