Progress in Iraq

The word is slipping out confirming what many of our troops have been saying about the help we have given to the Iraq school system. Sabrina Tavernise of the NY Times is one of the better reporters in Iraq. She was the first to report the red on red action in Anbar province while she was an embed with the Marines. She filed this report on the schools.

Enrollment in Iraqi schools has risen every year since the American invasion, according to Iraqi government figures, reversing more than a decade of declines and offering evidence of increased prosperity for some Iraqis.

Despite the violence that has plagued Iraq since the American occupation began three years ago, its schools have been quietly filling. The number of children enrolled in schools nationwide rose by 7.4 percent from 2002 to 2005, and in middle schools and high schools by 27 percent in that time, according to figures from the Ministry of Education.

The increase, which has greatly outpaced modest population growth during the same period, is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy landscape of bombs and killings that have shattered community life in many areas in western and central Iraq. And it is seen as an important indicator here in a country that used to pride itself on its education system, then saw enrollment and literacy fall during the later years of Saddam Hussein's rule.

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But while life in Baghdad grows more paralyzed — it was the only province in the country where primary school enrollment fell — the figures for the rest of Iraq show that everyday life goes on, particularly in the largely peaceful south, which experienced the biggest jumps, with some regions having above 40 percent enrollment increases since 2002.

"There is a considerable increase in the number of students," said Majid al-Sudanie, an official in the Education Directorate in Najaf. "This province needs more than 400 schools to accommodate the growing number of students."

It is a complex phenomenon. Increases in some places, for example, are being driven by bad news: among the highest increases in secondary and high school enrollment were in provinces that have received families who are fleeing the violence of Baghdad and its dangerous outskirts, including Babylon, with a 44 percent enrollment rise; Najaf, with 35 percent; and Kirkuk, 37 percent.

But the growth is too broad to be explained only by migration patterns. According to American government estimates, Iraq's population grew by about 8 percent to 26 million from 2002 to 2005.

Even in provinces that have experienced population declines, for example, school enrollment is still up. In Anbar — the large desert province in western Iraq, where insurgents regularly battle American soldiers, causing residents to flee — enrollment in primary school is up by 15 percent, and in secondary and high school it is up by 37 percent.

Economics is driving much of the rise, officials say. Public sector employees, who make up almost half the work force in Iraq, according to the Ministry of Planning, used to collect the equivalent of several dollars every month under Mr. Hussein. But since the American invasion, Iraq's oil revenue has been earmarked for salaries instead of wars, and millions of Iraqis — doctors, engineers, teachers, soldiers — began to earn several hundred dollars a month.

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The largest change among Iraq's approximately five million schoolchildren was in secondary schools and high schools, the equivalent of 7th through 12th grade in Iraq, where numbers of enrolled students rose to 1.4 million in 2005 from 1.1 million in 2002.

Primary school enrollment rose to 3.7 million from 3.5 million. The numbers do not include the students in the northern Kurdish region, which is administratively separate.

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Some of the students going back to school are adults. Tavernise has given a fair presentation on this story. I can only remember one story where she got it wrong and the NY Times never corrected it. That was on the bogus migration report that one of the new Iraqi ministers made. Only days before the US spokesman had flatly contradicted what was later said and went into detail on how migration was checked by the coalition. Interestingly she uses some migration data in this story that would appear to be inconsistent with the previous story.