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National law and policies on fee or for free – Georgia

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

The government of Georgia claimed in its PRSP, in June 2003, that primary education had already been universalized. This is not confirmed in internationally comparable statistics which place the enrolments in primary school for 2003 at 89%, while school attendance and completion are likely to be even lower. The subsequent transition of governance through the ‘rose revolution’  raised expectations that governmental performance would substantially improve and that government’s self-assessments would come closer to reality.

Also, corruption-free public services constituted an important popular demand at the time of the ‘rose revolution’, including in education. One facet of previous governmental policy made corruption in education inevitable because teachers’ salaries had been set below the official poverty line. In 1995, the average teacher’s salary of $10 per month was insufficient to cover the cost of public transportation to and from work.  The consequences were detrimental and affected all public education.

In particular, informal charges in the form of ‘private tuition’ emerged so as to supplement inadequate teachers’ salaries. The Committee on the Rights of the Child was concerned in 2000 that “low wages have forced teachers to offer private tuition, creating a two-tier system of education”. Other forms of corruption proliferated, such as the sale and purchase of school places, exam results and grades. In its reports under human rights treaties, the government admitted that such “an informal system of payments” has transferred the financial responsibility for education to “Georgian households [which] fund much of the educational institutions”.

Formal legal guarantees of free education continued unchanged but the abyss between them and governmental policy broadened. The government allowed schools to charge tuition and other fees as well as to collect funds from parents as ‘additional expenses’ or ‘voluntary contributions.’ NGOs reported how these charges were levied in practice:

Teachers inform pupils of the necessity for additional payments for the needs of the school. There are always reasons for additional payments: school and class funds, new school inventory, etc. The fees are legal to a certain extent. Parents are requested to pay for additional expenses. Schools also receive voluntary contributions and they have a right to organize fund-raising events. Unfortunately, children very often participate in the collection of the fees.

Although the law mandates the first eight years of schooling to be free, for-fee education was formally introduced: “Fee-paying instruction and other activities are permitted at State- run educational institutions; the profits are at the disposal of the respective institutions'  administrations”. The permission to levy charges was a likely government’s response to its inadequate funding of public schools. The reasons for Georgia’s “chronically under-funded education” were, according to Neil MacFarlane, that “the Georgian state started weak and was further damaged by two de facto secessions and a civil war”. He has added that Georgia was “deeply dependent on western assistance,” much of which was wasted through corruption. As a consequence, formal and informal payments cover almost the entire cost of education. How much and how fast the post-2003 government will be willing and able to change the policy of public funding and thereby improve educational performance is an open question.