Photo: Reinis Hofmanis

• Nine out of 10 secondary schools with lowest exam scores in Riga are Russian schools.
• We saw the same education inequality in one city of Riga as we did comparing city and country schools nationwide. 42 percent of the city schools are half-empty or have grades with fewer than 25 students.
• As a result, the education quality suffers. To earn a decent salary, teachers must teach one or more subjects to students of various age groups, which means no time for digging deeper into the subject. Money saved by shutting down or reorganizing schools can be used to pay larger wages and keep most professional teachers.
• Half-empty schools and free public transportation have segregated school because children from privileged families are able to go to schools in the city center. Children from less privileged families have remained in neighborhoods.
• A shortage of professional teachers, particularly Latvian language teachers, hurts education quality in Russian schools, especially in the Soviet-bloc neighborhoods. The country as a whole has a deficit of the Latvian language teachers. Those few who learned the profession do not choose Russian schools because they are not considered prestigious. The salary is low and often those that do teach at Russian schools are considered traitors by their Latvian colleagues and friends.
• Latvian language teachers in Russian schools as well as parents complain about poor learning materials. Instead of teaching a child, for example, how to find a railway station, from the first grades, Russian children learn complex literary words that even ethnic Latvians themselves do not use in their everyday life.

Read the whole investigation in Latvian or Russian

Read more: Latvian education reform: why Russian parents are afraid to talk

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People who regularly cross the Russian border are more vulnerable to the risk of recruitment. As opposed to officials who work with state secrets and have been warned about the methods of foreign intelligence services, the average person is less informed. A friendly question by Russian border guards, such as whether a bribe should be given to anyone on the Latvian side and to whom, may seem innocent but allows the other side to mark potential recruits.

Concluding Re:Baltica’s sixth year in action, we want to tell you what we have done and what we plan to do next year.

27.09. A Country for Old Men – schools in Latvia are shut down and transformed into old folks’ homes
04.10. Past migration experiences dampen Latvia’s appetite to patch looming labour gap
11.10. Will automation bring liveable wages to fast-food restaurant employees?
18.10. Why return of expats is false hope for Latvia’s labour problems
26.10. Why more children wouldn’t solve Latvia’s ageing problem
31.10. Discussion

INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM NEEDS INDEPENDENT FINANCING
If you like our work, support us!

Financed by State Culture Capital Foundation.

Can cute kittens save journalism? Re:Baltica’s Inga Springe reveals it all! Watch her #TEDxRiga 2017 talk.

For the third year in a row Re:Baltica, together with The Centre for Media Studies at SSE Riga, organizes a journalism festival where seven excellent journalists from the Baltics, Ukraine, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom will share their stories.

Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism Re:Baltica and artificial intelligence and automated speech analytics start-up Toneboard have received the Google Digital News Initiative (DNI) Innovation Fund support to create a fact-checking platform.

Why investigative journalism is expensive. Re:Baltica’s education project “Jaunā skola“.