Education and knowledge economy

The world is moving inexorably towards a future based on a knowledge economy. Peter Drucker (in his book The Age of Discontinuity) popularized the idea that the most valuable resources will be technological and business know-how, combined with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. With these “ingredients” the highest value-added products are created - the same ones that make Western societies the richest in the world. It is no coincidence that on the back of every iPod, in addition to “Assembled in South Korea”, it says the more important thing - “Designed in California”. Serious profits are for those who are (like the late Steve Jobs) innovators, entrepreneurs, people who can turn knowledge into a profitable product. Those whose work cannot be done by anyone else.

The creation and development of a knowledge economy requires the presence of certain conditions. The World Bank identifies four:

• reasonable institutional and economic structure
• good education system
• developed telecommunications infrastructure
• innovation system

Bulgaria has a great telecommunications network, a relatively reasonable economic and political structure, and for now I will have to put aside one of the pillars - the culture of spreading innovation. I will do so so that I can focus on something extremely important, namely education.

We can all see that the state of Bulgarian education is bad, and we would be right even if we rely only on anecdotal evidence (yes – that much extreme and indicative it can be). The same is confirmed by the 2009 PISA report, where the performance of Bulgarian high school students was compared to that of their peers from around the world (you can read the full report here ). The results are truly deplorable and anyone with any observations about the system will expect even worse in the future.

The competition to attract investment on the world stage is becoming increasingly fierce. It is visible even if one turns on CNN and watches the advertisements. After our country begins to exhaust its other comparative advantages (such as cheap labor), our path to economic development cannot bypass the knowledge economy, and from there education. That is precisely why we will publish articles on this topic as often as possible and specifically about Bulgarian education.

The aforementioned PISA report pays special attention to the extent to which schools are autonomous and accountable to stakeholders in the educational process. Two types of autonomy are defined: in resource allocation and in curriculum development. As can be seen from Graph 1, Bulgaria has a very high score on the resource autonomy index, but the determination of curriculum content is still highly centralized - under the control of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

Index of school autonomy in determining curricula and allocating resources (2 – very autonomous; -1.5 – no autonomy)

Източник: PISA 2009 Results, What Makes a School Successful? Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV)

The study shows that resource autonomy by itself does not always lead to an increase in the quality of education. It is much more effective in combination with the elimination of centralized imposition of curricula, in other words, with the possibility of:

• introduction of flexible assessment systems
• choice of taught subjects
• choice of type of textbooks and teaching aids
• determining the content of the academic disciplines at the discretion of the teachers

The second element, without which the introduction of any autonomy can even lead to a decline in the level of teaching, is accountability. Public disclosure of the results of any organization leads to external pressure to perform better. In this case, accountability will lead to competition between schools, which always stimulates quality improvement. This is also confirmed by the average results of the PISA reading test - schools with a high level of autonomy and accountability received from 3 to 9 points more than all other possible systems (with autonomy but no accountability; with accountability and no autonomy and without both).

The lessons are simple - when the state leaves schools in a competitive environment with all the necessary tools at its disposal (resource and program autonomy), the mechanism of competition will bring the more active and innovative ones to the fore. It will weed out the places where knowledge is truly gained and a worldview is developed from those where mediocrity is encouraged. Bulgarian principals and teachers will be the ones who will have to prove that they can provide world-class education.

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