Politically Neutral School Plans

Even as American and British forces struggle to bring order to much of Iraq, an ambitious Bush administration effort is underway to reopen that nation’s battered school system and replace its focus on Saddam Hussein with politically neutral studies.

A Washington-based consulting firm, Creative Associates International, last week landed a $2-million contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development to begin the daunting task of remaking Iraq’s primary and secondary schools and getting more than 4 million students back in class by the fall.

USAID officials said Monday that amount will cover just the initial costs. The total amount of the award is expected to reach as high as $62.6 million for the first year alone, according to USAID and Creative Associates. The contract may be extended for two subsequent years.

On Monday, Robert Gordon, director of operations for Creative Associates, said the 24-year-old firm, which had $50 million in revenue last year, runs USAID-funded education projects in a number of developing countries, including Afghanistan.

The company will work in Iraq with a team of subcontractors, including education specialists from Washington’s American University and two U.S.-based Iraqi exile organizations. Private firms on the team will buy school supplies and equipment for the project and eventually work with Iraq’s Education Ministry to develop curriculum reforms, he said.

In addition to dealing with the reverence for Hussein omnipresent in Iraqi schools, the new education effort also must cope with a curriculum intended to instill extreme nationalism from the earliest ages, said Zainab Suwaij, an Iraqi exile involved in the project.

“In Iraq, every book, every exercise has been related to Saddam Hussein and to what he was doing for the country,” said Suwaij, who heads the American Islamic Congress, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that will help recruit Iraqi teachers for the project. “This will have to be changed.”

But the USAID contract does not directly address some of the more sensitive questions on how to change the curriculum. It says only that such work will be done “in collaboration with” the Iraqi Education Ministry.

It also says that pilot programs will use “politically neutral course content” but does not elaborate on who will determine that or what it means.

Al-Suwaij and others, however, also said that the U.S. must not be heavy-handed as it remakes the curriculum.

“The challenge is going to be to reform the curriculum but avoid the temptation to inject new political content into it, like how great the U.S. is,” said Jerrold D. Green, director of the center for Middle East public policy at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. “I hope that we would not be that crude.”

The education contract, which was open only to limited bidding, does not include the production and delivery of new textbooks, which will be awarded in a later contract, USAID officials said. A separate award also will be made for the physical reconstruction or major rehabilitation of schools, which may have been damaged in this conflict and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Gordon described the company’s task in Iraq as a “very big undertaking.” And, with the collapse of the Iraqi regime, he said, “everything’s happening pretty fast now. We just signed the contract on Friday and we’re trying to move as quickly as possible to get things going.”

The company said that work will be similar to its project in Afghanistan, for which it won a $16.5-million USAID contract in January. There, however, it has printed 10 million textbooks in addition to training teachers and starting a program to cram a full year of studies into six months for over-age students.

Gordon said Creative Associates within a few weeks will send a team of technical experts to Iraq to assess the security situation. Its project director, former UNICEF official Frank Dall, spent the day Monday in a pre-deployment training session run by the Defense Department.

“We initially thought we’d be starting out in Kuwait, then in Basra and working our way up,” Gordon said. “Now it looks like we’ll have a lot more of the country accessible to work with, but we have to be very careful not to send these educators into harm’s way.”

Before the 1991 war, the Iraqi education system, despite its adulation of Hussein and his Baath Party in textbooks and curriculum, was considered among the best in the Arab world, producing a middle class of educated professionals. But that conflict and subsequent U.N. sanctions have caused a significant decline, according to United Nations reports.

School enrollments for primary and secondary students are believed to have dropped since then, from about 75% in 1989 to 53% in the late 1990s. The rates for girls and children living in rural areas are often even lower, U.N. officials have said.

American University will assess the immediate needs of Iraqi schools, Gordon said. That effort will be led by Carole O’Leary, a political scientist with extensive experience developing education programs in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

Other subcontractors include the Iraq Foundation, a Washington-based Iraqi exile organization whose Web site celebrates the fall of the Hussein regime, and the American Manufacturers Export Group, a Texas-based for-profit company that will supply the project with student book bags, pencils, paper and other items.

According to the contract, the work includes providing school supplies and materials and developing programs to help Iraqi children who have been out of school for years. The effort will also train Iraqi teachers and principals and develop a strategy to hire expatriate Iraqi teachers who want to return.

But even as Creative Associates’ leaders celebrated its new role in Iraq, critics were questioning what some said is a growing tendency by the U.S. government to give such rebuilding contracts to private, for-profit companies rather than nonprofit organizations, even though the latter may have more experience running social-services projects in developing countries.

But even before the announcement, a top representative of Save the Children, a Connecticut-based nonprofit aid group, said it had been contacted by Creative Associates and asked if it would help implement the Iraq project.

Rudy von Bernuth, vice president in charge of Save the Children’s crisis programs, said the group would consider the proposal but had misgivings, in general, about working with for-profit firms in Iraq.

“If one believes that the reconstruction of this country would best be achieved under a U.N. mandate, and we do, that isn’t necessarily fostered by setting a whole bunch of contractors in place before the process even begins,” he said.