Monday, August 26, 2013

Science and Education for Intelligent Growth

Several news outlets reported last week that Brussels has commented on the Bulgarian project for an operational program titled "Science and Education for Intelligent Growth". The program will cover the period 2014 to 2020. Such operational programs allow the individual EU countries to set internal funding priorities, within the predefined broad EU development goals. This allows countries to tailor funding to their specific conditions and target spending to areas that need it most. If, for example, Bulgaria receives the 1.5 billion it is asking for, the money can be used to improve science infrastructure (for example) by opening grant opportunities within Bulgaria. Without the program funding, projects to improve science infrastructure will be judged at the EU level, where such awards are much more competitive.

Rumors that such a project was under way have been making the rounds since last December, but according to official documents work didn't actually start until March. In any case, the scientific community is quite excited that such a program is being prepared. During prior EU funding periods Bulgaria has not asked for dedicated science funds even though such opportunities did exist. This is generally regarded as failure of previous governments.

Trud, Capital and several smaller news outlets, such as Offnews, reported that an initial version of the proposal has been submitted to Brussels. During the visit of Prime Minister Oresharsky, he received feedback about the proposal. The European Commission (EC) has expressed concerns over the poor coordination between different ministries and overlap between the goals of the science program with those for human resources and competitiveness. There are also concerns whether the Ministry of Education has the administrative capacity to manage such a program.

Trud quotes Vice-Prime Minister Zanaida Zlatanova saying that that there is a readiness to revise the priorities set in the proposal to ensure that there are money for science and education. "The goal of the program is to reform education and to adequately finance science." The European Commission recommended that more attention is given to reforms of the secondary and post-secondary education. She adds: "During the last four years the EC has been pointing out the pressing need for a strategy on how to reform secondary education. It is only logical that such a strategy is part of our priorities for the proposal. Currently, we have no strategy for reforms in higher education. We expect to have one by the end of the year."

The daily Capital criticizes that there is a danger that the program becomes a substitute for the lack of national policy. The quote from Minister Zlatanova suggests exactly that. Concerns over the slowly sinking ship of Bulgarian secondary education did not inspire any recent government to create a strategy to reform it until the promise of European funding appeared on the horizon. The situation is much the same with science. Such hasty strategizing does not bode well for either science or education. Ideally, a healthy strategy should respond to the need for reform, should be used to implement policy within the country, and should cover a long period of time. Such a strategy should NOT be shoehorned to fit into a call for operational programs which only provides money but no legislative pressure and only lasts 6 years - a period too short to see if such a strategy is indeed working.

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