Where does school education in Bulgaria “break”?
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When the latest PISA results were released last December, it sparked a wave of commentary and even prompted the Ministry of Education to announce measures to prevent a repeat of the disastrous ranking. No wonder – the results clearly show that half of the country’s 15-year-old students are functionally illiterate, educational inequalities are very large, and elite schools are not as elite as they think.
Earlier this month, the TIMSS results were released, which received far less attention, perhaps in part because of the more optimistic conclusions they suggest. However, a comparison between the two studies clearly points to the point at which the quality of Bulgarian school education is declining sharply.
TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a standardized international study that aims to compare results in mathematics and science between different education systems and models. It examines two stages in the course of school education – fourth grade (9-10 years old) and eighth grade (13-14 years old) among 59 countries, and data for Bulgaria is available only for fourth graders. Like PISA, the study aims not only to establish comparable levels of knowledge and skills of students, but also to look for the reasons for the differences in them – both in the family environment and parents, and in school conditions and teachers.
The average score of Bulgarian fourth-graders in both mathematics and science is 530 points, which places them in 18th and 17th place respectively among the countries included in the study. Their achievements in mathematics are comparable in Europe to those of students from Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Norway, and in science – to those of Norway, Ireland and Sweden. In other words, in its initial phase, Bulgarian school education ranks among countries that we are used to thinking of as educational leaders, imposing trends in approaches and methods that achieve the highest results in school. It is striking, however, that even at this stage the differences between the results of the best and lagging behind students in Bulgaria are greater than that of most comparable countries – in other words, even at this stage inequality in education is large.
At the same time, in the latest edition of PISA, among 15-year-olds, the results of Bulgarian students are 78 points lower than the OECD average in reading, 63 points lower in mathematics and 70 points lower in science. The average 15-year-old student in Bulgaria is below the functional illiteracy line in mathematics, and the share of illiterates in this subject is 54%. In reading, the share is 53%, in science – 48%. In short – the school education system systematically fails to meet the minimum standards for more than half of students.
Comparing the results of the two studies should be done with the necessary clarification that they apply different methodologies and approaches to assessing students’ knowledge and skills, as well as that they do so at different stages. Nevertheless, the conclusion is more than clear – within five years of school education, Bulgarian students fall from a level comparable to that of European educational leaders to a level comparable to that of countries with a far lower level of economic and social development.
Something is happening in the lower secondary school stage between the fifth and seventh grades, as a result of which the results of Bulgarian students fall far behind those of their European peers. The potential explanations are many – from overly academic material, through the transition to a different structure of the educational process to inappropriate curriculum design and insufficient teaching hours, as well as large differences in the impact of the family environment and resources. It is at this stage, however, that the inequality between leading educational institutions and the rest increases enormously – while the leaders maintain their high level, the weak schools fall behind with each passing year.
The main direction for the reform of school education also becomes clear – obviously, changes and resources should be directed to the lower secondary stage of school education. Focus should be placed on the fundamental disciplines – mathematics, reading and language skills, on which the structure of all other studied disciplines rests, in order to prevent general lagging behind. This, of course, is only part of the necessary and urgent educational reform; the remaining measures can be found in the chapter dedicated to human capital in the White Paper of the Institute for Market Economics.
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