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The Dutch take their constitution seriously. A few articles jump out: article 1, about the principle of equality, and article 23, about freedom of education. Article 23 is so important that professor emeritus Dick Mentink made a career out of it.
Mentink, who taught educational law at Rotterdam's Erasmus university until his retirement, says article 23 is unique in the world. "The Netherlands are the only country in the world where the state is constitutionally bound to finance confessional schools in the same way it finances public schools."
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The Dutch state, says Mentink, "recognises that all parents must have the unlimited freedom to give their children the education they want. Article 23 guarantees that the state cannot force parents to send their kids to a school against their will."
The Nijmegen challenge
The adoption of article 23 in 1917 was seen at the time as a compromise between liberals and confessionals. Then prime minister Pieter Cort van der Linden, a Liberal, felt that the state ought to be only minimally involved in organising education, but that it had a duty to facilitate free competition between the different educational and philosophical views in Dutch society. Article 23 also says the state cannot intervene with the fundamentals of confessional schools; its only role is to finance all schools equally.
In 2009, Dutch society is profoundly changed. Because of immigration, confessional schools - traditionally Catholic or Protestant - have come to include Muslim and even Hinduist schools. Added to the distinction between public and confessional schools is the distinction between 'black' (ethnic minority) and 'white' (native Dutch) schools.
According to some people, it is a perverse effect of article 23 that the freedom of education now allows Dutch parents to cycle across town just to send their kids to that one good - usually white - school. These schools have long waiting lists, while other schools become more and more populated with immigrant children.
Ghettoisation
The city of Nijmegen has recently decided to challenge article 23 in an effort to fight the increasing ghettoisation of its primary school system. Starting next school year, parents in Nijmegen will be allowed to name up to six preferred schools, after which a central committee will determine to which school the child will be admitted.
The committee will use several criteria to determine the choice of school, but the first criterium is that children must be encouraged to go to school in their own neighbourhoods. If parents name faraway schools they decrease the chance that their child will be able to attend the school of their choice, because children living near those schools will be given preference.
The second criterium is to strive for a better balance between disadvantaged and mainstream children. Research shows a ratio of 30 percent disadvantaged children to 70 percent mainstream children is beneficial to both groups: it encourages disadvantaged children to do better without lowering the quality of education in the process.
The right to choose
The two criteria are sometimes at odds with each other because the demographics of the neighbourhoods are not always desirable. In those cases preference is given to sending kids to schools in their own neighbourhoods.
Nijmegen denies that its policy is a violation of the freedom of education principle. Article 23 only guarantees the right to choose a kind of school, based on its denominational or educational fundamentals, the city says. It does not guarantee the right to choose a specific school establishment.
The right-wing liberal party VVD in the Dutch parliament objected to the new policy because it could force parents to send their children to Islamic schools against their will. The city authority says all parents have to do is not to list Islamic schools among their preferred schools.
Nijmegen is not the only local authority in the Netherlands to have challenged article 23. In the town of Tiel, parents have to report to either the public, protestant or catholic school system, after which their children are assigned to a school in their own neighbourhood. Tiel does not use a ratio of disadvantaged to mainstream children, which means that Tiel schools better reflect the demographics of the neighbourhood they're in. Another difference is that Nijmegen assigns children to one specific school; in Tiel, parents can choose between any school of the same denomination within the same neighbourhood.
There has been little protest in Tiel, but the changes in Nijmegen are more controversial. Educational columnist Leo Prick wrote in NRC Handelsblad that the city is "riding roughshod over the fundamental right of parents to send their children to a school of their choice."
Closing achievement gaps
Mentink disagrees. He says article 23 has often been misinterpreted in the past. "Article 23 was never about the consumer's right to choose. It is about the right to organise education", he says. And former prime minister Cort van der Linden's interpretation that "no child shall be forced to attend a school that doesn't respect the religious convictions of its parents" stands unchallenged, says Mentink. "Parents in Nijmegen can still chose the denomination of the school their kids are sent to."
At issue is whether local authorities have the right to spread out pupils in their efforts to fight ghettoisation. Doing so is illegal when it is based on nationality or ethnic background, but it is compulsory when it comes to closing achievement gaps. Article 167a of the law on primary education says local authorities have to consult with the schools in order to prevent segregation and spread out struggling pupils equally.
But is the Tiel or Nijmegen approach applicable to all areas, especially to the big cities? Tiel has only one "very weak" primary school. Amsterdam and Rotterdam have fourteen "very weak" primary schools.
Christian Democrat member of parliament Jan Jacob van Dijk is not opposed to the Nijmegen experiment. But what if all the schools in your neighbourhood are marked as very weak? he asks. "I wonder if one can force parents to send their kids to an obviously underperforming school. The system can only work if the quality of education is guaranteed across the board."
Hispanic students have become more segregated in suburban public schools over the last decade, even while blacks and Asians have become slightly less isolated, according to a new study.
The report by the Pew Hispanic Center challenges the conventional assumption that growing minority populations will create an instant "melting pot" in suburban and other districts. It raises questions about whether local school boards need to actively promote integration.
"Suburbia has changed — suburban schools are getting much more diverse," said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew, a Washington think tank. "But we shouldn't assume that white suburban students as a result are interacting significantly more with nonwhites."
The popularity of charter schools, now promoted by President Barack Obama, is a factor behind some of the segregation in grades K-12, Fry and other experts say. This is because many charter schools have special ethnic themes or offer bilingual courses, and minorities are choosing to enroll in schools with classmates of the same race.
The nation's suburbs added 3.4 million students from 1993 to 2007, representing two-thirds of the growth in public school enrollment. Virtually all the suburban growth — 99 percent — came from the addition of Hispanic, black and Asian students.
But while black and Asian students saw small gains in integration, Hispanic students were increasingly clustered at the same suburban schools. The study found their segregation was particularly evident not only in counties around Chicago, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and in Prince George's, Md., where their population is small compared with blacks and whites, but also in Hispanic hotspots in the Los Angeles, Miami and San Diego metro areas.
Among other findings:
_White students comprised 59 percent of suburban public school enrollment, down from 72 percent in 1993. Hispanics, who now make up 20 percent of enrollment compared with 11 percent in 1993, were the primary driver of overall growth.
_Minority students tended to cluster in schools where blacks, Hispanics and Asians made up the majority of students, rather than being evenly spread among schools.
_Nationally, blacks, Hispanics and Asians saw modest declines overall in segregation since 1993, as minorities began moving away from city districts, which were disproportionately minority.
The latest trends reflect some of the challenges ahead as public school districts educate a K-12 population that is increasingly minority.
David R. Garcia, an assistant professor of education at Arizona State University who has researched charter schools, said the dilemma of resegregation in some communities is complicated. That's because many minorities are choosing to congregate in charter schools because of their emphasis on special needs such as Hispanic students with English-language problems.
The Supreme Court in 2007 rejected the explicit use of race in assigning students to schools, leaving districts scrambling to find new ways to alleviate isolation among racial and ethnic groups.
"We worked hard to have more diversity by bringing together students of different races who go to school together, learn together and become more tolerant as a whole, so there is concern," Garcia said. But policymakers have been loath to intervene when minority and other parents are making the choices, he said.
Nearly half of the children of internally displaced ethnic Kurds in Turkey are unable to attend school and other minorities face institutional discrimination in education, a report said on Monday.
Nurcan Kaya, author of the report by Minority Rights Group International, said a failure to provide equal access to education for children from non-Turkish backgrounds could hamper the country's bid to join the European Union, which has called on Turkey to expand cultural rights for its ethnic minorities.
"The discrepancy between EU standards on education for minorities and those in Turkey will ultimately affect Turkey's efforts to join the EU," Kaya said at a news conference.
"The EU should give this issue greater priority during Turkey's accession process," she said.
Turkey only recognises Greeks, Armenians and Jews as minorities under a treaty that ended World War One and doesn't afford special rights to other ethnic or religious groups, including Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the population, Roma, Syriac Christians, Alevi Muslims and others.
Millions of Kurds over the last three decades have left the countryside in southeast Turkey for urban centres to find work and escape fighting between the army and Kurdish separatists.
Forty-eight percent of these families questioned said they were unable to send their children to school after moving, citing poverty as the main obstacle, according to the London-based NGO's report, which was funded by the EU.
Literacy rates are 73 percent in the mainly Kurdish southeast, compared to 87 percent in the country's more affluent west, the report said. Only 60 percent of women are able to read in the Kurdish region, it also said.
Turkey has eased restrictions on the Kurdish language, which was completely banned until 1991, and language courses are now available at a handful of universities.
Kurdish children, as well as other ethnic groups, who attend state school are unable to study their mother tongue, the report concluded.
Officially recognised minorities operate their own schools and are able to teach some classes in Greek or Armenian, but are given as little as $1 per student annually in financial assistance from the government, said Garo Paylan of the Armenian Foundation Schools at the news conference.
Minority schools are unable to find properly trained teachers and updated textbooks, he said. A Turkish assistant principal employed by the Education Ministry is the main authority at the schools.
Religious education that teaches the Sunni Hanafi creed of Islam remains mandatory in state schools and non-adherents can only opt out of classes if they disclose their faith, which violates Turkey's secular constitution, the report said.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that religion classes in Turkey's state schools violate pluralism in a case brought by an Alevi father.
See also:
about Alevi
