Portugal's Education System Faces Cuts Francisco Seco for the International Herald Tribune Miguel Reis is a laid-off schoolteacher who opposes education cuts. LISBON - Miguel Reis was one of the vulnerable ones. Like most of the 15,000 or so public school teachers laid off in Portugal over the last two years, he worked on a short-term contract. That made him an easy target when it came to government cost cutting. Six months ago, he lost his job. Angry and unemployed, he joined a protest group - with a name too profane to print - aimed directly at the trio of international lenders that bailed out Portugal's government with about $100 billion two years ago. He now blames them for Portugal's troubles, saying the onerous cuts needed to repay the money threaten to forfeit the welfare of future generations, particularly when it comes to education. "The I.M.F. and the rest of the troika don't care about the well-being of Portuguese people, but only about financial markets and getting their money back," said Mr. Reis, 34, who taught philosophy to high school students. He was speaking about the International Monetary Fund, along with the European Central Bank and the European Commission. In Portugal and other nations in Europe, the battle lines are thickening around just how many more cuts to social benefits people will take, as their economies continue to shrink and social imbalances intensify. In a watershed ruling this month, Portugal's highest court struck down some of the austerity measures included in the government's initial 2013 budget, saying they discriminated against civil servants and retirees who had been singled out for salary and pension reductions. The court ruling and continuing budgetary difficulties have left Portugal's government - once held up as a model of the austerity approach - with a dwindling set of options if it is to balance its books. If the government cannot cut civil servants" benefits, as the court ruled, then it will have to cut deeper in the places where it can. That has placed Portugal's education system, which is already one of the weakest in Europe, squarely on the chopping block, intensifying calls by Mr. Reis and others to draw the line. In recent months hundreds of thousands of Portuguese have taken to the streets in protest to defend their social benefits. But the government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho may have nowhere else to turn. Last week, it announced new spending cuts worth about $1 billion, or 0.5 percent of gross domestic product, as part of a revised 2013 budget. While not specifying where the cuts would come from, Luis Sarmento, the budget secretary, warned that they would "place public services under great pressure." When it comes to education, already last year the government cut spending to about $8.7 billion - back to the level of 2001 - and down from a peak of about $11.2 billion in 2010. Mr. Reis and other teachers argue that a new round of cuts threatens not only the education but also the future employability and competitiveness of an entire generation. About 63 percent of Portugal's adult population has not completed high school. With attention and spending, Portugal managed to reduce a dropout rate that was the worst in the European Union, to about 21 percent in 2011 from nearly 39 percent in 2005, according to a recent report from Eurostat, the European Union's statistics office. "All that austerity is doing is impoverishing and threatening an education system that was finally going in the right direction," Mr. Reis said. Still, an I.M.F. report issued in January concluded that "Portugal's education system remained overstaffed and relatively inefficient by international standards." It suggested "making the education system more flexible and limiting the state's role as a supplier of education services" by eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. Those steps - what the I.M.F. called "a mildly ambitious education sector reform" - set off an uproar among Portuguese teachers. "Our system isn't yet efficient, but we come from a terrible dictatorship and we've clearly been improving recently," said Ana Maria Bettencourt, president of Portugal's national education council. "The I.M.F. documentation is full of errors," she said. The most fundamental mistake is to think that we can somehow cut more the financing of education, when education and professional training are the only way to fight unemployment.