Since 2007, the decentralization of the state network of pre-university education in Romania has been talked about with fervor and on the basis of politically predictable projects. It is true – if it was the main intention – that with Romania’s accession to the European Union, the number of private schools and secondary schools in our country has increased dramatically, but this is far from the level necessary to meet the educational needs of the masses.

The reason lies in the lack of a sufficiently high standard of living of the average population of Romania (chimer middle classurbanized as a suburban project) so that it can afford to purchase educational services for a fee for Romanian minors in formal education. Private pre-university education in Romania knows some exceptionally positive examples in terms of quality and performance, but the quality landscape reproduces private university education, which, unlike developed societies, still leaves much to be desired in terms of value, achievements and general prestige.

In 2014, the district/industry accounting centers, which were considered financial cores, although they were still actually educational institutions under which dozens of schools and gymnasiums were subordinated, were abolished, and educational units began to benefit from their own financing and accounting. Whether this favorable phenomenon succeeds in all regions of development in Romania, except for cities with a population of more than 50,000 inhabitants, remains to be seen in a scientific study with clear data and measurements dedicated specifically to this topic.

Starting in 2018, the payment of salaries to teaching staff, assistants and non-teaching staff was transferred from the competence of city/branch heads to the competence of the Ministry of Education. Whether this phenomenon is called decentralization or not, let alone efficiency, we leave the value judgment to the account of each beneficiary of Romanian public education.

Certainly, talking about fiscal decentralization sounds like an extreme exaggeration. Despite the fact that schools have their own budget and on paper enjoy financial and accounting autonomy, money is received and distributed hierarchically, under strict state control, according to a political decision: either from the Ministry of Education to educational units, where the vast majority of allocated amounts go in the form of a salary, or from the mayor’s office to the same schools, if it is about investments and improvement of the school’s material base.

A question that can be asked, fair and desirable, is: why do municipalities no longer pay the salaries of school staff? What was the reason for the transfer of the budgetary burden from the local factor to the national one, centralized as clearly as possible in Bucharest? Perhaps because more than 90% of Romania’s communes cannot financially survive without financial assistance from the Romanian government, a wise decision was made, given the inability of the local factor to collect enough taxes and fees (poverty, tax evasion, low taxation, misuse of local budgets , including a controversial chain of corruption, etc.), place the responsibility for the salaries of education budget workers on an important institution located in the capital of the country.

There were many situations, some mentioned in the press, others less so, when salaries were either delayed or remained blocked for days on the accounts of the City Hall, which bore its fruits in various forms. As a result, administrative decentralization with money from the center sounds as plausible as the shopping independence of a teenager who squanders his parents’ pocket money. At least a fifteen-year-old is not required to create an updated accounting table in which expenses and income are displayed with an arithmetic breakdown.

And decentralization from the didactic and pedagogical side? Here, too, the landscape is no different from the landscape of an absolutist state, which, we do not guarantee, is also educated. Theoretically, the system was Europeanized. They attended courses paid for by the EU and became wiser. I learned that in Finland, students leave their winter boots at the school entrance and their skis in the locker. We found out that in Denmark, the number of male workers in public nurseries and kindergartens who work with babies is equal to the number of female workers. I have found that in other states, school cafeterias offer healthy meals.

Gentle blond giants with blue eyes comfort Scandinavian children. Digitization has increased administrative control, but it also promotes centralization. Now we no longer make hundreds of reports and situations for the academic year only on paper, when we press a button hard prince, as well as in digital form. We own one double bureaucracy, which can only be wonderful and enormously useful.

What does it matter that there is not a month without two ministerial orders and four new decrees, some from Alfred Jarry’s register? If you want to solve an administrative problem in Romania, and you are the governor, the solution at hand is to issue decrees and decisions, not to solve an intractable (perhaps expressed as collective discontent and individual sulking), an issue that will require more than just functioning already existing laws, but also adequate knowledge of what is happening on the ground, in the classrooms and corridors of Romanian schools. This last situation requires effort, intelligence, know-howreal experts, not mere masters of the pen or despots of ink, endorsed near the edifice of the name of a political party.

Inspections are ministerial repeaters, centers for collecting a huge amount of dry, raw, unprocessed information, which we do not know how to or do not want to use, because we have had parties since school age, and not the state as an administration. , not qualified and honest officials, but straw people, concentrated by family, friendship and other nameless “dangerous connections” around one or another political party. The hybridization between the petty “political commissar” and the bushy legislation, a European import grafted onto the stem of Romanian troubles and troubles, leads nowhere but blocking and educational blindness. The real suffocates the imaginary and kills the symbolic in Romania, sterilizing them intellectually and professionally, prompting some to run a society they ignore as impossible to run with European laws on the table so permissive… Read more at Contributors.ro