DECEMBER 2006

Monitoring Roma Education: Statistical Baseline for Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe

In response to the fundamental lack of accurate information on Roma in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, and in the interests of promoting education justice for Roma, the Education Support Program of OSI presents its publication, Monitoring Education for Roma: A Statistical Baseline for Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, the most readily available data on Roma education in these regions.

The statistical baseline was collated at the beginning of the Decade of Roma Inclusion to allow for monitoring of improvements on key education indicators for Roma over the course of that 10-year program. The current information demonstrates just how far behind the Roma are in the area of education; how much work and commitment is required of governments to bridge the education gap between Roma and majority populations in these regions; and what daunting challenges remain, even in the most committed countries, to achieving the Decade’s goals in education.

The inadequacy of the available information is plainly apparent in the table, the International Comparative Dataset on Roma Education, and the methodological challenges presented by attempting such a set of (roughly) comparative data were considerable. Nevertheless, the statistical baseline is an unprecedented compilation, which collates information from 19 countries and provides the clearest, most accurate image yet of Roma participation across a broad range of key education indicators, including enrollment and completion in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

The document is available on OSI’s website.

Interested persons may also contact cmcdonald@osi.hu

Final Report on Roma Education Initiative (REI) of OSI - ESP

The Education Support Program (ESP) of OSI-BP is pleased to announce the release of the Final Report of the Roma Education Initiative (REI). REI aimed to tackle the unacceptable situation in the region of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in education for Roma children by increasing national programming; mobilizing national agendas and resources; and advocating strongly and consistently for systemic and policy changes that work against segregation and racial discrimination, and for high-quality educational provision for Roma children. REI was implemented from 2002 to 2005.

The Roma Education Initiative was designed to work on both the international and national levels, and included grant-making and technical assistance functions. Though all projects were aligned with the overall REI goals and principles, and implemented the comprehensive approach methodology, each project was unique, based on the situation and context of each country. From its inception in 2002, REI funded seven national-level projects in Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In addition, REI provided support to other national efforts focused on Roma education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo, through technical assistance and/or inclusion of implementing teams in international events.

REI did not envisage a centralized evaluation due to the variation in implementation and timeframes of projects; difficulties over the comparability of data would not have made that possible. Instead, REI relied mostly on national-level external evaluation of projects to provide data necessary to document its achievements. Though some data was collected centrally, the final report draws primarily from these national-level external evaluations, thus combining a cluster evaluation and multisite evaluation approach.

The national-level evaluations as well as the final report are available on REI’s website.

Preliminary Assessment Report on the Results of the RE:FINE Program

The Resourcing Education: Fund for Innovations and Networking (RE:FINE) was established by the Education Support Program in 2004 to provide an opportunity for civil society organizations to work together on joint initiatives for school reform. Since its establishment, the fund has supported 22 projects with grants totaling 2,054,244 U.S dollars. Projects typically ran for two years and involved around five partners from different countries. In total, 119 civil society organizations and institutions in around 30 countries have received funding from RE:FINE.

RE:FINE was established to address a capacity gap between organizations working toward education reform in Central Europe on the one hand and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, the CIS, and Mongolia on the other.

In early 2006, the Open Society Institute New York recognized that RE:FINE had reached a stage where an external assessment of program results was needed to draw on the lessons that could be learned, to understand to what extent the program objectives had been reached, and to determine whether and how the fund should be redesigned to maximize its impact.

To learn more about the findings and recommendations for the RE:FINE program, please see the report.

Snapshots of Education Developments and Trends from Central Europe to Central Asia 2005-2006

This report provides snapshots of developments related to education and education policy in 28 countries and territories over the last year with a focus on secondary education and, where relevant, vocational training and higher education. Geographically, it focuses on Central Europe, the Baltics, Southeastern Europe, Turkey, the Palestinian Territories, the Caucasus, Turkey, Pakistan, Central Asia, and Mongolia.

The publication of the report was supported by the Open Society Institute - Education Support Program within the framework of RE:FINE program through a grant to Transitions Online, Czech Republic. The report is available here.

Developments and Trends in Secondary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

The development of secondary education in Africa and other low-income countries is receiving renewed interest. The paper Developments and Trends in Secondary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa is based on a review of various reports on the performance of secondary education in SSA and summarizes developments in the sector over the past few decades. It begins by outlining what the main purpose of secondary education in SSA has been in the past and whether and how this purpose may be changing. The paper then briefly describes the outlines of a quality secondary education according to UNESCO. This provides the basic framework for the subsequent analysis of the current status of secondary education in SSA and how it has developed, focusing on the key issues of access and equity, quality, relevance, and policy. The publication of this paper was supported by the Open Society Institute - Education Support Program in cooperation with Transitions Online, Czech Republic.

The paper is available here.

Enhancing Professional Development of Education Practitioners and Teaching/Learning Practices

With financial support from UNESCO and the Open Society Institute - Education Support Program, the South-East European Education Cooperation Network held a regional workshop Enhancing Professional Development of Education Practitioners and Teaching/Learning Practices in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina on November 17-18, 2006. The workshop documentation, including the presentations, is now available on the website (in the "Meetings" section). The workshop event was combined with promotion of the book The Prospects of Teacher Education in South-east Europe, which was published in mid-November and is now available in four languages (English, Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian) in electronic format at http://www.see-educoop.net/portal/tesee.htm (in Project Products section). More translations will follow. For the English-language printed book, please contact igor.repac@guest.arnes.si

Assessment-based literacy instruction manuals for children at risk

Participants in the RE:FINE project Academic Success for Roma Children developed literacy assessment instruments and wrote training manuals on assessment-based literacy instruction. The project is supported by ESP's RE:FINE Program and the OSI/World Bank Roma Education Fund (REF). The manuals, prepared in five languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak, and Romanian), are intended to be used in in-service training workshops for primary school teachers who wish to learn two things:

• how to genuinely assess their students’ reading skills (what a particular child does and does not know that will help him or her learn to read; what many children of this age group, or from the high, middle, and low parts of the spectrum of reading ability in this class do and do not know), and
• how to diversify literacy instruction so that diverse children’s literacy needs and instructional levels are met (strategies and methods to teach reading, including comprehension). The diagnostic instruments are intended to be administered by a teacher to one student at a time. Starting from the information obtained upon administering the informal literacy assessment (emergent literacy assessment and informal reading inventory) about a particular student’s reading ability, the teacher can then decide on appropriate strategy as to how to help a child to improve his or her reading skills.

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