Policy  Paper
/internal document/

THE PROBLEM
The educational policy of Bulgarian central and local authorities towards the ethnic and religious minorities has followed an assimilationist line from the early sixties to the late eighties (1989) of the XX-th century. Since 1990 significant changes were introduced in favor of the cultural rights of the minorities. At present the normative documents which have greatest relevance to minority education are as follows.

Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria:
Art. 36 (2) The citizens, for whom Bulgarian is not the mother tongue, have the right beside the obligatory study of Bulgarian to study and use their mother tongue.
Art. 53 (2) School education to the age of 16 is obligatory.
The Law of National Education:
Art. 4 (2) No restrictions or privileges are admitted, that are based on race, nationality, gender, ethnic and social origin, religion and social status.
Art. 8 (2) The students, for whom Bulgarian is not the mother tongue, have the right, beside the obligatory study of Bulgarian, to study their mother tongue at the municipality? schools in the Republic of Bulgaria, under the protection and control by the state.
Art. 9 Every citizen has the right to consume his right to education in schools that has been chosen freely by him, according to his personal preferences and potential/
The Law of the Grade of Education, the General-Educational Minimum and the National Curriculum
Art. 8 (2) The General-Educational instruction is built upon the principles of: universal human rights; chidren’s rights; the traditions of Bulgarian culture and education, the achievements of world culture, the values of civil society, the freedom of conscience and freedom of thought
Instructions of the Ministry of Education and Science:
Instruction No2 about the National Curriculum
Section “Civic Education – basic themes: “I am a citizen of my country”; “Diversity and Identity of the Personality”, “Rights and Responsibilities of the Person”, “The Citizen and the World”, “Global Issues of our Time”, National Identity and Differences in Society”, “Citizens, Rights, Responsibilities”.
Instruction No4 about the Distribution of Teaching Time:
Art. 5 ...among the obligatory elective subjects is the study of the mother tongue...
Art. 21 ...among the freely elective subjects is the study of Religion....

The status of study of the mother tongue has been transformed in 1999 from a “freely elective” to an “obligatory elective” subject. This means that the lessons in mother tongue will have place within the regular studying time (and will not be taken after the regular classes as was until 1999). The language that is studied at the largest scale as mother tongue is Turkish (more than 37 000 students and about 680 teachers). In several towns there are classes in Hebrew, Armenian and Greek. The second largest minority, the Roma, do not study their mother tongue, because of lack of professionally qualified Roma language teachers, and to some extent, because of difficulties with the standardization of the Roma language, which has quite a few dialects in Bulgaria.
The study of Islam as freely elective subject is still under discussion, although there are no normative obstacles for it. Another matter is the study of Islam at the religious secondary schools, which prepare imams for the needs of the religious practices of the Moslem population, and which have a special status.

Until 2001 the only civil servants, whose professional duties involved dealing with the issues of minority education, were the experts in mother tongue. There are such positions in several towns in the regions with greater number of minority (especially Turkish) students – Shumen, Burgas, Russe and Kurdzhali. At the Ministry of Education and Science there are experts in Turkish, Hebrew and Armenian.
In 2001 an expert was appointed at the Ministry to deal with the issues of minority integration, and several months later (after the change of the Government and administrative transformations in the Ministry) a Directorate for “Spiritual Development and Integration” was established. One of its prerogatives are the issues of minority education.

On the whole, a paradox is becoming more and more evident. On the one hand, we have the need and the normative basis for developing minority education. The growing number of minority children, who drop out from school, and the poor quality of the education of most of those, who stay at school, are a menace for the future development of the country – no society can integrate large masses of illiterate or semi-literate people into constructive economic and cultural processes. Besides, the decline of the birth rate (with the exception of the Roma and to some extent the Turkish population) brings about a sharp decrease of the numbers of school children. Each year more and more schools are closed because there are no children to study there. Many teachers, consequently, lose their jobs. If a preparatory year (before the first grade) for the children, whose mother tongue is not Bulgarian, becomes a mass practice (now there are such classes, but more as an exception, than as a rule), this would restore many positions for elementary school teachers. The same is valid also for full day training. And last, but not least, there is considerable international pressure to harmonize Bulgarian legislation and policy practices with the European standards. This is valid also for minority rights.
On the other hand, the Educational administration and the Government as a whole keep being rather passive with regard of the issues of minority education.
Some progress was made recently, after the adoption by the Government (under NGO pressure) of a Framework Program for the Integration of the Roma in Bulgarian Society (April 1999), as a result of which an experimental Project was started for the replacement of the de facto segregated Roma schools by a system of distributing the Roma children among the mainstream schools. However, this initiative is being realized exclusively by NGOs, and is financed from international funds.

Initial assumption of this paper: this paradox – the reluctance of the Bulgarian educational administration, inspite the obvious necessity and the recent improvement in the normative documentation, to commit itself to a more active minority education policy is due greatly to concerns related to the danger of making large scale mistakes. There is actually no experience in the country in specialized minority education. Besides, the political sensitivity of minority issues in general makes the educational authorities very cautious and unwilling to make radical steps in this direction. As a whole, there is no clear perspective for a consistent minority education policy, and this justifies to a great extent a passive position of the educational administration in this respect.
The main objective of this policy project is to consider the different options for developing minority education in Bulgaria, and sort out by means of policy analysis their shortcomings and advantages, outlining as a result the most acceptable solution and formulating the respective policy recommendations.

OPTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION
1. To preserve the status quo, doing nothing special about the problems of minority education. This option has the advantage that no one will be personally responsible, if the situation deteriorates substantially in some respect. The basic shortcoming is that in this way the educational system reproduces and increases the alienation between the minority ethnic and religious groups, on the one hand, and mainstream society, on the other. If we take into account the shifting of the demographical balance in favor of the minorities, this postponing of the state’s tackling of the problem increases the latter’s scope progressively, so that a future catastrophe is becoming more and more probable.
2. To introduce into the curricula only elements of intercultural education on culture-general basis, i.e. working against ethnocentrism and prejudice; raising of culture-awareness; developing general skills of intercultural communication. The advantage is that there is virtually no risk of achieving results, which jeopardize the peaceful relations between the ethnic and religious groups. The shortcoming is that in this way the most dramatic problems of the minority children at school (such as the unattractiveness, the “intransparency”, the irrelevance to their basic life-problems of school reality) will remain unresolved. The intercultural education, which is built solely on culture-general basis, would serve as an alibi for the educational authorities (that they are doing their best in this respect) and would mislead the general public that the problems of minority children have roots outside the educational system and a different agenda of resolving these problems is needed. Basically, the introduction of culture-general methods of intercultural education is quite necessary, but it must not remain the only element of such education to be practiced at Bulgarian schools.
3. To supplement the culture-general methods by radical changes in the educational system in the direction of developing culture-specific methods to work with the different ethnic and religious categories of students in general (i.e. – to use different educational instruments in the education of Roma-Christian, Roma-Moslem, Bulgarian-Moslem and Turkish students). The advantage of such an approach is that the specific educational needs of these categories of students will be addressed. The danger is that this would lead to a segregationist system of working with minority children. The more distant history of minority education in Bulgaria can present negative precedents of special schools for Roma children, which had the task to prepare them for low skilled work places, giving them an education that was of second quality per definition. A segregationist approach would be also quite unacceptable in a political perspective.
From a philosophically methodological point of view, such an educational policy could be characterized as “essentialist” – i.e. as treating the concrete situations in a preconceived way. This means to regard the cultural needs of the various “populations” of minority students as directly determined by the mere fact of their belonging to one or anotheran ethnic category. As a result, in most cases the culture-specific methods would be applied inadequately. A clear example for the consequences of an essentialist minority (and more specifically – educational) policy is the case with the Albanian minority in Macedonia.
                                                                                                                                     Macedonian case study: see Research Paper
4. To supplement the culture-general methods by an individualizing approach to the concrete groups of minority students, which takes into account their specific needs, without using large-scale categorization, i.e. without creating prerequisites for educational segregation. This option is being considered in more detail below as subject of the policy recommendations.
5. Regardless of the options of resolving the basic problems of minority education in Bulgaria, there is an unquestionable necessity of taking urgent measures for improving the education of Roma ghetto children. This is a matter of a separate category of recommendations further.

RECOMMENDATIONS
It would be helpful in this situation to work out an individualizing approach towards the different ethnic/religious categories of students within the concrete schools with minority representation (as an alternative for a generalizing approach, developing specialized methodologies for working with the different ethnic and religious categories of students in general). Such an individualizing approach should be applied both in identifying the educational needs and in using educational materials and training techniques, adequate to these needs.

This approach should by no means be oriented towards “dissolving” the cultural (ethnic, religious) identities of the minority students by treating their culturally specific educational needs as only a part of the complex needs of a culturally heterogeneous school or class. The individualizing methodology includes as its important component specialized working with children from one or another ethnic or religious category – e.g. on lessons in mother tongue; or within the obligatory lessons (about inividualizing didactic instruments see Research Paper); or out of the obligatory lessons, which is possible within a full-day training (the latter, unlike the predominant in Bulgaria half-day training, gives more opportunities to work out of the strictly programmed compulsory lessons); or as extracurricular activities. My specific methodological claim here is that this specialized training is “tuned” a posteriori to the actual needs of the children from the respective cultural community - needs that are determined in interaction with their concrete social environment.

The sociological survey, which is a part of this policy Project, has demonstrated that the response of the children from ethnically and religiously heterogeneous schools to questions, concerning their cultural attitudes, was determined more by the concrete configuration of their social environment, than by their belonging to the respective ethnic or religious community in general. (For more detail see the Research Paper.) This is an argument in favor of the following recommendations
 

Level A (general):

- working out a questionnaire for identifying the specific educational needs of the ethnic/religious categories of sudents wuthin concrete schools with ethnic/religious minority representation
- working out a resource package of educational materials for all the identified educational needs – the application of the appropriate part of the materials will depend on the concrete diagnostics of the educational needs within the concrete class.
- working out a strategy for building a social environment at school, which is culturally friendly for the minority students
 
 

Level B (immediate/urgent measures)

- combating the striking communicative deficiencies among the ghetto Roma children:
- wider introduction of the preparatory (before the first grade) year for minority children, with emphasis on communication training.
- wider introduction of full-day training for minority children (additional work after the compulsory lessons)
- special measures for the motivation and qualification of the teachers, who work with minority children
- appointing of psychologists at the schools with problematic minority children
 

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES

The possible sources of resistance against the proposed policy changes are as follows:
- the deficiency of material resources. In the recent years an automatic response by the educational authorities to all initiatives for change has been, that the budget money available is barely enough to support the system such as it is. A possible counter-argumentation can be developed in the direction that saving money in the field of education now can bring about wasting much more money later, to repair damages, if a social catastrophe, conditioned by the inadequacy of the education of minority children, breaks out. Besides, a possible strategy to bypass the resistance of the educational authorities in this respect might be to provide non-government (private, international) funds for experimental small scale introduction of the proposed educational methods. If they demonstrate their effectiveness in a convincing way, this could be a decisive argument for the changes.
- The inertness of the teachers and the administration. Such as the human resources in the educational system are now, it is quite difficult to expect from them a positive reaction to the introduction of qualitatively new methods of work with minority children. A possible tool to overcome this obstacle might be to develop a system of stimuli – in the respect of increased pay, of attractive forms of post-graduate education, of improving the career opportunities – for teachers and administrators, who take active part in the changes.
- A negative attitude of the general public. This is possible as a result of political concerns (e.g. that a too great attention to the education of minority children might trigger a “chain reaction” of escalating demands by the minorities for more rights and privileges not only in education, but in all fields of social life). A possible preemptive strategy against such a reaction might be a campaign to promote public awareness in this field, including also minority NGOs and political representations. More general methodological and world- view elements, such as the values of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue might be helpful in this respect.