Our government has been the coalition for over two years now. The
coalition consists of ministers with different political and economic
views. They can appear in the public eye as a whole. Last week,
“ArmenTel” managed to break this unity. It turned out that the
government is like a compact unity as long as the decisions are not
going against the ministers’ personal interests. There are no other
disagreements besides personal interests. For example, after Sergo
Yeritsyan, who is from the “Orinats Yerkir” (Lawful Land) political
party, got appointed as Minister of Education and Sciences he continued
to implement his optimization project in the schools. This is a project
which causes much interest for many reasons. First of all, a majority
of the population sends children to public schools. Less than 1% of
students study in private schools. Secondly, teachers represent the
largest group in Armenian society. The first step towards optimization
in public schools is the shortening of teachers. This is logical in
some way. According to European school standards, one teacher may have
17 students. As for Armenia, the number of students is limited to 9.
This large number is not something which was inherited from the Soviet
era. This has been formulated in the beginning of the 1990s. A
demographic explosion took place in Armenia in the years of 1985-1992.
During that time, birth rates went up tremendously. Starting from 1992,
schools were having 60,000 1st grade students a year. The children born
in 1985 started attending school in 1992. As a result, the number of
teachers also increased. In the course of ten years, the number of
teachers reached 65,000. Then everything changed. In 2001, the number
of students lessened. 2001 marked the first year when there were less
students enrolled in school than there were graduating.
The statistics of birth rates show that this will continue in the years
to come. According to national statistics, there were 370,000 children
between the ages of 10-14 living in Armenia in 2002. Meanwhile, the
number of children under the age of four is 151,000. It turns out that
in the upcoming years, the number of students studying in 3rd-7th
grades will be reduced two times more. This outlook served as a reason
for coming up with the optimization project without informing the
public of why they were doing that. The battle between the Ministry of
Education and teachers began. Each side was choosing its own methods to
solve the conflict. The first and probably the major step of the
project was the shortening of teachers. The shortening made way for
many myths to come up out of nowhere. The first shortening was
obviously the teachers who were receiving pension. Then the Ministry
saw that the problem can not be solved just by shortening 2-3,000
pensioner teachers. A new approach was to remove the non-professional
teachers. Now this was genius. Only our officials could come up with
this. Over 70% of the teachers working in schools have 5 years of
experience. Only Armenia’s Ministry of Education can claim a teacher
who has a university diploma and has taught for over 5 years to be
“non-professional”. The courts did not understand this concept and made
decisions for bringing back the shortened teachers.
The teachers themselves tried to think about ways for turning the whole
optimization issue around. During the last school year, 25% of them
started working less. If we take into consideration the fact that
nearly 84% of the teachers are women, we can clearly see that the main
thing is not to be involved in teaching, but rather to have something
to do (in other words, get a chance to leave the house). There are
4,500 teachers working part-time and receive a monthly salary of 10,000
drams. You can not demand high quality work from the teacher.
In response to this, the Ministry of Education raised the rate of
pay from 18,000 to 22,000. In order to not disappoint anyone, the
Ministry also raised the salary. A salary of 24,000 can no longer
interest a teacher who has a 15 year work experience. It was also
decided to fund the schools based on the number of students. If you
work well, then you will be acknowledged for that. If you are
acknowledged, then you will enroll many students. In exchange for this,
teachers came up with a new method. On September 1, the teachers “gave
a speech” to the Ministry, claiming that they have enrolled many
students and signed a financing contract for the new school year. Then,
just 15 days later, they “checked” the real number of students and
marked the students not present as “out of the country”. The Ministry
has not solved anything regarding this issue, and instead of that is
currently in the process of solving the shortening issue. According to
official data, there were 46,550 teachers working in the 2003-2004
school year instead of the 54,850 in the previous year. Parallel to all
of this, the authorities are reaching their goal through the
shortening-the decrease in the number of students. The authorities
prefer to be looked at by society as a monster that makes decisions for
itself. Meanwhile, by going with the flow of demography, in the
upcoming years schools will be filled with 30-35,000 students instead
of 50-60,000.
The construction of schools is still a show of pride, yet it is still
unclear as to for whom the schools are being built. Certainly, the
government does not take this into consideration. We can not insist
upon the reason for this being the low level of birth rates in the
middle of the 1990s, which will be clearly shown later on in the
National Armed Forces.