Enough time has passed to assess the performance of Dolores Cristina as Minister of Education. She enjoys very favourable media coverage as she is also the minister responsible for our state broadcaster PBS, which is the government’s mouthpiece and pushes the PN agenda hand in hand with the PN media, The Times and The Independent’s Sunday and daily newspapers. Minister Cristina never loses an opportunity to promote what she says she is doing to change and improve our education system.
But she runs education like 19th century minister Grigory Potyomkin, who created fake villages by having hollow facades of houses built to impress Empress Catherine II’s ambassadors, and fool them into believing that Russia was surging ahead and reaching new heights of civilization. Some historians do not agree that Minister Potyomkin indulged in this politics of deception, and accuse his opponents of spreading false malicious rumours against him. I am sure that I can also be accused of judging her too harshly and unfairly if I compare Minister Cristina to Minister Potyomkin. Anyway politically ‘Potemkin village’ has come to mean “any hollow or false construct, physical or figurative, meant to hide an undesirable or potentially damaging situation”.
While I have no doubt that we have many good people in our schools and colleges, directorates, MCAST, Institute for Tourism Studies and University who are doing their best for our students, we have also serious problems and shortcomings that are not being addressed. Cristina cannot address these problems simply because she is creating them by running education like a personal fiefdom. She has created a cabal network of individuals that are chosen primarily for their loyalty to her. To form part of these secret centres of power, it is not enough to be Nationalist, as persons close to former ministers Louis Galea and John Dalli have found out: you have to be a crony of Cristina’s.
Over the past two years, Cristina’s way of doing things is causing serious problems for education. Much more needs to be done to enable more children and young people to succeed. Much of what is being done needs to be done differently. Cristina has staffed her secretariat with people who are not competent in educational matters, yet they meddle in the sector and micro-manage it. Concentrating so much power in the hands of a few is harming our education system.
Over the past two years Cristina has been busy reversing a trend started by Minister Michael Falzon in the mid-90s, intensified by me between 1996 and 1998 and continued ever since by Minister Louis Galea. In fact, the setting up of the college system was meant to devolve more power to schools and clusters of schools networked together to put them in charge of their own affairs. The role of the Ministry and Directorates was meant to change: strategic direction by the ministry, support and quality assurance by the two directorates, allowing schools and colleges to manage themselves and take major decisions directly.
In most cases this is not what is happening. In the last two years the ministry has clawed back the most important part of the decision making and implementation process. The secretarial cabal of the minister dominates this process. Instead of an open system of full collaboration between all those involved in education at various levels and in a wide range of roles, in schools and beyond them, Cristina has introduced a very traditional governance style where a few command and control the rest.
This top-down and authoritarian way of running things is hidden like Potemkin villages behind a hollow façade of the rhetoric of consultation, dialogue and participation. But where it matters our education system has been dragged back to the past, where the ministry controls and commands the directorates, and in turn these dictate to the college principals, who in turn are expected to tell the heads what to do. This way of doing things is disempowering thousands of educators.
The energy, enthusiasm, sense of initiative and commitment of many educators who can make a difference to thousands of children and young people are being suffocated. We have many capable and dedicated people in our schools and directorates at every level who do all they can to give a better educational service to our students and they can do much more but they are being held back by the few in the cabals on top appointed by the minister.
Important policy decisions are taken in secret by these cabals, creating an animal farm where some animals are more equal than others. Those who do not belong to these cabals are given fewer resources to work with, they are kept out of decision making and so thousands of students and teachers are being deprived of the necessary conditions to create much better education opportunities.
We need a totally different way of doing things. We need the active involvement of all those engaged, in some way or another, in education. Our educators, administrators and other stakeholders in education need to be brought together and given all the space to create an educational experience that our students deserve and need to be able to thrive in the 21st century.
Cristina’s way of doing things has damaged the working relationship that had been built between the directorates and the Faculty of Education. Relations with the Malta Union of Teachers are also very poor; and the National Commission for Higher Education is at a loss and some of its best people have left it, the Institute for Tourism Studies, the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology and the University are being kept in the dark about what is in store for them in the Higher Education Act that should have been discussed in parliament last June. The Minister’s top-down approach, and her decision to trust only a handful of loyal persons, are choking the whole system and many steps that needed to be taken in the last two years have not been taken.
To make matters worse, in the recent tiny cabinet reshuffle the Ministry of Education has been joined at the hip with the Ministry for Social Affairs. Cristina has not been capable of showing any strategic leadership in education in the last two years. She has lacked vision and is very slow to decide. Things are going to get worse in education now that she has returned to her real and first love: social policy, her ministerial comfort zone.
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