A Handful of Educators Testing Private Schools

Down a side street in the busy Yarmouk district, midterm exams are underway at Al Mamoon Scientific Secondary School.

Principal Sabah Masraf unlocks a cabinet, takes out a stack of sealed brown envelopes, slits them with a razor blade, then hands out tests to rows of anxious teenage boys.

Al Mamoon itself is a test. It is among 13 new private schools that opened here in the fall, the first of their kind since Saddam Hussein nationalized the education system three decades ago.

The private schools are a half-measure by Western standards, bound to the core curriculum taught at state schools and answerable to the Ministry of Education. It is too soon to tell whether they will widen the education gap between the rich and poor or deepen sectarian divisions. But many here say they offer choice and hope to people who haven’t had much of either for decades.

“After the fall of the regime, people wanted these kinds of schools,” said Majeed Allaq, the interim government’s director of general education. “This is one of the freedoms people should have.”

Before the 1968 coup by Hussein’s Baath Party, Iraq had many private educational institutions, including secular prep schools, and others operated by Assyrians, Jesuits and the country’s small Jewish community. Nuns oversaw a Baghdad high school for girls called Al Aqeeda, Arabic for “faith.”

Hussein nationalized all schools in 1973, except those for children of diplomats and kindergartens attended by a fraction of Iraq’s children. Under the central government, schools were ordered to conform to certain standards and the content of some classes became politicized.

Though Shiite Muslims compose at least 60% of Iraq’s population, schools taught only a Sunni interpretation of the Koran, reflecting the background of the Baathist elite. Only non-Muslims were exempt from such instruction.

Still, Iraq’s schools -- free to all and equally accessible to girls -- ranked among the best in the Arab world. Literacy rates reached 80%.

That changed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Public schools deteriorated as the country’s economy shriveled under United Nations sanctions. Funds to maintain schools and add new facilities evaporated. In Baghdad high schools, as many as 60 students were packed into a single classroom, with only fans to circulate the baking heat.

Teachers’ salaries fell to about $5 a month. Some made extra money by charging so-called tutoring fees, then giving preferential treatment to students whose parents paid up.

“Teachers had to search for illegal incomes,” said Ali Sabour, an investor in Al Mamoon. “Students were passing courses by money.”

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, officials have focused on revamping public schools, which are attended by 6 million children nationwide.

After Hussein’s ouster, 80% of Iraqi schools did not meet basic sanitary conditions, U.S. education advisors said. More than $200 million in international aid has been budgeted for upgrading school sites, providing new books and retraining teachers.

Certifying private schools is a way to add classrooms without tapping public coffers, Allaq said. After years of surviving on subsidies, “the citizen is realizing that not everything can be provided by the government,” he said.

Private schools also received a boost because some of the American advisors sent to work with Iraq’s transitional government had ties to the U.S. charter school movement and supported more local control of Iraqi schools. The first private start-ups have surfaced in more prosperous parts of Baghdad and the southern city of Basra, where conditions have been more stable.

Most try to keep a low profile because kidnappings have become more common after the 2003 invasion.

Sindbad Primary School in Baghdad’s wealthy Mansour neighborhood doesn’t even have a sign. Four armed guards lurk around its entry and small, enclosed playground.

So far, countrywide there are nine coed private primary schools and four boys-only secondary schools, with a total enrollment of about 2,000.

Tuitions vary widely. Sindbad Primary charges a little more than $1,200 a year, equal to tuition fees in neighboring Jordan. Al Mamoon asks for $300 a year but offers discounts to top students and to families with more than one child enrolled in the school.

“This is not our aim, to be only for the rich people,” said Masraf, the principal at Al Mamoon. “Even the government workers can afford this sum of money.”

Midway through its inaugural year, the school is clearly a work in progress. As students hunched over their exams last month, construction workers toiled over their heads, adding second stories to the school’s two small buildings.

The new space will house labs, one element of a plan to augment the state curriculum with advanced studies in biology, physics and chemistry. Built with U.S. and Jordanian academies in mind, the improved facilities are intended to prepare students for the rigors of foreign universities.

Eighth-grader Haky Wisam, 15, said he liked the school’s whitewashed, air-conditioned classrooms and smaller classes. With 166 students, Al Mamoon limits class size to 25.

“I was in a bad school,” said Haky, who wants to pursue a career in engineering. “The teachers used to take money for tutoring all the time. This is better in everything.”

Large parts of Al Mamoon’s program remain unrealized. The school is still working to add facilities for sports. This year, the students dress casually, many of them in jeans. Next year, they will wear uniforms.

Most of the school’s 23 teachers and administrators retired from state schools. They see in Al Mamoon not only a better income than in public schools, where teachers now earn about $300 a month, but a chance to teach in a more interactive way.

“During Saddam’s time, we were thirsty for liberation and democracy,” Assistant Principal Majeed Hamad Thir said. “He isolated us from the world.”

There is already an undercurrent of debate about how much freedom private schools should have.

There have been grumblings that the Ministry of Education was withholding its stamp of approval from a school proposed by an Assyrian group. Allaq, the director of general education, insisted that was not the case, saying the government had approved schools backed by both Christian and Islamic organizations.

Some Iraqis would prefer private schools to be nonsectarian.

“We don’t want to introduce segregation along sectarian lines,” Thir said.

Allaq said he was not concerned with doubters. The Ministry of Education has set up offices in every province to supervise private schools, and he anticipated that another wave of schools would open in October.

“We’re not afraid,” he said. “We want these schools to succeed.”