A November report by the Bulgarian National Audit Office on Government spending on IT hardware and training in education showed chaos that bordered on the incomprehensible.

In four years, more than 100 million leva had been spent on computer hardware and training of teachers, to little or no measurable effect. Equipment that had been purchased for schools was often found in poor or non-working state, lacking professional system administration or support, with missing software or infrastructure problems.

Even after training, the number of teachers who used computers in their classes – except for those who were paid to teach Informatics – could almost be counted on a single hand.

The training itself was said to focus on little more than general computer skills, instead of the integration of computers into day-to-day classes. Not surprisingly, the report also found that government-provided home internet for teachers was mostly used by the family and children of these teachers.

Measures intended to guarantee quality of education and to assess teachers were largely based on years served and did not include computer literacy as a factor. These same systems turned out to be major obstacles to innovation and improvement of the educational system.

According to at least one media report (in Bulgarian), a young biology teacher who was said to use computers extensively in his classes, would have to spend at least 10 years as a teacher before he would be considered qualified enough to teach his colleagues on how to do the same in their classes.

Some NGOs, whose main activities included staff training, were quick to suggest a list of fixes, from unified budgets that would include system administration, even more IT training of teachers, expenses related to school websites and special multimedia software for children with disabilities, to making computer literacy part of the job description of middle and senior level teachers. Sorely missing in the avalanche of proposed fixes was an overarching vision.

Underpaid and less-than-motivated, Bulgarian teachers have long become a shadow of the mythical будители (bouditeli), the teachers of social and cultural ethics from after the Ottoman oppression, celebrated as national heroes on November 1.

Success in education is not measured by how much money has been sunk into how many pieces of hardware, but by how the lives of young Bulgarians are changed for the better by the education they receive.

Several years ago, a then-seventh-grader explained Bulgarian education to me like this; "you go to school to see your friends, you go to private classes to learn something".
Anyone at the receiving end of that devastating analysis does not deserve to hold on to their miserably paid jobs for a day longer.