The author is an INESS analyst
In Slovakia, we have around fifty elementary schools that are absolutely failing. Approximately 20,000 students visit them every day, and they complete more than 10,000 hours of education during the 9-10 years of attendance. And the result of all this is – nothing. In Tests 5 and 9, they achieve results that are often worse than they would have been if they had chosen the answers at random. These children graduate from school and cannot read, write, or count.
It is true that approximately half of the students in these schools come from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, this cannot be an excuse for schools. These children are healthy and have potential. However, this cannot be fulfilled in the school, which functions through a template created by the Ministry of Education for average children from an average Slovak family. If a student in these schools deviates from normality, the school ceases to function. And children from disadvantaged backgrounds deviate.
A large part of them do not have a good command of the Slovak language and come from an environment of extreme poverty with the absence of cultural customs that the majority population and their children take for granted. The connection between effort and result, respect for formal rules or a vision of the future and career are not adopted by children from excluded communities. They do not automatically fit into the formal environment of the school and begin to perceive it as hostile.
This is a big problem for standard schools and the question is to what extent it can be solved by surgical changes in the form of rewriting state education programs and retraining a small number of teachers. That is, the recovery plan. I am very, very skeptical. If there are examples of schools in the world that were able to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds, they were schools that were created for this purpose. These are primarily so-called charter or autonomous schools. The people who founded them took all the traditional assumptions about education, threw them in the trash and gradually came up with a battery of principles and knowledge that work even in such difficult conditions.