Annual Education Conference Under Way in Pärnu
Teachers, administrators and policymakers are meeting today in Pärnu for an annual conference on education.
The two main themes are teacher pay raises and the reorganization of an inefficient grade school system.
“It is a consensus in the Estonian society that teachers deserve fair, usually higher pays, and that the school system is in dire need of an overhaul, especially at the high school level,” said Kalle Küttis, undersecretary for the Ministry of Education. “The debate surrounding these issues is how to reach these goals.”
Despite calls for united action, both debates could so far be described as a messy blame game involving local governments, the national government, and the schools themselves.
Both national and local government representatives say they don't have the funds to raise teacher salaries.
The other huge dispute, not unrelated to the salaries issue, surrounds efforts to reorganize the grade school system altogether.
Minister of Education Jaak Aaviksoo has said he would like to cut the number of high schools in the country from 220 to 70. That would lead to a more economically efficient and higher quality education, advocates say.
But administrators and local governments hardly want to see their schools get shut down overnight, even in rural areas where institutions are now seriously lacking students. And parents often prefer that their child continues to study closer to home after junior high school, even if it means a lower quality of education and fewer options.
Ott Tammik