Since 1994, Yanka Takeva has been the chairman of the Union of Bulgarian Teachers (SBU), and with her long career in the post she overshadowed even the “irreplaceable” until recently chairman of the Bulgarian Teachers’ Union – Borislav Mihailov.
Although Takeva’s successes in the field of Bulgarian education are similar to the successes of Bulgarian football in the last 15 years.
For 30 years, the “head” of the SBU has been able to effectively maintain backward, non-working and rotten manifestations that visibly poison the Bulgarian education through the instrument for quality teaching – the teachers.
But somehow she always gets away with it.
If public responsibility is sought for the poor matriculation results, for the poor PISA scores, for the apathy that has settled in the entire education system, the last person people will turn to for an explanation is the Union of Bulgarian Teachers and in particular its president Yanka Takeva .
Teachers come and go, hanging in the towel on the dismal performance of their graduates, ministers of education change more often than springtime, generations of children come and go from school, and Yanka Takeva remains steadfast.
Although education owes part of the mess it is in to its resistance to successful reforms.
Let’s start from the back forward.
At the last conference dedicated to improving quality and a positive school environment, Takeva again took up the old song that teaching in the country is top-notch, teachers are prosperous and if any changes are to be introduced, they should be in terms of motivation and artificial intelligence.
We should not be surprised that the head of the SBU is wearing rose-colored glasses after she said some time ago that our PISA results “are not that bad”.
But the statement that the social welfare of Bulgarian teachers does not fall below that of their colleagues in Western Europe marked new levels of proverbial escapism.
If only we lived in Takeva’s imagination, where education in Bulgaria smells of violets and strawberry breath, but, unfortunately, we live in reality, where independent data show otherwise about the well-being of teachers in our country.
In fact, they show that the teachers are not feeling well at all. Even the opposite – they burn with impatience to shake off the burden of educators.
This is what the World Bank data for 2023 says, according to which 90% of new teachers leave the system within 3 years of starting their career.
90%! A murderous, absurd number, a clear signal that teaching conditions are not predisposing at all, no matter what is said in educational forums and symposiums.
On the face of it, it seems that the majority of appointed teachers are not prepared for the environment in which they have to practice their profession. And the increase in wages does not act as an incentive to stop them from spitting on their heels.
Normal. When the situation eats away at their nerves on a daily basis, and nowhere in the textbooks on teaching theory does it say how the tension is played out in the classroom, it is far easier for the young staff to pack their bags and leave the training to their more hardened colleagues.
Bulgarian teachers need, first of all, stable training, which starts from the student years. How? With enhanced field practices so that they gain a clearer idea of the conditions in which they will have to work.
Also, it would be a good idea to put together mentoring programs to introduce new entrants to the process, rather than throwing new teachers right into the deep end from day one and leaving them to deal with the stress on their own.
With Yanka Takeva, however, the painful problem and unflattering numbers are not affected.
In the last year, the chairperson of SBU has mainly acted as a living chain against the proposal for third-party certification of teachers.
Let me explain briefly. In the current procedure, the teachers personally evaluate their work with the children. There is no other meter. Neither matriculation results nor PISA have any weight in separating good from bad school practices.
The introduction of independent certification has been talked about for a long time, but every time the proposal reaches public discussion, Takeva and her related unions throw themselves like militia against the idea.
They do not give a word to say about evaluating the teaching methods, even less about removing teachers, where a large part of the children have not learned a button. Let’s put it bluntly – teachers who are only on salary and imagine that their inaction and indolence is not harming anyone.
The SBU’s last argument against certification was that it would represent “redundant paperwork”, which is ridiculous given the endless administrative checklists that teachers use to validate their work in front of institutions.
And in which the check is fictitious, such as: is the document filled in with a blue chemical and is the seal in the right place.
Of everything Yanka Takeva has said during the decades in which she has been at the head of SBU, I agree with only one thing – teachers deserve a decent salary.
I can even go further: teachers deserve salaries of BGN 2,000-3,000 each, preferences on credit terms, discounts. Teachers deserve to be made into an elite class.
But not before we have removed the weeds from the industry and before there is a strainer to separate the good from the bad.
Until then, there is no use for Yanka Takeva to act as if everything is fine, education flows smoothly, and teachers flourish and prosper under her union protection. This is not true and is a serious obstacle to the progress of education.
No one benefits from cherry-picking practices for which God only knows why they continue to be a factor, and I don’t know of anyone in history who’s gone as far as burying their heads in the sand and pretending their giant-sized problems don’t really exist.
