Jumping off a Sinking Ship

Kyrgyzstan’s native-language schools are dying of neglect, while its Russian schools face a crush of new students.

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BISHKEK and OSH | Among the things Kurmanbek Bakiev left behind when he fled Kyrgyzstan last month, alongside an angry populace and empty state coffers, was an education system starved of investment and expertise. Once buoyed by the Soviet emphasis on education, the country’s schools now turn out students who score abysmally on international assessments.

Experts say this education catastrophe is largely a result of an authoritarian regime uninterested in the abilities of its citizens.

In the meantime, desperate parents have been moving their children from declining Kyrgyz- and Uzbek-language schools to slightly-better-equipped Russian ones. As a result, demand for Russian-language education has grown so much that schools can barely cope.

“My parents want me to go to a Russian school,” said Guljamal Sagynaly-kyzy, a tall, thin 11^th-grader at a Bishkek secondary school. “They say that studying at a Russian school will help me in the future. I don’t know what they mean. Time will tell.”

Natalya Charishdalidi, director of curriculum development at Sagnyaly-kyzy’s school, said that although most of the school’s children are ethnic Kyrgyz, there was not enough demand this year for classes taught in the Kyrgyz language. “In our school, there are 877 students, and ethnic Russians are the minority, but we teach in Russian,” she said.

Local experts say a similar situation prevails in the south, where about 22,000 Russians live, compared with about 400,000 in northern Kyrgyzstan. This country of 5.4 million also has a large Uzbek minority, who make up about 14 percent of the population. Russians make up about 12 percent.

“There is a definite trend where the number of children at Russian schools is increasing,” said Raisa Toibolotova, director of primary and secondary education in the Education Ministry. “There are many overcrowded schools. Every year, 5,000 to 6,000 children start attending Russian schools.”   

In 2006, 1.1 million children attended school in Kyrgyzstan, according to state statistics. About 63 percent of students are taught in the Kyrgyz language, 24 percent in Russian, and 13 percent in Uzbek, according to the Education Ministry.

Toibolotova said that even many children who attend Kyrgyz primary schools switch to Russian secondary schools when the time comes. She said textbooks in Kyrgyz often did not make the grade.

“We’re a young country, and I wouldn’t say our textbooks are bad, but we’re still not satisfied with their quality,” Toibolotova said.

Toibolotova said parents send their children to Russian schools with an eye to their someday living, working, or studying in Russia. Official and unofficial statistics suggest that nearly all emigrants from Kyrgyzstan head to Russia, with a smaller percentage going to neighboring Kazakhstan.

But Gulchekhra Saidova, a 30-year-old teacher and ethnic Uzbek from Osh, the country’s southern capital, who sends her daughter to a Russian school, says migration is not the key issue. “The main reason why parents take their children to Russian schools is that they offer a better education than Uzbek and Kyrgyz schools,” she said.

According to the UN’s 2009 progress report on the Millennium Development Goals in Kyrgyzstan, “secondary schools face serious difficulties in delivering educational services of appropriate quality.”

“Since Kyrgyzstan obtained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the quality of services provided by secondary schools has been declining,” said Munojat Tashbaeva, a sociologist in southern Kyrgyzstan. “The situation is most alarming at Uzbek- and Kyrgyz-language schools. Services are better at Russian schools, which attract more and more parents seeking better education for their children.”  

The overall competence of students, according to the Education Ministry, is low. In 2005, 45 percent could not pass a nationwide literacy test and 41 percent failed the test in mathematics.  

In the country’s education development strategy for 2007 to 2010, education officials linked the declining achievement to a shortage of quality teachers, textbooks, manuals, and teaching materials, insufficient funding, and poor management.

“The quality of education in Kyrgyzstan is declining,” said Duishon Shamatov, an international education researcher at the University of Central Asia. He cited results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, a triennial project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that measures 15-year-olds’ reading, math, and science skills. In its first time participating, Kyrgyzstan scored last in all three areas among the 57 countries surveyed.

These are the fruits of intentional neglect, some critics of the former administration say. In 1990, as part of the Soviet Union, the country spent 7.6 percent of its GDP on education, compared with 4.7 percent in 2005, according to the Education Ministry. In 2007 the figure had edged up to nearly 5.3 percent, according to UNESCO, although a member of parliament recently put it lower in an interview with a local press agency.

Only 39.4 percent of Kyrgyz schools have textbooks, according to Guljigit Sooronkulov, director of textbook development for the Education Ministry, in an interview with local media last year.

For the last several years, Kyrgyzstan has been short of 3,000 to 3,600 teachers, for which Bakiev blamed low salaries. The profession has been unable to attract young people in significant numbers: 65 percent of teachers in Kyrgyzstan are older than 45, and 11 percent are over 60.

“The interest of the ruling elite of this country in the quality of education is directly connected with the level of democracy and authoritarianism of the regime,” Alexander Knyazev, director of the Bishkek branch of the CIS Institute think tank and a history professor at Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University, said. “If the regime is democratic and wants its people to be socially and publicly active, it tries to give them a good education.”

Likewise, Jyldyz Aknazarova, an economics professor and an expert on international education at Osh State University, said, “The poor quality of education in this country leads to a degradation of the society and destabilization of the economy as well as the democratic sector. Economic and social progress takes a good education.”

In February 2009, a parliamentary committee acknowledged that improving education must be a priority for the country.

Amid this dismal picture, students from Russian-language schools did better than those from Kyrgyz- and Uzbek-language schools on the national test for university entrants for 2009. The growing appeal of Russian schools, however, has created problems of its own.

Alexander Yazov, principal of the prestigious Russian language Olympus secondary school in Osh, said the demand for places there is so great that he often admits more students than the public school can accommodate.

“In every class, we have about five to eight children more than we should. For example, we should have approximately 30 children in one class. In reality we have 35 to 38 pupils,” the principal said. “We don’t have enough teachers, and most of our teachers … are over 50. Young people don’t want to work at schools. They say salaries are too low,” Yazov said, although he added that about 40 percent of students there consistently get above average to excellent grades.  

“There are about 10 elite [Russian] schools in the capital where everything is fine,” said Vitaliy Skrinnik, the first secretary at the Russian Embassy in Bishkek. “[Elsewhere] there is a lack of teachers, and I know one village where the Russian language is taught by the physical education teacher, who doesn’t speak Russian well, or even Kyrgyz. What can he teach children?”

The teacher shortage mirrors a lack of textbooks. “Though annually Russia provides 40,000 to 70,000 textbooks for Russian schools, only 60 percent of the schools have enough,” Skrinnik said.  

Charishdalidi, the Russian-language school curriculum specialist, said her school has taken to copying textbooks. “Textbooks published in Russia are expensive, and the [Kyrgyz] authorities don’t allocate enough money for books.”