INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STUDIES

Education is like an enormous oceanic ship where no one can change the course quickly, even if everyone can see that they are heading for an iceberg. Enough politicians have been burned in Slovakia who have taken command, announced a new course, and started turning the steering wheel, but nothing happened to the ship. I know a few seasoned sailors who have already resignedly declared education unreformable. When you can’t change the ship’s course, hand out lifeboats.

How services are funded affects their effectiveness and quality. Take meals. It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or “merely” mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers. Each of these models brings different incentives and feedback loops.

When people say “innovative improvement”, they immediately think of cars that don’t need to be driven; medicines that cure an incurable disease or vegetables that taste like meat. But an important innovation can also be a relatively unremarkable thing, such as shortening time. For example, to get from point A to point B, or to grow fruit from a plant, or the necessary hospital stay after a surgery.

In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.

Teachers’ salaries are a topic every year. This time, however, it is different. In addition to internal arguments about the state of education, external developments – inflation and the public deficit – also play an important role. We describe how to approach teachers’ pay rises in this context in the new INESS publication, Teachers’ Pay with a Sober Head.

In Slovakia, the risks that private schools can pose to poor children are being debated. In particular, one such critic of private schools from Centre for Educational Analysis writes that “however, several studies show that instead of improving the quality of all schools, the unregulated establishment of private schools can deepen educational inequalities”.

The Slovak education system has a number of problems but the generally low teacher salary is not one of them. Those who claim the opposite refer to an international comparison: the share of teachers’ wages in wages of university-educated people. Even the government reform plan says that this share reaches 88% on average in the EU, while Slovakia scores a little above 70%. This difference is identified as one of the main reasons why there is a necessity for a blanket pay rise for teachers in Slovakia.

When you look closely into the part of the Programme statement of the Slovak government devoted to Education, you will find many well-meant objectives and ambitious measures. The first approach encompasses optimization of the network of schools, opening the textbook market, unification and equalization of financing, de-bureaucratization, or simplification of rules guiding establishment of primary schools.

There were over 400,000 distrains recorded in Slovakia in 2017. New websites and organizations have emerged to help people in debt. A vast majority of people do not know how much taxes they pay or how much public services cost.