Dzeno Association
The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has criticized the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary for allegedly discriminating against Romanies from an early age by sending many of them to special schools for people with learning difficulties. The EU report suggests that this practice is at the root of the government's inability to deal with the integration of Roma into society as such, because wrongful assignment to special education has far reaching negative consequences for future employment opportunities

Some 250,000 Romanies are thought to live in the Czech Republic and many of them say it is impossible to find work. Few have more than primary school education and according to a report commissioned by the EU close to seventy percent of them end up in schools for children with learning disabilities. This is largely because they come from a different language and cultural background which gives them a huge handicap. Under pressure from the European Commission the Czech government has recently undertaken steps to address the problem, introducing special pre-school language classes, Romany councillors and officially committing itself to dissolving "special schools" for children with learning disabilities.

This is definitely one example (probably one of many) when the pressure from the 'bureaucratic' Brussels has been beneficial. The educational mistreatment of Roma children has such a long-established tradition that it is rarely discussed. It is also one of the examples where the purely meritocratic approach to educational attainment breaks down in the face of reality.