Testing my patience

So, I wrote last week about the important tests for 8th graders which go a long way to deciding their next 4 years. I mentioned then that I don’t believe in testing in general, because I think it tends to favour those who are good at tests .  But I do see that they at least provide something of a level playing field.

Except when they don’t

There are times when my patience for the way things work in Romania is tested to its limits.  This last week has been one of those times. It is not an exaggerated rant to say that the testing system in this country is an absolute fucking disgrace.

Let me explain:  The marking of these tests is done pretty much the same day (or the following day) by local teachers who are paid almost nothing for the job (they get a gross payment of something like 3.70 Lei per test marked, which, after taxes and everything probably works out at about 40p net). These teachers have a mark sheet to refer to, which they use to score the tests. But – and it’s a very big but – there is no standardisation.  Essentially the teachers mark as strictly or leniently as they like. Indeed on the markers' information sheet it actually gives the marker the leeway to decide whether they think something deserves a mark or not.  If your paper ends up with a strict marker you get a low mark. If it ends with someone willing to give the benefit of the doubt, then you get a much better one.  The test grade is, to all intents and purposes, a lottery. Your grade depends, very heavily, on the marker your paper is randomly assigned.

Now, I know a fair amount about testing and assessment in my professional work.  I'm by no means an expert in that field, but I have read a fair amount on it, taken training courses, and have attended testing and assessment conferences. In short, I know something (less than many, more than most) about how tests work and what their function is. In addition, I am an oral examiner on a well-known international English test, and in that capacity I have to attend thorough and extensive annual standardisation meetings.  

In these tests, though, far from levelling the playing field, the testing system does exactly the opposite (the papers are marked anonymously, so at least we can say the process is not corrupt, but it’s still based on pure luck).  And levelling the playing field is, and I want to stress that I'm stating this in the most calm, objective, thoughtful way possible, levelling the playing field IS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF HAVING A FUCKING TEST IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE.

The maths test is reasonably balanced, because obviously in maths (especially at the 8^th grade level) there isn’t a great deal of potential variation in correct answers. It’s either right or not. But the literature tests (and here in this town most kids take two of those – in Romanian and Hungarian) are pretty much marked by whim.

So,  one can draw the short straw in the Romanian and/or Hungarian marking lottery and get a terribly hard marker.  The best in the class can get the worst marks.  To give an example, there are two identical twins in another class at her school, who are both brilliant, and who both score more or less exactly the same on any work.  Their marks for the Romanian test were 9.10 and 5.25 out of ten. This is simply not a possible split. Some of the best in Romanian in Bogi's class got some of the lowest marks (including the two kids who have a Romanian parent, and who are therefore functionally bilingual. Though, of course, as I've mentioned before, the test does not test language competence, but literary analysis)

There is an appeal process.  But everybody in the know says that the second marker tends not to alter the mark much because it’s perceived as undermining a fellow teacher. 

The Romanian test in particular has been the subject of much debate in the country over the last week, since a teacher from Bucharest last week complained that it was (a) testing things that were not on the curriculum; and (b) subjective in the marking.  She gave an example of a question of synonyms in which two answers were given but others were possible.  (Her letter here, in Romanian).  The Ministry of Education has responded on their website by pointing out that (in the case of (b)) it states quite clearly that the teacher/marker has the flexibility to decide whether an answer not given in the key is acceptable or not. (Link here). In other words, they have proudly stated, defending themselves against the charge of having a subjective grading system, that they do in fact have a subjective grading system. 

The function of the test is essentially a competition. Having your test marked hard is not a problem – if everyone is marking the same.  But they are not. So, the upshot is that some kids get punished through no fault of their own.  And these tests (or rather the grade given for these tests) decide which school you can go to and which subjects you can study. They are, in short, extremely important.  Much too important, it would seem, to be left in the hands of whichever people at the Ministry of Education are currently responsible for them. 

I love living in this country for many reasons, but sometimes the way it is run makes me want to scream. Perhaps I should not expect more when the Prime Minister is an unrepentant plagiarist. 

Maybe it's an important lesson for 8th graders to learn that their lives are subject to the whims of fate and that ability and hard work count for nothing.  But I figure they'll learn that eventually anyway.  It seems shameful to institutionalise it.

  

Exams

This week is exam week for the 8th graders of Romania.  Essentially, they have 2 (or 3 - see below) big exams, after which their futures (or the next 4 years of those futures anyway) are decided.  Roughly, how it works is this: Over the 4 years from 5-8th grade they have been receiving marks for everything they do at school, and this continuous assessment goes towards their final grade.  But it only constitutes 25% of the total, and the exams they are taking this week make up the other 75%.  But they don;t have exams in all the subjects they have been studying, just 2 (or, as I said, 3, in some cases).  So there are large amounts of subjects that have almost no weight in this process - Physics, English, chemistry, geography, history, biology, etc etc are all sort of left behind here.

The exams that they do have are in Romanian (that was this morning, Monday), and maths (that's on Wednesday). For those kids whose first language is not Romanian, they also have an exam in "limba materna" - in my daughter Bogi's case (and the case of 90% of Harghita County, and about 7-8% of the country) that means Hungarian. Seems a bit unfair that they have to do 3 rather than 2, but them's the breaks. (It will be this way after the 12th grade too).

Next year, from the 9th grade, they will all be at high school.  These tests will decide (a) what "track" they will be able to take in high school, and (b) what high school they can go to.  Because while there isn't any form of streaming in the Romanian system, the "good" high school can choose the "good" students to fill its places (this happened to me too when I was at school choosing sixth forms, so it;s not exactly a Romania-specific issue).  So it does make a difference.

Over the years the weighting of the continuous assessment and the exams keeps changing (to the point where you only really find out what it will be during that final, 8th, year.  4 years ago, there was no test at all, and it was all on continuous assessment.  Last year it was, I think 50/50.  Now the test is dominant.  I'm intellectually opposed to the primacy of the test as a form of assessment, but the argument that I hear a lot from parents is that in schools in villages, everyone knows everyone and the teachers tend to give higher marks during the year than do teachers in towns.  Thus when the reckoning comes, kids from villages end u taking the places in the "good" schools, squeezing out the town kids who have had much tougher teaching and more exacting standards.  I have no idea if that's true but it sounds like a valid concern - especially in a community like this where it's very rural and this is the point at which kids from a large hinterland are all feeding in to a few schools, all in the town.  The national test, it is thought, at least provides a level playing field.

Anyway, the stress will all be over in 2 more days, and then it's just about trying to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get to your chosen school.

Today, then, the kids are not 100% happy, but just to wrap this up, here is a video that Bogi's class made to celebrate the end of school.  You get to see lots of shots of the town and it is really, genuinely  a very high quality video.

The Romanian Education System (3)

Finally, many months after starting this small series, I am ready to get to the third and last part of it - though obviously since I started it the education system here has had loads more crap piled upon it.  As of the day before yesterday there is yet another new education minister, but I'm not hopeful of positive change any time soon.

But I digress.  

The third area in which I encounter a massive problem with the Romanian education system is not an area which affects much of the country.  But it is certainly a huge issue here. 

This is to do with the teaching of Romanian in schools. Specifically the teaching of Romanian to those who don't speak Romanian as a mother tongue.  Which is most kids in Csikszereda, including my own daughter.  

Now before I start on my now customary rant, let me make it totally clear that I believe very strongly that all Romanian citizens should be able to speak Romanian. It seems to me more or less unarguable. But - the current system actually, I believe, makes it harder for people who don't speak Romanian as a first language to learn it than it should do.

First of all, let's clear up a semantic thing, partly because it irritates me, and partly because it will make it much easier to write the rest of this post. That is that kids who, say, speak Hungarian as a mother tongue, need to learn Romanian as a Second Language.  Clearly they are not learning Romanian as a foreign language (because it's obviously not a foreign language).  They are learning it as a second language.  Second, in this context, does not imply second class or second rate, merely a marker of the order in which the languages were learned. Kids in the UK or USA who are not native speakers of English learn English as a Second Language and nobody gets stressed about this terminology.  So, for my own sanity I will call it Romanian as a Second Language (RSL) here, rather than the convoluted phrase that is often used to try and avoid this which is something like Romanian for Romanian children who don't speak Romanian as a first language.  

Now for a large part of my adult life I was a language teacher. In fact at times I still teach English.  I do know a little bit about how language teaching and learning works, so unlike most of my usually ill informed posts this one is coming from a place of some actual knowledge. It may be the last time it happens, but we'll see.

The situation at the minute is that all children in the Romanian state education system study the same subjects to the same curriculum (there are some minor variations in subjects studied, especially in languages, but in general). This means that all children in Romania study Romanian in the same way. That is to say that children who speak Romanian as a first language study the same curriculum as those who study it as a second language. There is a certain desire born of nationalist head-in-the-sand-ism that we should close our eyes to the fact that in fact these two groups of children have different needs and are coming from a very different starting point.  If we treat them exactly the same, the logic seems to go, then they will all be good Romanian children.

But in fact, of course, the opposite happens. Kids who really should be learning RSL, end up finding themselves completely lost in a curriculum which is completely unsuitable for them. My daughter  is expected to read literature, which in many cases is not even modern Romanian, but is an archaic version of the language.  The grammar work she studies is heavy in metalanguage and light in practicality.  In short she is not taught Romanian as a tool  for a communication, but as a literary language to be examined. Which does, obviously, make some sense for most Romanian kids (though I'm not entirely convinced of the value to Romanian kids of reading Ion Creanga at the age of 12, myself, but that's by the by).  I've lost count of the times which I've come upon her crying because she just can't understand what she's supposed to be doing, each page of the novel takes her hours to read, and she beats herself up over the fact that she can't do what she shouldn't be expected to do.  And, she is one of the best in her class.  She is motivated and keen and actually is doing very well in Romanian, despite the system. I'm incredibly proud of her, and her language skills, but at times it's heartbreaking to watch.  

And it of course means that many kids who need RSL, are not learning Romanian well. At best they can learn to struggle through the exam system and not be completely held back by it, but they are not learning to use the language properly.  And surely the goal of this system should be that RSL kids leave school speaking Romanian very well and therefore being able to be full members of society.  This must be what would suit everyone. (Unless of course the goal is to actively disadvantage RSL kids - and it does disadvantage them as they have a much harder time in the national exam in Romanian at the end of the 12th grade for example, which in turn harms their overall grade, quite apart from harming their ability to succeed in one of the primary life skills that they need - the Romanian language)

(Actually at this point I should probably add that I am not alleging some nationalist conspiracy to keep the Hungarians and others back and deliberately make their lives difficult.  I genuinely think it is this way as a result of simple pigheadedness and stupidity)

To give another example of how this plays out: Some while back some friends who are from here but who moved to Hungary returned with their two children aged 11 and 13. Obviously having been brought up in Hungary the boys spoke no Romanian, but back here in Transylvania attending school they are of course studying Romanian. At a party a few months after they came back (at which I was present) the younger boy was asked by his mother to show us what he had learned at school that week. He then proceeded to recite the entirety of a fairly long Octavian Goga poem. He could recite it word for word, quite well, I'm told, but understood barely a word of it. Now it seems fairly clear that this is not good language teaching.

Obviously there are other side effects to this as well.  Not only does it fail to teach RSL kids Romanian successfully (which of course has a knock on effect of making their lives difficult and also failing to develop the potential of everyone), but it leads to a dislike of the language in general (after all it is the school subject which most makes the kids in question suffer). This is - in some cases - exacerbated by the nationalist feelings that they may be getting from their parents or classmates, and in turn exacerbates them.  All in all, the effects go beyond the academic achievement of the child in question, but actually can serve to cause even deeper rifts in society.

It's not that the Romanian education system is not good at teaching languages - these days most young people speak very good English for example, and many also speak French, German, Italian or a number of other languages.  It's just that the approaches and methodologies used in teaching those foreign languages are not allowed to be applied to teaching Romanian as a Second Language.

This change seems like such a no-brainer that one might wonder why it hasn't yet happened.  Indeed so much of a no-brainer is it that even Basescu, a noted no-brainer himself, has mentioned that he thinks it should be changed.  But yet, every year it is still the same. One might even have cause to wonder what the UDMR are actually doing with their time in government if they can't even influence a policy that is so clearly and insanely fucked up. 

Romanian Education System (brief reprise)

This is a sort of coda to my post on money in the Romanian education system (or rather the lack of it). I still have to write the third in that series, which sort of ended abruptly when things got rather hairy last year.  That should come soon, now that I have remembered that this blog exists (and that I have some time)

It's just a short one, but illustrative of so much I feel.  The government has decided to create a "Year Zero" class for children who have yet to begin the first grade (nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge, you'll be glad to hear).  This is to ensure that children entering year one are prepared for the rigours of a school education.  Or something like that.  I think in the UK something similar is called the Reception Class.  Anyway, it seems like a pretty reasonable idea on the face of it.  Kids here don't start school until they're 7, and the idea of a sort of slightly more schoolish year between kindergarten and that first year of your actual real school makes a certain amount of sense.

The problem of course is that while the idea is reasonable, the practicalities have not been thought about in the Ministry.  You can imagine someone sitting there saying in some meeting "Let's create an extra year of school, that will prepare kids for things better, and possibly enhance learning", and the others just sit around nodding their heads and saying "Excellent idea.  Consider it law".  The problem, of course, as you may already have worked out is that when you effectively create an extra year of school, you need to find some teachers to be in charge of it, and crucially you need classrooms to put these kids in.  And this in a school system which is basically being starved of any money whatsoever - teachers' pay, buildings, materials, everything is being cut.  And yet, here is this plan to put kids into these schools a year earlier.  It makes you want to weep.

What solution will be found?  Well right now it seems that the most likely solution is that the kids will have to have their reception classes somewhere other than the already overcrowded schools.  Where, you may be asking yourself.  Well, the plan will of course free up some space in certain buildings, so at the moment the most likely way of coping  and meeting the requirements of the new law seems like it will be that the reception classes will happen ... in the kindergartens.  Thus ensuring that, in fact, at the end of the day, absolutely nothing will have changed. I can think of no better example of the incompetence of this government.

The Romanian Education System (2)

OK, part 2 of my searing expose of the problems in the Romanian education system.

This one is the really BIG one. Money.

Romania doesn't have much money to go round. The government has recently signed up to an IMF loan with all the conditions that this usually implies (cuts, cuts, cuts). However, rather than making some sensible economic decisions like having a progressive tax and actually collecting taxes from rich people (and really doing something about corruption and tracking down the billions that vanish every year into personal bank accounts and expensive cars) it has launched into what can only be described as a war on the poor. That sounds melodramatic, perhaps, but take a look at the things proposed so far: Close half the hospitals, cut public sector pay by 25%, cut pensions by 15%, make it easier for employers to sack workers, raise the retirement age by 5 years (women) and 2 years (men), cutting quarter of a million public sector jobs, raise VAT by 5% points to 24%. Not all of these things can or will happen, but it's pretty clear which sector of the population that the Basescu / Boc government wants to attack to get the money from to pay the IMF. And it's not the well-off.

Anyway, inevitably the education system is another victim of these attacks. Not only are teachers salaries being slashed, but it seems that there is basically no money for anything else either. Basescu made a speech last year in which he praised Romania's vast diaspora, mostly working as agricultural labourers and construction workers in Spain and Italy for(a) leaving the country and not burdening the Romanian state with their needs; and (b) sending money back to bolster the Romanian economy. So possibly his plan here is to make this some kind of semi-compulsory national service, sending every able bodied young adult between 20 and 30 abroad to pick strawberries and send their earnings home. In such a scenario educating the population is really just a waste of money, since you don't need to know much to be an indentured peasant.

To give some examples of the lack of money in state education, it has become the norm for us (as parents) to be tapped up for money to support the school at every opportunity. I thought that's what our taxes were for, but I was obviously mistaken. At the beginning of the year, we're asked for money to buy books, or furnish the classrooms, or replace the one computer in the classroom or various other things. (At Paula's kindergarten, also part of the state education system, all parents are asked at the beginning of the year to donate 10 rolls of toilet paper, 4 of kitchen paper, two bars of soap and a packet of serviettes).

Now that they're 11 (apparently) Bogi's class gets various responsibilities thrust upon them. They have a class president and a treasurer and I don't know, possibly a witchfinder general to boot. Anyway, Bogi got elected (meaning nominated and appointed before she know what was happening) as the treasurer. This means that basically all the kids contribute some money (from their parents obviously) at the beginning of the semester and she takes care of it and has to buy things when the need arises (this as you can imagine is a shit job - you have to account for every bani, you have to chase your classmates up for their contributions, you have to keep very accurate records, and you have to do all the shopping and carrying stuff to school).

Now you may imagine that this is money that gets used for parties or excursions, or some special events for the kids. No, it's money that is seemingly used to top up the various classroom needs that ought to be covered by education funding. At christmas for example, Bogi was charged with going to buy coloured cardboard so the kids could make cards.

This reached its nadir a few weeks ago, when Bogi mentioned that she needed to go out and buy a battery. A single AA battery. I asked why, and she said it was because the clock in the classroom had stopped and needed a new battery. I lost it. Thankfully not at Bogi herself or not in any way that made her think I had lost it at her. But at the system, the school, the teacher, the whole bloody ridiculous, messed up, collapsing, desperate, stupid, backward, crappy system that valued education so little that when the battery in the classroom clock ran out the kids had to replace it. It was an epic rant, which I cannot possibly do justice to here, but if it had been videoed I feel quite sure could have been a YouTube hit.

How the hell is this country going to move forward if there is so little money for education that people are scrapping around to buy paper and batteries and soap to keep their child's school from falling apart?

And rich people pay 16% tax. It's absolutely scandalous.

The Romanian Education System (1)

I have three major things I want to say about the Romanian education system, of which this post is the first. Up until this year I have been only partially aware of some of the problems that exist within the system, because until this year my daughter Bogi was in the first 4 grades. You see there are 3 major and clearly separate bits in the system. Grades 1-4, which are essentially the equivalent to primary school in the UK, where you basically have one teacher (or in some cases, Bogi's included, a team of 2) for more or less every subject with one or two exceptions. Then grades 5-8, in which you start doing more subjects and having specialised teachers. Finally there's grades 9-12, in which you are studying towards your school leaving exams and so on, and preparing (in some cases) for university. [Switching schools at either one - or both - of the two milestone points above is fairly normal, and often unavoidable]

Now, there might be a few problems in grades 1-4, but like primary school it's sort of not desperately important in the grand scheme of things. School at this age, in a sense, is about learning how to read and write and to be part of a class, and a few other basic skills. It seems to work pretty well in my experience.

But now Bogi is in Grade 5, some of the real problems with the Romanian education system have become increasingly apparent. The first of these is this:

Pretty much everything you do in these 4 years garners you a grade. This is a score out of 10. All these marks get tallied up and they count towards the final grade that you end up with at the end of the 8th grade. This grade is extremely important as it basically selects which high school you end up going to. Good grade -> good high school, Low grade -> not such a good high school. There is an exam at the end of the 8th grade which goes towards this too, but the whole system is terrible.

1. It means that kids are under constant pressure from the age of 11 onwards. Pressure comes from teachers, parents, and of course the students themselves. They are constantly being reminded about how important these grades are. Getting a 7 one day, for example, is seen as a disaster
2. The (effective) streaming of kids at the age of 15, is counter to everything I believe about good education practice
3. The whole thing makes school about competition. There are a limited number of places available in the "best" high schools, so not only are you striving to get one of those places, but you are also on some level trying to squeeze out your classmates. (Not consciously I am sure, however)
4. It means that everything is geared towards grades and marks, and not necessarily towards learning stuff
5. All the evidence is pointing towards the idea that grading and testing does not aid learning (in general), and certainly not in the case where everything is graded

Just to add another layer of idiocy to this, not only do you get these marks in the academic subjects but you even get them in things like "gym" (or what we used to call PE). Now, I am fully in favour of kids doing PE and that being part of the curriculum, but grading them on it? It's absolutely mental.

Just to be clear, when I say that these are failings of the Romanian education system, I am not comparing this with other education systems. To my knowledge the UK education system also has major problems these days with an obsession with grades, and standardised tests, and for all I know has a very similar system. I'm just saying that this (as the first of my major complaints) is a huge problem in Romania. [I'm pretty sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen in Finland - the gold standard of global education systems^[1]]

I want to be able to tell my daughter that if she gets a bad mark it doesn't matter. I want her to learn from the experience of turning in something that doesn't meet her own standards (as opposed to the state's). I want her to learn stuff at school, and to be aware that this is the purpose of it. And I want her to have fun, and enjoy her childhood. But the system is telling her something different. The system is making her beat herself up, and cry when she doesn't get a 10, and ask to stay up until 10pm or beyond, or ask me to wake her up at 6 so she can do more homework before she goes to school. And while we try and protect her from the system, and make sure she understands that it is not the most important thing in the world, and while she is bright and pretty good at all her school subjects, so it's not like she's being penalised in terms of her future by the system, I do feel like it is a really really bad way of educating kids.

Footnote (I know, look at me and my mad & fancy HTML skillz)
Some links for stuff on Finland's education system 1 2 3