If Vladislav Sekanina, principal of the 5th Elementary School in Cheb, west Bohemia, were to have his way, all of his English teachers would have university degrees in teaching the language. The trouble is he can’t find them, or rather afford them.
The math is simple. “The starting salary of a teacher is between 15,000 Kč [$716] and 16,000 Kč,” Sekanina says. “If I know English well and know how to work with computers, I will go to Prague and earn 50,000 Kč.”
And so he has to make do with what he has: one high school graduate who spent two years in England as an au pair and two career teachers — one of Czech and history; the other used to teach Russian — with a patchwork of requalification courses.
Low pay turns many teachers away from public schools.
Sekanina is not alone in struggling to staff his school with qualified English teachers, those who have university degrees in teaching English.
According to a report released late last year by the Czech Education Inspection, a state monitoring body, only 32 percent of the 193 teachers surveyed in 74 elementary schools around the country held university degrees for teaching English. The rest either were qualified for teaching other subjects or held no teaching degrees at all. Almost 20 percent of teachers didn’t have a university degree of any kind.
At a time when the Czech Republic is becoming increasingly integrated with Western Europe, those are unsettling figures to parents and educators alike, though not all agree that university-educated English teachers are the only way to ensure an adequate level of foreign-language learning.
“Who wouldn’t be concerned?” questions Libor Vacek, the inspection’s spokesman. “If the children are to learn a foreign language well … they need to be taught well. … If there is a lack of qualified teachers, it’s reasonable to believe that the quality of education suffers.” According to Vacek, a comprehensive university education for all elementary-school teachers is the best way to guarantee appropriate teaching skills.
Petr Roupec, a representative of the Education Ministry, counters: “To say that teachers don’t have [university-level] qualification doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to speak English or that they don’t know how to teach English. … So the situation doesn’t need to be as drastic as the figures might suggest.”
Still, things are serious enough — if not in larger urban areas that can draw on a wider pool of candidates, then in the outlying regions, like west Bohemia, and most smaller communities, where teaching English is often left to former Russian teachers and high-school graduates who studied English at school.
“Here, at the elementary-school level, you won’t stumble across a fresh graduate in English teaching, not even by accident,” says Pavel Tomáš, principal of the 6th Elementary School in Cheb.
Up until 1989, Russian was the dominant foreign language taught in Czech schools. But, aside from historic reasons, the main cause of the current situation is financial.
Money matters
Despite steady pay increases in recent years — this year, elementary-school teachers are getting a 5 percent raise — the base salary of a freshly minted teacher still remains between 13,150 and 14,280 Kč and that of a teacher with at least 32 years of teaching experience between 19,810 and 23,280 Kč, according to the Education Ministry.
This is hardly enough to compete with a private sector that is willing to pay large premiums for active English speakers.
And, although school principals can selectively award bonuses that can amount to as much as 100 percent of the teachers’ base salary, few do this for fear of alienating teachers of other subjects.
“All we can offer is job security, the holidays off and that just before retirement [the teacher] will maybe have the salary of a high-school graduate starting his first job in Prague,” Principal Sekanina says. “That’s all.”
Another reason is that teaching elementary-school children, who come with a wide range of learning abilities and sometimes disciplinary problems, is a lot harder than teaching the select group that goes on to high schools. “Children are not sitting with their hands behind their backs, and their twinkling eyes are not always thirsting for the teacher’s knowledge,” Tomáš says.
Some recently graduated teachers who have gone to work for public elementary schools also find the work intellectually dulling. “At the elementary level, I will not use almost any of what I have learnt about American or English literature,” says Tomáš Fišer, a 24-year-old English teacher at the 6th Elementary School in Cheb.
Fišer, who took the job two years ago and is already starting to ponder an exit for the private sector, says he also feels as though his active knowledge of the language is suffering due to little contact with native English speakers, who are practically absent from elementary schools.
Beating the odds
Those are high odds against teaching conditions at elementary schools improving any time soon.
With education already being the second-largest expenditure of the state budget, after social security, it is unlikely to expect teachers’ salaries to rise more quickly in the near future, the Education Ministry’s Roupec says.
And, despite the fact that qualifications of many teachers have improved in recent years, along with their numbers as a result of various retraining programs financed by the government and the European Union, the demand for learning English has been growing just as fast, if not faster.
What would help, many educators agree, is a revision of the strict standards on which teaching qualifications are judged and that threaten to exclude many teachers without university qualifications by Jan. 1, 2010. The standards are currently under review by the Education Ministry.
What might also help is better PR for public schools, Fišer says. “All one hears is that there is no money [to be made] and that children misbehave,” Fišer says. “I can’t complain.”
Still, if Fišer were not pooling his salary with that of his girlfriend, an English teacher at a private-language school, he might view things differently. “If I were alone and had to pay for the apartment, I could hardly make ends meet,” he says.
Source: www.praguepost.com
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