How the recent teachers' strike forced the prime minister to openly state a statement that has been mentioned in private conversations, on television shows and on media portals for 20 years, and which has to do with the functional illiterates that our education system produces. The article will talk about teachers as instruments and about the contribution of ten people who designed or led, so to speak, all the 'educational reforms' that brought the system to its current state
Writes: Murteza Osdautaj
The strike of these days, whether we wanted it or not, once again brought to the surface some problems that we have been discussing for years and that almost everyone knows about. These are problems that are related, first and foremost, to the quality of education and the social status of teachers, but also to the system as a whole. The strike was also a moment that makes us think about, let's call it, the general architecture of the education system and the contribution of many factors in its 'construction' and in creating the situation we are in and which we are doing nothing to change or improve.
Education, in these twenty-three years, was one of the links in the chain of our state system that has functioned, to a large extent, poorly. Neither large investments in building schools, nor large investments in equipping schools with teaching aids, nor endless training of teachers, nor the unprecedented involvement of civil society and foreign organizations from individual countries and other international organizations have been enough for our education system to recover.
I am writing this article for a simple reason. In this entire journey, there are no more than ten people (excluding ministers who, each in their own time, have made a 'contribution') from civil society, NGOs, private and public institutions, etc. who, often, have also held high political positions and who, in the capacity of 'experts', have been engaged and have 'contributed' to the development and reform of education during all these post-war years. Their engagement was so long and so comprehensive in the events in our education that every 'reform', every activity, every event and every document, legal and sub-legal, strategic or programmatic written about education, of all levels has the hand and seal of these ten people.
Being eternal 'experts', getting involved in every gear of the system's functioning and usurping every opportunity for others to engage, they, in a way, usurped, so to speak, this field of action entirely because it was a good source of enrichment for them or their interest groups.
These, say, ten people, ten 'experts' that Kosovo has, coming from civil society, who were lucky enough to speak English in the post-war period, managed to enter UNMIK institutions by taking advantage of positions, from the highest, even in the executive political hierarchy, becoming political advisors, ministers and deputy ministers, engaging in the largest projects in the field of education financed by Kosovo or by foreign donors, leading local NGOs that 'absorb' endless local and international funds and providing 'technical assistance' services to almost every foreign organization, became rich, created private institutions while, in no case, did they take responsibility for their unsuccessful work which was so transparently revealed in the two PISA tests. I am calling it unsuccessful because, except in PISA, in all international reports, especially those of the European Union, educational developments in Kosovo are not evaluated for any qualitative improvement, even though the 'commitments' of these ten Kosovars were permanent, continuous and influential.
These ten people, with their organizations, are the largest organizers and providers of training, these ten people, as representatives of local and foreign organizations, are, so to speak, the sole drafters of national educational curricula, strategies and programs. Using these instruments and the monopolies created, they managed to make the entire educational system dependent on their 'knowledge' and their 'all-round' contributions, however, through the engagement of their 'professional' teams who, in the most frequent cases, with exceptions, were ordinary people, without the necessary education, skills and expertise but, for financial reasons, became and still are part of the structures I am talking about and which are led by the ten people whose names I am not mentioning in this article but whom every reader, after reading this article, will identify.
It would be perfectly fine for people to engage in work in which they have expertise, it would be normal that, sometimes, people fail to materialize their work and ideas, but it is completely abnormal that, while the education system does not mark any qualitative improvement, the same people who are directly or indirectly responsible for the state of education are now and in every situation the ones who are called upon to fix what they themselves have ruined.
In general, in all educational and pedagogical events, at all educational levels, starting from the preschool level to the education of educational staff, professional development, legal and sub-legal documents, trainings, curricula, licensing, professional rehabilitation, etc. etc. have passed through their hands or have been designed by them. Unfortunately, almost all of their professional engagements have turned out to be unsuccessful, not based on the educational needs of Kosovo, often copied from similar documents and activities of Scandinavian countries, causing, unfortunately, Kosovo education and its development to stagnate significantly and making our system the most underdeveloped and backward in Europe.
We all know that we have an extremely big problem with education and its quality at all levels. All ministers, all prime ministers have known this, and the current minister and prime minister also know this. But all of us who have dealt with education issues know this. We have known it before and we have known it from the beginning, but, always, to 'cure' the situation, the same people were invited and are being invited, those who contributed the most to the current stagnation and lack of development of our education system.
This entire situation has been created with the 'professional' contribution and leadership of the group that I would call the 'big ten'.
There are some things that are universally known about the state of our education, some of which I would like to mention, and in the creation of which this same group of 'men of education' have had a key or, sometimes, leading role.
We know how poorly we performed in PISA 2015 and how poorly we also performed in PISA 2018. We know that we also have the highest proportion in Europe of 'educated' teachers who have a master's degree. We know that, almost every year, in international reports on education in Kosovo, the state of our education system is considered low and described with terms such as: 'in the infantile phase', 'at initial levels', 'without noticeable positive developments', etc. Every Minister knew it and every policymaker knows where the problem is, how and where to intervene and how and where the chain of the system is malfunctioning, but no one, because touching the education sector costs votes, has the courage and desire to intervene. Failure to intervene in time and 'exacerbating' the problem will cause irreversible situations and conditions that will force, at some future time, an unfortunate government to start the entire process from scratch, and if, in a certain situation, we are forced to start the entire system from scratch, the losses will be irreparable.
In many discussions, it is requested that teachers be tested to see if they are capable of being teachers. In many cases, in many public discussions and analytical writings, teachers are called 'functional illiterates'. We must stop at this point because if we call teachers 'functional illiterates' we are not, in fact, attacking teachers. If they are like that, they are not at fault because they have 'graduated' by meeting the graduation standards of each of the universities in Kosovo. Each of them has registered to study to become teachers and each university has provided them with 'valid' diplomas for teachers. In this situation, we come to another side of the general problem that our system has. So we come to the field of preparing teachers to be capable of being included in the educational labor market. It is therefore the universities and university professors who, in this situation, stand out with their work in preparing teachers. If, therefore, universities produce 'functionally illiterate' teachers, we have no right to attack teachers. It is the universities that fill our schools with unprepared teachers and we must deal with the universities and their 'standards' for awarding diplomas but also the educational quality that they offer to future teachers. The PISA test has confirmed this phenomenon by finding that in Kosovo the teacher training system for the preschool system does not function well (It has been seen that children who have attended the preschool system, compared to those who have not been in this system at all, have shown weaker results in all three testing areas. It has also been shown that the qualification of teachers, which is among the highest in Europe, is not a factor that positively affects the achievements of Kosovar students.), the primary level teacher training system does not function well, but it has been seen that the other two educational levels do not function well either. Requiring a state exam or a renewal of a teacher's license is not the end of the world, but a normal act that all states do. But requiring a test (often in retaliation for a strike) for teachers and allowing universities to continue their rampant production of incompetent teachers is nothing more than a kind of monthly attack on them.
Even in the creation of this situation, the people I am talking about and their 'educational' organizations were 'professionally' engaged and used their resources.
But we have known and we still know where we should have intervened, what we should have done, what tasks we should have done differently and how we should have done them in a different way. But we have not done more or, better, we have not done anything because, many of us, by doing things or by not acting, at times when we should have done more for our country and education, have seen and still see as a priority our interest and our well-being, our benefit, our profit that we can have from the current situation and from the tragic situations that our people and the functional sectors of the state may go through. In this context, we can talk about a series of institutes and other institutions that, for profit reasons, are and have been put at the service of what, at the very least, we would call a continuation of the bad state of education.
Therefore, today, without a doubt, we can talk about the educational mafia in Kosovo, composed of politicians, local and international NGOs, institutes, educational institutions of all levels and of all ownership affiliations, experts, administrators at local and central levels who use millions of euros, receive millions of euros and, organized or 'unorganized', stop, hinder and 'suffocate' every idea, every initiative, every tendency and every enterprise that could 'healthy' our education system through genuine reform interventions.
Even in this 'sphere', the magic ten has the greatest influence and power.
In this context, it is enough to mention the fact that four Ministers are being replaced in MASTI whose main job is still the 'reorganization' of this institution (initiated, with political and illegal purposes, by the former NISMA Minister, Shyqri Bytyqi) through an organogram that will be proposed and drafted by a local or international NGO, while this same institution has more than 300 employees who have been working for more than 20 years and who, most of them, are experts in certain fields. The engagement of an NGO, such as the German GTZ, which is not known for its expertise in the field of education (in policy making) anywhere in the world, and its engagement of some Romanian 'experts' and some local junior translator or official is nothing other than an educational crime, I would call it. It is also a crime and mafia to engage individuals without special expertise and NGOs without any recognized activity to draft strategies and evaluate the work of MASHTI whenever this becomes necessary. Having experts among you, having academic and university institutions on your side, having skilled experts who have been educated domestically and abroad, having people with lifelong experience in education, and engaging only a group of local and international people who have created a monopoly and have not created any positive situation except enriching themselves and their paramafia groups is more than a crime and a disaster. It is, simply, a slippage and denigration of every work done for years by generations and generations. In the meantime, I do not want to deny the inaction of certain individuals and groups, and of course, such a thing should be sanctioned, but it should also be known that the majority of such persons who have damaged the system are partisans of the PDK and LDK and their sister parties, but also servants of each clique, declared as 'non-partisan', who have been used by political oligarchies to achieve political goals that focused on usurping all executive functions in the state and, through them, to always keep under control the education system, which, since it affects almost the entire population, has such a wide reach, being considered a large basket of votes, would be used as a vote ATM on the one hand and for the enrichment of the parapolitics of certain political parties, on the other.
Such an approach has developed at all levels of education and, without a doubt, has also extended to the tertiary sector, that is, to universities, where party militants of the parties that dominated, at a given moment, the particular institution have been employed and installed. Whether in universities or even in university units within universities, you can very easily see which political party the management of this or that university belongs to, or which professor the staff of this or that faculty had as their mentor. With a simple glance, you can see that all institutions are divided into clans and groups, in all institutions ghettos or territories have been created into which other persons are not allowed to 'enter'. You can notice communities of 'scientists' or other communities (read clans) of 'poets', 'artists', or other unprincipled groups which, in their own way, hinder any progressive development in education and other fields of science and culture by usurping the spaces and opportunities for people with knowledge and without clan affiliation to be able to engage and make their contribution.
The aforementioned ten operate in the territory or 'kibbutz' of the education field and all of them have been very nicely accommodated in various profitable positions by taking advantage of the opportunity to 'maintain' clan divisions, by taking advantage of the lack of capacity and ignorance of the cabinets of ministers, but also by closing any space for different opinions regarding educational events and developments in the country. Unfortunately, with the connection of incompetent, profiteering and visionless politicians with the educational mafia structures that have a stake in projects and the state budget, it has been achieved that the Kosovo education system has degraded to the extent that its reconstruction has to be started starting from scratch.
It is clear that we know where we are and how bad our work is and where the shortcomings and problems are, but we do not want to change any situation because we are used to becoming slaves and servile to some international organization that helps us with foreign and local 'experts' who, in their own country, are unknown, while here, due to our mental sterility and pathological servility, they create national education policies that only further destroy our education system. Hundreds of projects over these twenty years have cost the country's budget but have also 'absorbed' donations to the tune of nearly 500 million euros. Only one of the organizations involved has 'absorbed' projects, for the 20-year period of operation, in the amount of 60 million euros, and while a local organization has managed to 'manage' so many millions, one must think about how many other millions have been 'managed' by other foreign and local organizations. If you make a measurement between the two PISA tests that took place in 2015 and 2018, you will see that the effect of all the 'interventions' (e.g. 2 million hours of training with teachers) on the system has been equal to zero. On the contrary, even though the system has been 'helped' with all those hours of training, there has been a slight negative decline in achievement in PISA 2018 compared to PISA 2015. In all cases, as has happened in all countries, when a failure is recorded in the PISA test, as has happened in our country, the state gets up and organizes dozens of research studies to find the causes of such a situation, looking for them from human factors to structural and systemic ones. Nothing has happened in Kosovo. It is mentioned on some news program and everything is forgotten as if nothing had happened and, ironically, those former 'experts' are invited and the same ones are committed to 'remediating' the situation they have contributed so much to creating.
Looking at how our entire education system and the country's educational institutions function, we cannot escape the fact that in Kosovo, in these 23 years, an educational mafia has been created, led by a dozen powerful people connected to politics and powerful internal and external organizations. The educational mafia does not only include NGOs, management institutions and persons and individuals. It also has an extended hand within the government, in municipalities, in Universities, scientific and pedagogical institutes and institutions. Thousands of graduates, masters and doctorates 'pour' into the 'academic' market every year. Thousands of graduates, with bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees, obtain titles by buying diplomas (the latest case was with the 12 Kosovar 'doctors' who had bought their doctorates at the University of Kragujevac in Serbia or, in previous years, about 180 of them who had 'doctored' at a private university in Tirana alone) or by using diplomas, already protected, but by changing their titles and names or mentors. Hundreds of professors and scientists obtain university titles by using all possible machinations to falsify scientific work. If we look at 'scientific writings' we can find the same works published under different titles in different journals, we can find, for example, works from physics in which one of the authors is a geographer or a veterinarian, we can find works from veterinary science or mining in which one or several of the authors are linguists or pedagogues and we can find works from medicine in which one or several authors may be geographers or pedagogues. In addition, the educational mafia has taken root in other fields as well. The drafting of textbooks, the monopolies created by publishing houses with authors, reviewers and editors have caused the phenomenon of usurpation of a very important part of education, writing, publishing and purchasing of textbooks to be observed even in the textbooks that were or are used in Kosovo. Here too, however, the big ten of Kosovo's education system necessarily have their hands full because textbooks are a major source of money and profits for individuals and companies, even though there has always been talk about the extremely poor content, technical, and educational quality of the textbooks.
But that's not all! We know that our schools are 'producing' students with poor performance. We know that this chain is carried to the faculty and then the faculty produces poor teachers. Ministers know it and we know that a link in this chain must be broken so that it cannot be reproduced. Ministers know it, academics know it, universities know that this trend must be stopped but, knowing that breaking each link in the chain means less profit for an entire class of people and institutions, no one has the courage to take such a 'historic' step. The strangest case is of a faculty that 'produces' graduate teachers and the same faculty offers them training for professional development. This is a unique case in the world that an institution that educates and trains teachers with a master's degree, provides them with diplomas and, immediately after graduation, invites them to training for professional development. A university institution should have basic academic ethics so that the diploma it issues is a guarantee of the necessary skills and abilities for students who complete teacher training studies at the same faculty.
The educational mafia is a very lively structure composed of wealthy tycoons, political and money-making structures, foreign and domestic organizations, pseudo experts and pseudo intellectuals, professors and academics who, for a few more bucks, are instrumentalized by anyone and everyone who can offer them money. The state of permanent crisis in Kosovo's education is an endless space for them to enrich themselves even more and to seize any development perspective that well-intentioned people may have.
In a situation where the state does nothing to improve and protect the quality of education, the teacher is the target of attack, the political instrument for achieving goals, and, most often, the victim of the system. They were used by political oligarchs, by union oligarchs (for example, it turned out that the union secretary is one of the richest people in Kosovo with a fortune that includes more than four apartments, expensive cars, etc. that could not have been created with one salary or even two salaries and that had cash in the bank equal to the salary that a high school teacher receives for 12 years. I am not prejudging anything, but all that wealth was not created without a strong income base and that cannot be achieved with one, two or three average salaries in Kosovo), by religious oligarchs and, often, also by opposition parties which, regardless of who is in opposition, use unions and teachers as instruments and weapons of political warfare. While teachers are used as instruments and means to achieve political goals and while unions are fighting with each political group for a minimum salary increase, at the same time they greatly damage the human and professional dignity of teachers, damaging, almost irreversibly, his image and personality.
After every storm, the government will certainly invite the 'big ten' of the education mafia to fix the 'situation'. And while they will get a little richer by feasting on the poor funds of this country, we will remain, for a long time, speaking and writing about the inadequate functioning of our education system.
And while things are inevitably heading towards the starting point, that is, point zero, which means that everything must be started from scratch, the ministry is still doing the same thing that other ministerial cabinets have done with the 'fantastic ten' who are the absolute authors and contributors to this situation.
In our culture, unfortunately, crime is hidden and not talked about because people do not want to be part of private and public 'chaos'. I hope this article of mine will open this 'chaos' and, in a future situation, if necessary, I will also mention the names of these 'musketeers', emphasizing their concrete contributions to the current state of our education.
Where writing is not an accusation, it is an effort to speak openly and broadly about problems, which also means including as many institutions and public figures as possible in the larger discussion that this country needs to develop.
Education, the political, institutional (universities, institutes, colleges, etc.) and human factors that have brought it to this state, should be the big topic that needs to be discussed urgently and immediately. Let's all discuss it at once.
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