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Wednesday, February 28, 2001
If Minister Gregr has his way, the country will join the EU with a jacked-up GDP, but with professors whose salaries put them below the poverty line of any industrialized nation. By Susan Nerlinger Some financial experts praise Minister Gregr's Big Bang concept in at least one respect -- he's finally progressed from sinking billions into industrial dinosaurs to sinking billions into industrial infrastructure. Modern wisdom has it that governments can best support economic growth not by helping companies, but by building infrastructure so that business in general can thrive. Unfortunately, Minister Gregr wants to spend the whopping sum (a sum that the nation does not currently have) only on physical infrastructure. He totally ignores a segment of the nation's infrastructure that has been overlooked routinely since 1989 -- educational infrastructure. Let's review a few simple truths. The Czech Republic has few natural resources to speak of. Oh, there may be deposits of construction materials -- limestone, for example, or kaolin, that kind of thing. But there is no oil, there are no diamonds or rare minerals. And the economy won't be built up on the foundation of a booming kaolin industry. Pretty much all this country has is its labor force. It has people -- people who, if properly educated and trained, can become workers in the New Economy. How do people, the nation's one significant resource, become tomorrow's workers? Well, you don't need a college degree to answer that. Education forges workers for the enterprises of the future. And education happens in elementary, secondary and university classrooms. Schools don't figure in Minister Gregr's Big Bang program at all. They aren't even in the picture. They ought to be, because another truth that Czechs quietly grumble about is that every government since the Velvet Revolution has basically ignored schools. Take the universities, for example. The salary of a new faculty lecturer is about 10,000 Kc gross per month. After various withholdings, this Ph.D. lecturer takes home about 7,000 Kc. That's less than $200 at today's exchange rate. If Minister Gregr has his way, the country will join the EU with a jacked-up GDP, but with professors whose salaries put them below the poverty line of any industrialized nation. In elementary schools, the starting salary of a new teacher is 6,500 Kc a month -- around $176. It might not be so bad if that constituted a living wage in this country, but again, you don't have to be a World Bank economist to know that 6,500 Kc is not a living wage. If you could put a roof over your head for 3,000 Kc (a dubious proposition), that would leave you with 3,500 Kc to feed and clothe yourself and cover all of life's other necessities. What is the predictable result of an education policy that starves its educational system? Go to the British and U.S. media; you will see that Tony Blair and George W. Bush are spending lots of time and money trying to upgrade long-neglected educational systems. That should give you a taste of the future that awaits the Czech Republic -- playing catch-up and patch-up to get back what you lost because you neglected education. Facing facts The goal of the Blair government's newest initiative is a world-class education system in 10 years. This implies an admission that the British system presently falls short. But at least the government there knows that education is crucial. Minister Gregr can find out more about the Labour Party's approach at www.dfee.gov.uk/teachingreforms. And rather than archive those tips for future ministers, he should heed them today. Let's face facts. Secretaries at international companies earn more than experienced college professors. When new high school grads start first jobs at salaries higher than those their experienced teachers earn, the system is broken. Today's youth will not be shaped into tomorrow's top competitors by the best and brightest, if pay disparities like these persist. The most talented young people will increasingly abandon careers in education for careers in law, finance and technology, so long as the average teacher salary is less than the average wage of the work force as a whole. I mean no disrespect to teachers who soldier on in the current crumbling system. Many are still the best and the brightest. Some stay because of a laudable commitment. Quite a few have second jobs. Others (such as teachers of history, philosophy and literature) have qualifications that don't translate readily into marketable skills for today's businesses. But with such low salaries, no opportunities for development, no new challenges and no new resources, teachers such as these will be leeched out of the system; the profession will attract few new recruits. There won't be new teachers of any quality, good or poor. One of the goals of the Blair initiative is to attract more young people into teacher training, because one of Britain's problems is a teacher shortage. The same is true in the United States, where most math and science teachers are not qualified in those subjects. Note that U.S. students score below those of other nations on international tests of science and math. Is there a correlation between unqualified teachers and poor student performance? Do Czechs want to find out the hard way? Before this government inflates the national debt with Big Bang expenditure, it had better take a good hard look at education, lest the Big Bang evolve, in the long run, into a Gigantic Bungle. -- The writer teaches English in Prague
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