Croatia’s Schools Leave Roma Pupils in the Slow Lane

By Barbara Matejcic, Croatia

The article was created with the support of the  Roma Education Fund.

A failure to take into account their linguistic needs and deprived backgrounds means that too many Roma pupils in Croatia end up studying under simplified programs, which give them a poor start in life.

Igor is a cordial, curious, talkative young man. He recently finished high school but is dissatisfied with his education and would like to supplement it. More precisely, he would like to make up for what he missed. He will not go to college, and has no such ambitions, and he would not be able to go with his qualifications.

He wants a certificate from a “regular” high school. Igor completed almost all his education following a special, adapted curriculum. This was decided following a diagnosis of a mild mental retardation, as it was called in 2009, when he was examined at the age of eight at the request of his school.

Igor is ashamed of those three words, which is he does not want to give his real name. He was willing to talk about everything, just not to be associated with “mild mental retardation” – although he is aware that the information about what kind of education he obtained actually implies this.

This is why, among other things, he wants a certificate from a “regular” high school. He wants to rid himself of a label that he thinks does not belong to him.

Igor’s older brother, and a significant number of other children, grew up in Croatia just like him, in large, poor, uneducated Roma families, and received the same decision, which was a condition for transferring from the regular school curriculum to a special classroom with a simplified, customized program.

Like most Roma in Croatia, Igor is from the northern Međimurje region, one of nine children of an illiterate mother and a father who only completed elementary school.

His mother tongue is Bayash, an archaic dialect of Romanian spoken by most of the Roma in Međimurje. He only started learning Croatian at the age of six, in kindergarten.

“In kindergarten, I learned to say, ‘I have to go to the toilet’, some words like ‘car’, ‘table’ and ‘tractor’, and we wrote letters – but I didn’t learn anything more because a lot of children belonging to the Roma minority were in the kindergarten, so we spoke in Romani,” he recalls.

He enrolled in regular first grade, but did not understand the material and, at the end of the grade, did not even know how to sign his name. After failing first grade the school asked for an assessment, to determine the appropriate form of schooling.

The Children’s Psycho-physical Aptitude Assessment Board identified in him “mild mental retardation, difficulty in concentrating, visuomotor coordination and perception, and learning difficulties”, as stated in the decision on his continued education under a special curriculum for students with mild mental retardation in a special teaching and educational group, adopted by the Social Affairs Service in Međimurje County.

“This is often the case with Roma children. They don’t know what is required of them in school,” Igor comments. “The teacher speaks to them in Croatian in vain, when they do not understand. Imagine a French child coming to a Croatian school. They would be ‘dumb’ as well.”

Igor does not remember how the school’s expert board tested him. The procedure for determining the appropriate educational program, and the composition of the Children’s Psycho-physical Aptitude Assessment Boards, are prescribed by the Rulebook of the Ministry of Education. But the tests applied by the school board members are not prescribed.

Parents give ‘consent’ without much information

Many countries, including Croatia, use Wechsler’s Intelligence Scale for Children, WISC-IV, the fourth edition, to determine a child’s intelligence. But expert studies indicate that such tests are not suitable for children who don’t come from the dominant culture, especially if they aren’t fluent in the language in which the test is conducted.

Ana Horvat Vuković, from the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, in the work Segregation to integration? Possibilities of Integrated Education of Roma, writes: “In countries that classify students in schools on the basis of intelligence and ability tests, there is a fear about the ethnocentric character of these tests, i.e. that they ignore the linguistic and cultural differences of Roma children and thus cause their unnaturally high representation among students of ‘special’ schools.”

A recent study, Including Roma in Croatian Society: Women, Youth and Children, by Ksenija Klasnić, Suzana Kunac and Petra Rodik, states that, “children belonging to the Roma national minority are often educated according to customized programs only because they do not know the Croatian language.”

When a child receives a decision on schooling under a customized program, the consent of the parents is required. Igor’s parents agreed. But, he says: “Parents don’t understand anything.

They don’t know how to read, don’t know how to write, they don’t even understand Croatian very well, so if some professional words are used in conversation with them at school … they sign the consent without even knowing what they actually signed.”

In the summer before his sixth grade, Igor was fostered by a family from another place in Međimurje. His new foster parents enrolled him in an “ordinary” class, but then a decision came from the previous school and the class teacher told them that he had to transfer.

“Igor was the best in that special class; there were no problems, except that he was a little sad,” recalls his foster mother, Ivana, whom he calls auntie and in whose family he has lived for the last six years. The conversation took place at their home.

“I was actually sad all the time during my schooling,” adds Igor.

“From the beginning I felt awful; I talked to my auntie a lot about that. There were seven of us in a separate room. Students from several generations were merged into one class. The others looked at us differently. They also used to tease us.”

“Were you all Roma in that class?” I asked.

“Yes,” Igor said.

The school Igor attended is not predominantly Roma, however. In this school year, 25 per cent of the pupils were Roma, but Roma made up 76 per cent of the pupils attending the customized program classes.

“What was it that really saddened you?” I asked.

“The fact that I knew I could do more,” he said. “I didn’t have to study anything at home, because I would remember everything in class.”

His foster mother says he was interested in everything at that time, and read the encyclopedias he found at their home.

Because he mastered the customized program with ease, and as his teachers thought Igor could do more, Ivana says that in the seventh grade they wanted to transfer him to the regular program.

They also took him to professional orientation in the nearby town of Čakovec, where they, as Ivana says, wondered at how much general knowledge he had. However, they also explained that he would have to make up a lot in the regular program, and since these were final grades, his marks might be poorer and lower his average, making it difficult for him to enroll in high school.

So, Igor stayed in a special class until elementary school ended. He shows an eighth-grade certificate. He passed Croatian Language, Art, Music, Mathematics, Nature and Society, PE and Technical Education, and had excellent scores in all the subjects.

His conduct was exemplary, he played football and danced in the Cultural and Artistic Society. He had no excused or unexcused absences. He finished elementary school flawlessly.

However, as he did not study History, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, Biology or a foreign language, he could only enroll in a high school with a three-year program for ancillary occupations, which no one in the job market usually needs. In the first grade of high school he was again the best student and his foster parents reconsulted with the school pedagogue to transfer him to the regular program.

This time, sport got in the way. By then, Igor had become a promising athlete, training daily. The choice was between a new, better, but also harder school – and sport. Eventually, they decided that he should stay where he was. He finished high school as the best student in the class, but is not proud of the certificate. He would like to continue his education.

Ivana and her husband have been foster carers for 11 years and have fostered 13 children over that time. All except one were Roma. And most of them, when they came to them, already went to school according to a customized program.

“We have fostered children who attended fourth, fifth or sixth grade, and didn’t even know how to read. It is a matter of neglect because, if you work with them, they make progress quickly and easily. If all the children had started kindergarten at three, and if we’d worked with them, there would be no problem when they started going to first grade,” Ivana says.

Three of Igor’s eight sisters and brothers were fostered and one was adopted. Igor and his older brother finished school according to a customized program. His younger brother also repeated first grade, but was immediately fostered and now attends the regular program.

His adopted brother is also being educated under the regular program. The girls who do not yet attend school live with their parents. Igor is afraid they will take the same educational path as him. He even asked the Centre for Social Welfare for them to be fostered before they went to school, in order to have better opportunities, but the centre said it had no reason to withdraw them from the family.

“If nothing is done, my sisters will drop out of first grade and will then be found to have mild mental retardation. This is what happens with many Roma children, I guarantee that it will happen to them as well,” Igor said, indignantly.

High percentage of Roma pupils in ‘special’ classes

Of a total of 314,284 pupils attending primary school in Croatia this school year, 3,662 are judged as having developmental difficulties and attend various forms of special programs in special classes, according to the Ministry of Science and Education.

When the ministry was asked how many of these were Roma, its response was that it does not keep such records in terms of ethnicity. However, the ministry does keep statistics on Roma national minority students to monitor their educational success rate.

These detail how many Roma children complete a certain grade of primary school, how many are repeaters and how many enroll in secondary school – but not how many attend a customized program.

The Department for Education and Culture in Međimurje County also says it does not have such data. However, data from Školski e-Rudnik, an application of the Ministry of Science and Education, with numerous data on schools, show that the largest percentage of pupils with registered disabilities is in Međimurje County.

And, according to the data we have collected, the number of Roma pupils educated in different forms of special programs is disproportionate compared to non-Roma students.

In the school year 2018/2019, 24,340 of a total of 318,884 primary schools pupils in Croatia had developmental difficulties and had received decisions to attend an appropriate form of education.

This is 7.6 per cent of all children educated in special programs in Croatia last year. In the same school year, in Međimurje County, of the total of 1,639 Roma children in primary schools, 335 had received a decision to attend an appropriate form of education, which is as much as 20.4 per cent of all Roma children then educated under special programs.

Therefore, the number of Roma children educated last school year under special programs was three times higher compared to the general population. This percentage increases further towards the end of the school year, when the number of Roma pupils attending primary school falls, while the number of those with a decision to attend an appropriate form of education rises.

A big jump in the number of decisions between first and second grades is also noticeable, just as was the case with Igor.

There is a noticeable difference also between certain schools in Međimurje: in some, 26 per cent of Roma students are educated according to a customized program, and in others, 16 per cent.

The Ministry of Science and Education declined to comment on the overrepresentation of Roma pupils educated in various forms of special programs, citing a lack of available data. A number of experts in education with whom we spoke did not deal with this topic either – but were not surprised that such a large number of Roma children are educated according to such programs.

Neven Hrvatić, a professor from the Department of Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, said it was the line of least resistance, as it is easier to send children to such programs than do extra work additionally with them.

The head of a primary school in Međimurje, which is continuously reducing the number of students enrolled in a customized program and has a slightly lower share of Roma – although still high compared to the general population – told us that Roma children mostly face developmental difficulties rather than intellectual ones.

The school said that they work a lot through the preschool program with both parents and children in order to better prepare the children for school, and that the Board does not give them decisions so lightly about schooling according to a customized program.

Elvis Šarić, Principal of the Mursko Središće Elementary School, which also educates Roma children according to a customized program, but also uses sensitization programs, believes the high number of Roma children attending such programs is down to social deprivation and inadequate testing.

“If we tested a full bus of Syrian children who do not know Croatian, the results would be similar,” he insisted.

He advocates the abolition of testing, and of formal decisions of expert boards, because they usually mark these children by the end of schooling. Namely, children can switch from a customized to a regular program if they are deemed ready for it, but this rarely happens. Šarić believes schools should adapt to pupils, unless there are major difficulties, and work with them as much as they need, so that he or she can follow the regular program.

The EU Fundamental Rights Agency, FRA, has published several reports and surveys on Roma education noting the disproportionately large share of Roma students in so-called special schools and classes. A survey published in 2016, which included 11 EU members but not Croatia, confirmed this in a number of countries, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

The survey showed that the percentage of Roma pupils in special schools in the Czech Republic was 23 per cent, followed by Slovakia – 20 per cent. The percentage was the least in Portugal and Poland – only 1 per cent. The FRA stated its concerns that placing Roma pupils in “special” schools “could be the result of discriminatory practices”.

That involvement of indirect discrimination in the Czech case was confirmed in 2007 by a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. This came after 18 Roma pupils sued the Czech state after they were placed in so-called special schools with a simplified curriculum in Ostrava.

No official statistics were available, as is the case with Croatia, but the court accepted data collected by prosecutors, which showed that while Roma children made up only 2.26 per cent of the local urban population of primary school children, they made as much as 50.3 per cent of the pupils placed in special schools.

Prosecutors considered that they had not been adequately tested in view of the cultural differences between Roma and Czech children, and that their main obstacle was insufficient knowledge of the Czech language, while their parents had been insufficiently informed of the consequences of their consent.

The Czech government considers parental consent crucial, but the court was not persuaded that the parents of Roma children were able to assess all aspects of the situation, or the consequences of their consent.

Language issues are a major problem

Milan Mitrović, head of the Roma Youth Organisation of Croatia who studies early and preschool education in Slavonski Brod, says he has known for years about the large number of Roma pupils being educated according to simplified programs.

“It is not a matter of their intellectual limitations but of limited knowledge, primarily of the Croatian language,” says Mitrović, noting that the case was even worse before, as progress is being made in schools where staff are being educated on working with Roma children.

Jagoda Novak, who received her PhD on Roma Educational Integration, is not surprised that the same thing is happening in Croatia as in many European countries.

If we miss quality preschool work with children in collaboration with parents, we will later have children with large delays, attention dispersion and, most importantly, with a sense of failure and lack of motivation,” she says.She believes that the causes are multiple: “What we provide to children before school has an indelible effect on their later education.

“Such children are often the ones who attend school according to the type of program you mention,” she adds.

“A two-year continuous kindergarten program is a prerequisite for later good school success of children of lower social status, children whose mother tongue is not Croatian, children living in isolation of some kind, and such is the vast majority of Roma children. This is confirmed by many studies, but it is still not happening, although all national strategies for Roma inclusion have clearly introduced this measure as necessary.”

Novak says mentoring grants and extended daycare for children, salary supplements for teachers working in bilingual classrooms and compulsory education of school staff on, among other things, teaching Croatian as a second language, and on diversity, should be introduced in schools. She notes also that surveys have shown that low educational expectations often lead to low results, and that we should consider our expectations Roma children.

Igor, who had higher expectations during his school, but did not get the opportunity to realize them, says it is time for change: “At school they do not know what to do with a child of the Roma national minority who has not learned the Croatian language, does not have knowledge, or does not have parents to rely on. They think they can only help him/her by making his/her school program easier.”

 

This article was originally published in Croatian on 1 November 2020: