Ten Years After: A History of Roma School Desegregation in Central and Eastern Europe

CHAPTER ONE Institutional Responses to Segregation:The Role of Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations

CHAPTER ONE Institutional Responses to Segregation: The Role of Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations MARIUS TABA AND ANDREW RYDER Introduction In one of the pioneering texts on the issue of Roma education, Jean Pierre Liégeois comments on the value of education to Roma communities: Education increases personal autonomy, providing the tools for adapting to a changing environment and a means of self-defence from the forces of assimilation; it makes it possible to break out of the passive rut of welfarism to play an active role in cultural and political development.1 Yet the reality for many of the three million Roma children living in Europe is that they are denied educational inclusion and the opportunities outlined by Liégeois, instead large numbers of Roma children are consigned to schools for the mentally disabled and special educational needs or substandard or segregated learning experiences. The European Roma Rights Center has noted the social and economic consequences of school segregation: In such schools, Romani children do not earn a diploma preparing them for life in a democratic society and competitive labor market. Quite the contrary: they are denied the right to education and emerge stigmatized as “stupid” and “retarded.” They will live out their adult lives under-educated, unemployed or condemned to low-paying, menial jobs. They will be unable to realize fundamental rights, and will be deprived of basic dignity. Elsewhere, Romani children are segregated from non-Romani children in separate classes or schools because of patterns of ghettoized settlement, or because of raw racial discrimination. Isolated from their non-Romani peers and frequently taught by under-qualified instructors, they too emerge from schooling scarred by the experience and ill-equipped for life in a multicultural democracy.2 1 Liégeois, School Provisions for Ethnic Minorities, 19. 2 ERRC, Barriers to the Education of Roma in Europe, Budapest, 2002. 8 Ten Years After The principle that education is a fundamental right which should be free of discrimination is enshrined in international law. For example, it is prohibited by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Council of the European Union Directive 2000/43/EC3 . International law also prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment, which classified as a result of educational segregation . The illegality of educational segregation for Roma children has been demonstrated in the European Court of Human Rights Court’s by groundbreaking judgments in D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic (2007) and Sampanis v. Greece (2008), which rejected the segregation of Romani students into special schools for children with mental disabilities or within mainstream schools on the basis of ethnicity. A ruling that was bolstered by The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decision on Orsus and Others v. Croatia (2010) that decreed that the segregation of Romani children into separate classes based on language is also unlawful discrimination (see third chapter of the book). NGOs, international bodies, strategies and legal instruments have all contributed towards pressure for change. This chapter seeks to assess how successful the numerous actors, frameworks, and institutions have been in shaping state policy and delivering desegregation in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. This appraisal raises serious issues about how educational equality can be achieved in the future, but also raises broader and more fundamental questions as to how enshrined and secure are concepts of equality in Europe today. Segregation in Central Eastern Europe As segregation in the region has different patterns and manifestations, it is difficult to measure, understand, and determine whether it is a result of specific local policy or the general national context, or if it is a fusion of the two. There are experts who consider segregation to exist where Roma pupils are placed together in one part of the classroom, usually at the back. Others do not consider segregation to exist if the children share the same facilities, curricula, teaching methods and personnel etc. Clearly profound discrimination can exist even within a more mixed learning environment as well some forms of segregation but for many Roma pupils their experiences 3 For a longer discussion see ERRC, Stigmata, 14–19. Institutional Responses to Segregation 9 of segregation are more overt and transparent. When we speak about segregation of Roma4 in education there are three main causes namely residential segregation; local/national educational polices and school choice. Ghetto Schools: Schools with a majority of...