Is Minister Ben Weyts going too far in his attempts to get a grip on education? ‘He constantly tests the boundaries’

On the night of August 20, 1968, Russian tanks roll into the Czechoslovakian capital Prague. Together with the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, the communist counterpart of NATO, they put an abrupt end to the Prague Spring. The period of openness is over.

Flemish Minister of Education Ben Weyts (N-VA) regularly refers to the Prague Spring to make it clear to critics of his policy what is at stake in the elections on June 9. If we are not careful, all the achievements that he and N-VA have fought so hard for in recent years will be reversed. Then the quality of education deteriorates further.

Mouth-dead

The metaphor is indicative of the role that Weyts ascribes to himself. In his view, Flemish education has been suffering for decades under the yoke of the educational umbrella organizations, which determine too much what is written on the blackboard. The decline in the quality of education is the result of their ‘fun pedagogy’, in which the transfer of knowledge is no longer important.

Weyts wants to avoid that at all costs, but he has incurred suspicions in the process. Especially now that the Flemish government appointed its chief of staff Katrien Bonneux as Inspector General of the Education Inspectorate. She emerged from an external selection procedure together with another candidate. “In the end, the best person got the job,” the cabinet said.

Is that right? Or does the appointment fit into a broader strategy by N-VA to gain control over what is learned in the classroom? When the previous Inspector General Lieven Viaene recently lashed out at Weyts for allegedly silencing the inspection, Weyts responded that the inspection is simply part of his administration. “If he wants to become self-employed, he can open a shop or a barbershop.”

The underlying question is how far a minister can go in directing what inspectors check in schools. Anyone who reads the N-VA program on education will notice a statist tendency: the government finances education, and should therefore also be able to determine what happens in that education. “We are amending Article 24 of the Constitution,” the program says. That is the article that regulates freedom of education.

N-VA wants to formulate this freedom more restrictively, so that it “can no longer be an argument when it is objectively established that the quality of education is under great pressure”.

But where does a minister’s power end and freedom of education begin? N-VA has a completely different view on this than the umbrella organizations. And certainly ‘Guimardstraat’, the headquarters of Catholic Education.

That is why the umbrella organization went to the Constitutional Court in 2021 against the new final objectives in the second and third grade. According to Guimardstraat, these were far too strict and left too little room for personal interpretation. She got her shot home.

Weyts had more success with the introduction of the Flemish central tests. These make it possible to monitor the quality of education. The agreement with the educational world is that schools that fail to meet the standards will receive stronger guidance. Although Weyts would like to go even further. Now there are only tests for Dutch and mathematics. “We also want to add other subjects, such as languages,” says his cabinet.

Testing boundaries

Weyts would also like to reward schools that score well: those who achieve the greatest learning gains among students would be given more freedom in the use of government subsidies. Now these resources are ‘colored’ and may only be spent on certain domains – for example ICT. But will that work? The current compromise with the education field is already quite shaky.

“You feel that Weyts is constantly testing the boundaries of what the government can and may do in education,” says education expert Dirk Van Damme. “In itself it is a strong achievement of N-VA that the decline in the quality of education was put at the top of the political agenda. But when he started, Weyts missed the finer points of education. He had to conclude that the options for intervention were limited.”

According to the Weyts cabinet, we need “a different relationship between government and schools”. The freedom of education belongs to schools, it sounds, and not to powerful umbrella organizations.

“We want more output control, that’s right. But is that so statist? Did you know that Flanders was about the last European region that did not yet have central tests? Our quality of education has been declining for twenty years and that has been glossed over long enough.”