Schools a bright spot in Iraq

By James Rupert
Newsday

MOISES SAMAN / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Students visit last month at Al-Ziba Primary School in the Al-Hurriya district of Baghdad. The school got a paint job and more money to pay teachers. "We have a chance," says school director Talib Gharibawi.

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There are gunshots, occasional bombings and, for many, neighbors to mourn. The musicians killed last month in a U.S. airstrike on a reported wedding party near the Syrian border came from Hurriya.

But amid the broken hopes for rebuilding under U.S. rule, parents, teachers and students said the schools have been a relative success.

Batul Talib Gharibawi, director of Al-Ziba Primary School, cited as proof the fact that, during the year, three of her teachers became engaged. Teachers' pay — in recent years as little as $3 a month — has been boosted to as much as $200, she said. And it comes on time.

"Now lots of people want to marry teachers because they're getting good salaries," she said.

Before the war, the children's parents paid for the school's supplies, Gharibawi said. But with U.S. funds, Iraq's Education Ministry has been able to finance school operations centrally for the first time in years.

In arguments over how the occupation is going, U.S. officials have said that many improvements tend to be overlooked amid the bad and bloody daily news. And they stress the importance of the freedom that has come with the end of Saddam Hussein's tyranny.

According to many Iraqis and scholars, the area of life where that relative optimism is best seen may be education. Saddam's ouster may not have made it easier to generate electricity or establish law and order, but it has freed teachers and students in the classrooms.

"I am optimistic," said Gharibawi, "not because education now is easy or because we have the things we need," but "simply because we have a chance."

Saddam's regime "pretended to support the schools, but really it was the enemy of education, because education was a threat to it," she said. "Saddam's regime needed uneducated people to support it."

Still, in Iraq even a success story is heavily qualified. At the end of the first school year following Saddam's overthrow, schools are functioning minimally. Al-Ziba got a paint job, but remains overcrowded and short of even basic equipment such as desks and notebooks.
 
Iraqis and Americans say the revival of schools has been hampered because U.S. authorities planned for it too little, too late. And, like other big contracts given to politically well-connected U.S. firms, the one to rebuild schools has raised controversy.

Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development gave the Washington, D.C., firm Creative Associates International Inc., a $63 million contract to help revive schools. Within months, Congress began an investigation after it emerged that USAID had let the firm in on early discussions that helped to shape the contract.

Creative Associates and USAID began writing a new curriculum for Iraqi schools — an effort that USAID administrator Andrew Natsios said in October was being led by Iraq's Education Ministry.

Ahmed al-Rahim, an Iraqi-American scholar on the project, said, "The initial idea was that we would write a curriculum and bring it into Iraq." For Iraqis, he said, "Something packaged in America was not acceptable, and it was scrapped."

The Americans who had meant to jump-start a renewal of education instead "had to spend a lot of time learning things on the ground," he said. "This is indicative of a lot of the U.S. experience" in trying to rebuild postwar Iraq.

At Al-Ziba school, Rawan Muhammad Saddoun, 11, said she and her friends ended the academic year still grateful for the U.S. ouster of Saddam. Under his rule, "we couldn't speak of anything being wrong with the country," she said.

But the violence often obliterates even the aura of progress that surrounds a functioning school. In Rawan's class of about 30 children, three have had close relatives killed in the violence or imprisoned by U.S. troops. In April, more than 100 children died in fighting in the cities of Basra and Fallujah — at least 40 of them on their way to or from school, according to UNICEF.