Emese Boda

Integration versus Segregation

In my previous paper I tried to point out some ethno-cultural reasons for the high
dropout rate of Roma students in Hungary. I focused on the conflict between the educational
principles, expectations of School and the traditional values and standards of the Roma.
In this paper I would like to deal with the following question of integrated versus
segregated education, pointing out some of the advantages and disadvantages.
Irregular school attendance by Roma students necessarily leads to poor academic
performance, and a growing academic achievement gap between Roma and non-Roma
pupils. In many cases, teachers tend to waste much of their energy on futile class discipline
instead of real work. Lower - quality teaching deters parents with higher academic demands
and they simply move their children to other schools. This leads to spontaneous segregation,
which has accelerated since 1989, when free school choice was introduced. On the other
hand, another consequence of free school choice was the alternative to enrol in a minority
school if one wished.
There are (only) two Roma minority secondary schools in Hungary. Both were
established in the early ‘90s, as private schools. One, the Gandhi Secondary Grammar School
in Pécs is a boarding school, so the pupils can meet their families only on the weekend. The
other one, Kalyi Jag, where I work as a teacher, is a secondary vocational school in Budapest.
While the former was founded to develop talented Roma children with very poor backgrounds,
Kalyi Jag is a kind of “catch-up”, or “last chance” school for those Roma youths who had
dropped out of or expelled from other mainstream schools, or just felt they were being
discriminated against there. The founders of this school decided on segregated education
because they think integration in the majority society can be possible and acceptable only if
the subjects of integration see their identity not as a cause for their failures but as a sort of
cultural asset. If they are able to respect themselves than they will be able to respect others.
Both schools have been exposed to vehement attacks from the very beginning, coming,
surprisingly, mainly from the Roma side.
 The legitimacy of segregated education, as such, has been debated since the social
reintegration of prople with various disadvantages, the disabled, as well as the Roma, became
a real political issue and took legal shape in various acts.i The aversion to segregated
education is presumably rooted in the negative experiences of the past decades. This is either
rooted in the fact that segregated classes did not bring the expected results, despite the
beneficial efforts of the staff, or because segregated education was only an explicit
institutionalization of discrimination, in favor of some misperceived interests of the non-Roma.
Nevertheless, these bad practices cannot exclude the possibility that a well-functioning
segregated school serves integration more efficiently than a badly-functioning integrated
school.

Before taking a closer look at the arguments against segregated education, I hasten to
point out that any dogmatic Yes or No to the question of integration versus segregation is
mistaken for at least three reasons:

a: Dogmatic declarations will not go into practical details as they simplify matters and present
only binary options; b: They conceive the Roma society as some homogeneous mass whose
integration can be accomplished under a single, universal strategy (on the contrary, the Roma
society is absolutely heterogeneous, even in their attitudes to schooling); c: A dogmatic No
ignores the principle of free will and deprives one of the right to free choice.

Dogmatic considerations usually produce bureaucratic solutions. A grotesque example was

when in 2003, in a Budapest elementary school setting up different level-based ESL groups
was banned because the local authorities regarded it as “segregation” (the lower-level groups
included mainly Roma pupils), and from then on “integrated” groups were formed on the basis
of alphabetical order.ii This action, of course, made foreign language teaching and learning
practically impossible because learners of different skills, motivations, difficulties, and needs
were “integrated” in the same group, by accident. The same school was finally closed a year
later by the local authorities because, as a consequence of spontaneous segregation, 80%-
90% of the students were Roma, which exceeded the official limit, and the students were sent
to local district schools. According to a teacher from this school, the “integration” was not
without any success, though. Some of the Roma pupils really managed to adapt to the
demands of the new, “normal” school, but others did not. Some of them were immediately put
to “private student” status (which means that the student may attend school only on certain
days at certain hours); some of them were expelled as soon as they got over the compulsory
school age, and others were put in separate, mixed-age classes even in the new school.

This kind of integration can be called “cold integration”iii, which means that integrated
education is already implemented without creating the necessary conditions. This kind of
integration may cause more harm than a temporary segregation, because it can lead to
irreversible marginalization. These 100-110 children coming from a tolerant, yet not very
demanding environment were suddenly exposed to the radically different demands of their
new institutions, being left alone to overcome the hardships of reintegration.

A main argument of the educated Roma against separation in education is that the
tolerant and lenient attitude of teachers in segregated schools necessarily leads to inferior
education, dropping demands, weakening school attendance standards, etc. School marks
and certificates given by these schools are not equal with those of “normal” schools. And since
children do not face equal demands and expectations, they will not acquire the marketable
competencies later needed to go on to higher education or to get good jobs; in other words, to
reintegrate.

Another strong counter-argument is that Roma children must get by in the majority
society, and being educated in separate groups does not serve this aim. Separation does not
provide the opportunity of common assessment, of learning about each other, which will
preserve prejudices on both sides.

Both arguments are acceptable for they are concerned with the chances for future
integration, which, as a final goal is evident for the founders of Kalyi Jag, as well. The problem
is that these Roma intellectuals tend to forget about the fact that Kalyi Jag students are not the
ones who could easily cope with the demands of mainstream schools. The apt students
(mostly whose parents are educated or very committed to integration) are already there. The
very reason for the poor school results, failures and the high drop-out rate, in most cases, is
the “coldness” of integration in mainstream schoolsIt is the fact that Roma children are
exposed to exactly the same demands as non-Roma students, no matter what background
they come from.
 Segregated schools should start with helping Roma pupils to catch up on the basic
social and learning competencies. In this early phase the “quality “ of education simply cannot
and need not be measured to the level of mainstream education. After a while, though, a
segregated minority school like Kalyi Jag must make its accounting: Have its students become
more competent? Do they now have better chances of finding a job after finishing the school?
If the answer is no, then the school did not complete its task. A school like Kalyi Jag can only
justify its raison d’etre if it can produce results that integrated mainstream schools have not
been able to.

In the case of Kalyi Jag I have already been forming an answer but it should be the
subject of a further paper.
i
Fort the summary of the government’s integration program, see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?
q=cache:kHt9iaas2zYJ:www.romaeducationfund.hu/documents/Short%2520summary_Hun
%2520edu_integr_prog_0603.doc+Short+summary+of+the+Hungarian+
%E2%80%99Educational+Integration/Desegregation+Programme%E2%80%99&cd=1&hl=hu&ct=clnk&gl=hu
ii
Information from a colleague.
iii
Katalin ,Vég (1994) „Cigányútvesztők, elágazások”, in: Farkas Endre, ed., Gyerekcigány, Inter-es, Budapest.