An elementary school Math teacher (who teaches 5th to 8th graders and holds a college degree) earns a net salary of RON800 to RON1,000 per month, less than a non-commissioned officer of the Romanian Gendarmerie, who only completed secondary education and may earn RON995 to RON1,750 net per month. At the same time, a driver with the Finance Ministry is paid RON1,500 to RON3,000 in net amount per month, and an electrician of the Presidential Administration makes RON1,340 per month.
The Education Ministry last week issued a warning starting from the results of the national practice test the 8th graders took, where more than half of the students were unable to get at least the passing grade (5 on a sale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 the highest possible grade i.e.). The situation is even more alarming considering only half of high-school graduates have passed their high-school leaving exam in the last three years.
“The results of the national practice test for 8th graders represent the state of today’s society, divided into elites and students who have no interest in education whatsoever,” explained teacher Vasile Nicoara, principal of the “Mircea cel Batran” high school in Constanta.
“We are living in an economy that cannot absorb its highly-skilled workforce and does not provide any prospects for most of the people, who have a mediocre education.”
The decline in kids’ interest in school is a cause of the disaster in the education system and the teachers’ salary payment scheme needs a change, believes Cristian Parvan, general secretary of the Association of Businesspeople in Romania (AOAR).
“Raising teachers’ salaries won’t fix the problem. As long as the society keeps promoting successful businesspeople or stars who did not need an education as models and teachers are not paid in line with the involvement of the community in evaluating their performance, things won’t improve,” Parvan added.
A career in education has lost some of its allure largely because of the salary levels in the public system, so the potential candidates that could have been very good in this line of work were ‘driven away’ towards the private sector and vacancies filled with a generation of less well trained teachers. The decline of the competency level among young teachers, and the loss of motivation of experienced teachers were quick to produce effects in the results of the graduates.
Last summer, 32% of those looking to start a teacher career passed the tenure examination with grades ranging from 5 to 7, and 19% failed it.
One third of the 8th graders failed the national Romanian language practice exam and 70% got less than the passing grade, 5, on the Math exam. (8th graders are required to sit a national examination to be able to attend high school). This is the latest picture of the pre-university education.
“It’s getting worse as time passes and there are many causes for this. The first is the inadequate selection of human resources in the education system, reflected by the grades they get in the tenure examination, which shows the low quality of the training the teachers entering the system got,” explained Mircea Miclea, former education minister in the Tariceanu Government and chairman of the Presidential Committee in charge of analyzing and devising education and research policies in Romania.
The second cause, he said, has to do with the motivation of teachers, and another explanation is the non-enforcement of a paragraph in the Education Law that says the school hires the teacher and it should be the principal’s job to call the said teacher to account if they fail to do well.
A solution to the problem of Romania’s education system will not come from a raise of teachers’ salaries alone, educators say. On the contrary, a wide reform should be implemented, starting with the selection of the teachers entering the education system. A national program should be conducted to restore the status of the teaching profession and solutions should also be found for the employment of mediocre graduates because even if they wanted to learn a trade, young people have no idea where to turn to at the moment, says Vasile Nicoara.
Mircea Miclea agrees, saying that salary is not the only criterion to choose a profession by, and those seeking a teaching career do it for a number of reasons. The free time (more than those in other professions have available) and the joy of teaching kids are two of the main reasons why people choose to become educators.
He says there is not a direct connection between salary level in the education system and the poor training kids get.
“Students up to 14 or 15 years of age are well-behaved, their minds can be shaped and teachers cannot blame them for the poor exam results and lack of interest in education. There has a to be a way of selecting human resources in the education system and pay should be performance based, with some salaries going up and others down and there should also be lifelong training system for educators,” Miclea added.
The uniform salary law in the public system, intended to address the anomalies of the system by raising the low salaries and those cases where bosses earned less than their subordinates was not enforced by the Boc Government and by the Ponta Government, either, and was ‘cancelled’ by emergency ordinances every year.
“The salary law did not address the salary problem in the education system because it was devised by bureaucrats who wanted uniform salaries without taking teachers’ performance into account, there is no career plan, which is necessary to differentiate salaries, there is no such concept any more,” AOAR’s Cristian Parvu said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)