Session Information
23 SES 12D, Minority Education
Symposium
Contribution
The educational situation of the Roma in Europe is worrisome: Roma tend to have lower levels of education and higher drop-out rates than non-Roma. While a significant amount of financial resources have been allocated to this matter in the past years, the impact of related programmes has not been satisfactory. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the causes of ineffectiveness in this field. To conceptualize the research problem, the authors use McCrudden’s (2005) categorization of the understandings of social equality, and Fraser’s (2000) theoretical framework on the differences between redistribution and recognition goals of social policies. The paper presents a case study on the current educational policy measures and frameworks targeting the Roma in Hungary. The first part analyses the relationship between policy instruments and conceptualizations for the Roma on a general level, focusing on the question of how explicit targeting can be operationalized. The second part assesses key programmes from the aspect of targeting (two “honours programmes” aimed at assisting high-achieving Romani students, and two “opportunity levelling programmes” aiming to abolish educational barriers of Romani children/ youngsters). The assessment is based on programme documentations (calls, regulations, reports), as well as expert interviews. The authors argue that in the Hungarian context, due to direct and structural/indirect forms of discrimination, addressing only regional inequalities and poverty is unlikely to be effective. Thus, explicit targeting, either “exclusive” or “non-exclusive”, needs to be applied. However, both the existing “explicit and exclusive” and “explicit but non-exclusive” policies are theoretically confused: there is no clear agenda on who is targeted and what the actual goals are. We suggest that good practice should follow clearly formulated redistributive goals, while taking into consideration cultural sensitivities and developing separate programmes and frameworks with the goal of ‘recognition’.
References
Balogh, L. (2012). Minority Cultural Rights or an Excuse for Segregation? Roma Minority Education in Hungary. In Education Policy and Equal Education Opportunities. ed. Daniel Pop. New York: OSI. Chopin, I., Farkas, L. & Germaine, C. (2014). Ethnic Origin and Disability Data Collection in Europe: Measuring Inequality – Combating Discrimination. Budapest: OSI. Fraser, N. (2000). Rethinking Recognition, New Left Review (3), 107–120. Balázs, M. & Pap, A. L. (2009). Should ethnic data be standardized? Different situations of processing ethnic data. In: Privacy protection and Minority Rights. ed. Máté Dániel Szabó. Budapest: EKINT. McCrudden, C. (2005). „Thinking about the Discrimination Directives.” European Anti-Discrimination Law Review 18(1), 17–23. Messing, Vera, Bálint Ábel Bereményi. 2016. Is ethnicity a meaningful category of employment policies for Roma? A comparative case study of Hungary and Spain. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1213402 Open Society Institute (2010). No Data – No Progress. Country Findings: Data Collection in Countries Participating in the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005–2015. Budapest: OSI. Pap, A. L. (2008). Human rights and ethnic data collection in Hungary. Human Rights Review 9(1), 109–122.
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