Navalny’s Circles: Education (full version)

Friends, thank you all very much for

coming. For me and for the members of my

team, it is very important to maintain an ongoing

dialogue with professional communities

so that we can develop our

program, improve it, and listen to

critical remarks. Today

we wanted to talk with you about

education, about the problems that

concern Muscovites, and about the problems

that concern teachers. In other words, I would

like to discuss today the issue

of schools and the role of parent

committees. I know there are mixed

opinions on this, as well as the problems

that worry teachers, in particular

the monstrous bureaucratization, when teachers

have to spend entire days filling out

forms and instructions, and often do not

have enough time to teach

children because they are occupied with this

formalism. So I suggest that now

we simply discuss all these things in a friendly, informal

discussion. Well, what you said

about

this, apparently, suggests some kind of revival

of Soviet traditions, because I remember

sometime in the early 1980s

reading in the newspaper *Izvestia* (a major Soviet/Russian newspaper) a piece by a

teacher who supposedly wrote it while sitting on a

suburban train, and the piece was titled, “When

Are We Supposed to Teach?” And it was precisely about

the need to fill out endless

paperwork. I fondly remember

those years when it was possible to work according to

an individual program, and not a single official interfered with it.

People say, “the cursed nineties” (a common Russian phrase about the 1990s).

No, I’m not saying that, I’m not saying they were “cursed.”

In terms of salaries, yes, absolutely, but

as for freedom—yes, freedom is more valuable.

That’s right. Right now,

there really is endless, endless

filling out of all this paperwork. Back in the day,

again, in Soviet times, we breathed

a sigh of relief when

lesson-by-lesson planning was abolished and only

thematic planning remained. Now everything is back in full

force—it’s a complete disgrace. I

had to go through it myself with

teacher certification, when it is necessary

to compile this so-called portfolio, and

then I arrive with my so-called

portfolio at the Education Quality Center

and I see a line there of very

anxious elderly women teachers. And this

certification says absolutely nothing

about quality, about what kind of teachers they really are.

In my view, it is the same with the licensing

of schools, when there is simply a huge number

of formal complaints.

Bureaucratization is not even about the number

of officials; bureaucratization lies

in the official’s unchecked power and total

lack of accountability. He can make

any decision, and for none of his

decisions is he held responsible. But his decisions

must be carried out by us, ordinary teachers. That

is what I consider bureaucratization. It is, of course,

a factor that really

gets in teachers’ way: bureaucracy.

What is interesting in this connection

is the following: this

bureaucratization is definitely not needed by parents,

and they often do not even see it.

Teachers do not need it either. It is simply unclear

who it is for at all, or what it is for. But in our country, the official

has become the main figure in

the educational process—not the teacher, not

the student, not the parent, but the official. The official

should be a servant; he should perform certain

technical functions. He should really

not even be noticeable. But this is true everywhere, not

only in education, and yet it turns out that

no. What is more, oddly enough, the official

really creates for himself

completely unnecessary work, because

most of these endless papers

just end up on a shelf and have no significance

for decision-making, let’s say.

I wanted to say that I cannot even

imagine who reads or analyzes

these papers.

If I may, I would note two points.

First, successful international experience, which

Moscow officials themselves often cite

as an example, is the experience of Finland. There was

a very successful education reform carried out there

that allowed

Finland to rise to one of the top places

in all educational rankings. They began

by completely debureaucratizing

their education system. Not only does the

teacher not write these endless

papers, but moreover the teacher does not even

undergo certification. In other words, the free time

that teachers have, which, which

the great thinkers of pedagogy spoke about,

is fully preserved for their self-development

and further growth. That is the first point. The second

point: if you go to the website

of the Moscow Department of Education, this

actually relates to the question of why all

this exists—why all this information

is being collected. There is a section there

called “Official Statistics,” if I

am not mistaken. You open this section

and you are then invited

to choose one of the options for those statistics:

view by general education,

secondary specialized, vocational,

and so on. You open general

education, and a document downloads that

turns out not to be statistics

open

to city residents, but rather a list—a list

of the data that a school must

provide to the Moscow City Department of Education.

There is nothing else there.

You know, this list impressed me so much

that I even downloaded it so I wouldn't be

making empty claims—I’ll quote it for you.

These are the indicators from the sector passport for 2011

—five pages, five whole pages, and

the data here include the presence and number

of boiler houses, counted in units, utility payments,

All right, fine, let that pass—utility

expenses, the price of coal in rubles

per ton—we’ve been using coal for a long time.

So, there are five pages here with supposedly valuable

data. For example, every school is supposed

to provide its average score on the Unified State Exam (EGE, Russia’s standardized school-leaving exam).

Wonderful. That’s necessary. I think everyone

will agree that these are very, very useful

data—even for professionals like us.

Not everyone would agree.

The question is about the EGE as such—but a figure, a figure is needed.

Yes, a figure is needed. I’m not saying that it should be used

to evaluate a school, no.

That’s not the whole point.

But still, a number—well,

all the more so... all right, I understand this is

a debatable issue, fine, excellent, all right—but

the number is being collected, that’s a fact, and

accordingly, one would expect that these data

should be presented somewhere for

the public to review. There is, after all, on the

portal of the Moscow City Department of Education,

a section called “EGE in Moscow,” and within it

a subsection called “Statistics.” You open it

and see that the latest

processed data are for

2010. That is, the EGE that was taken

under Luzhkov (Yury Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow). Yes, excuse me, but the figures

for Sobyanin’s EGE (Sergei Sobyanin, current mayor of Moscow at the time) I am forced to learn from

his election program. I absolutely

agree with you that the website is absolutely not

informative, but in fact all the information

can be obtained from various

other places, if a parent wants to.

The issue is different: the issue is how much

the statistics presented actually help

both parents and teachers, and here I

agree with you that, for example, in my

field—education economics—I

couldn’t get anything from the Moscow Department’s website

except that in

2010 or maybe 2011

spending per student was 67,000 rubles,

and now it is more than

120,000. But there are no mechanisms, no calculation methods,

none of that is there. But perhaps that isn’t

necessary either, on the other hand. It’s just that

right now the issue is especially acute when it comes

to changes in financial mechanisms, and

often to the question of merging educational complexes. I

actually wanted to talk about that, because

the merger process comes up at every

meeting I have with voters. I can

visually identify all the parents

who have school-age children:

when you mention school mergers, they

immediately start shaking. And when I

tried to analyze why my

school—the school my daughter attends—is being merged,

with the neighboring school and kindergarten, maybe

it’s a reasonable decision. But where is the explanation?

Any explanation at all? My wife is on the parent

committee—there is no explanation. The principal

cannot formulate an explanation,

the teachers cannot, the local deputies cannot.

Why is this happening? It’s a purely

Moscow phenomenon; there’s nothing like it anywhere else.

There has been

nothing this mass-scale in major cities

at least among the several

megacities I know well.

The point is that maybe mergers

are not a bad thing, and the Department of Education

refers to the experience of twenty years ago,

when educational complexes were being created—

Yamburg’s complex, Rachevsky’s complex, and

so on. But what is troubling here

is something else. What is troubling is how, in such a

city, one model can be chosen

and treated as if it were the only correct one.

Most likely, there should be

a diversity of different model options.

And here I would like to pick up on both your

words and what Eduard Lvovich was saying, and

it seems to me that this is generally an alarming

trend in modern education. It is

a return. You said twenty years ago, and Eduard

Lvovich said: a Soviet tradition, in the sense

of bureaucratization. Look, in general, for us

the Soviet school has started to be spoken of as

a model. Suddenly a huge number of people

are saying: look, we supposedly had

a great country, great achievements, and all of that

was given to us by the Soviet school. Let’s

recreate the Soviet school, and today everything

will be fine again, and we’ll return to that same

result. And that, that is a serious

mistake, because the Soviet school, precisely

by virtue of its uniformity and its orientation toward

a single educational path for everyone,

uniform textbooks, uniform curricula, cannot

meet the challenges of our time today.

Today is a different time, today there are different

needs. Today a person must

leave school being ready

to choose, ready to learn anew, whereas

no body of knowledge—no knowledge at all—can

last a lifetime; it all changes anyway.

Yes, we change professions

seriously. And therefore this tendency

to return to the Soviet model—which, well, we all

understand perfectly well is visible not only in

schools and not only in Moscow—

and in some sense it is a reflection of broader trends. It

is dangerous precisely from the point of view of the future

of the country’s education system; it drives us into

a dead end that we have already tried

to get out of. I would like to say that in

education it is very important to watch for these

returns to the past. We need to move forward, not

backward. Well, in fact, this too is a return.

formal, because this really is

not a return to the real Soviet school system, but rather

what is being portrayed is a very

idealized image. It was actually quite strong in some respects

I myself started out at a school in a working-class district

where there were 45 pupils in the first grade

then, after completing eight years of school, I moved to

the best school in the city, with completely different

conditions. Yes, that’s true. This is a return to

a myth — that’s a very precise way to put it — and it is

all the more of a dead end, because it

raises a very important problem, because, well,

I work in higher education, so to speak

not in secondary school, but this problem affects me too

as someone who

receives graduates from the general education system

and quite often, with them

people

we have to spend a great deal of effort on

bringing people up to

the required level. But the problem

really is very complex, this whole issue

On the one hand, yes, there should be

freedom of choice, there should be

differentiation in quality, and at the same time

there is a huge problem: how do we

ensure that much-desired equality

of opportunity, so that

a person with abilities — how do we

bring them forward, how do we enable them to realize their

abilities? By the way, you’re wrong to change

it — you speak of the problem of choice and

differentiation by quality

Differentiation should not be by

quality; quality should be high everywhere

Differentiation should be by content

No, you see, objectively quality

will still end up being differentiated

and precisely in order to realize

that equality, perhaps there must be

different educational trajectories

That paradox of the situation is exactly what people are not

thinking about. And Moscow would actually be a very

convenient platform for working this

out — an excellent testing ground

That is, when people said that the more, the more

variety there is, the better

education would be — that was taken very seriously, and now

all of that is collapsing, and in this sense

people always talk about the problems of good schools

and say little about

the problems of struggling schools, and in principle

a great deal of attention needs to be paid to that as well

It is necessary to raise

the quality of poor schools, yes, to a high

level, rather than lowering the quality of good schools

to a more

low one. But mergers are leading us in that direction. Well,

for a struggling school to become a good one,

you cannot simply

mechanically merge it with a good school;

you need some kind of special

rehabilitation programs

to be organized for that. And in general, this is

not a very well-developed area right now, and perhaps

we should start with teacher-training

universities; for this, some

methodological approaches are needed, and money needs to be invested in it

to figure out how to do it

so that in places where drugs are being sold, where, broadly speaking,

criminalization is underway — where it has effectively become a center

of crime — in some schools there is a great deal of this

and they need to be worked with. Well, here I would

like to add that in fact

the current policy of the Department

of Education is in fact aimed precisely

at what you were talking about: equalizing

students’ starting opportunities

and this is reflected in the fact that

these standards were introduced, and the standards were introduced

for everyone — specifically, per-student

funding standards, that is,

and they were set according to the highest benchmark

For upper secondary school, it is more than

120,000 rubles (about $1,300–$1,400 at recent exchange rates), which was not the case three years ago. Three years

ago, as I recall, gymnasium-style

and lyceum-style classes could receive, and schools could receive

as much as five to ten times more

funding than schools in working-class outskirts

Now the Department of Education does not do that

Now funding is in fact

equal for everyone. But on the other hand, this

leveling-out leads to the fact that

equality of choice, we

are largely replacing it with a situation where we

flatten the best performers and do not give

the best a chance to develop. And isn’t this

the real driver behind school mergers?

Because here everything gets replaced by

manipulation of statistics so that

a good school receives more

money: several other schools are attached to it

and formally they end up with

a formally larger amount

of money, because I have heard many times that

the reason for consolidation is that

if we attach everything to a good school,

it will become much richer and everything will be

absolutely wonderful. It’s just that Moscow’s policy

is aimed at

bringing schools together, creating large educational complexes

Whether that is good or bad, time will tell; I am not

prepared to judge, for example

But financial mechanisms are not

the cause of this; rather, it is most likely

some kind of political decision that

is being made, because naturally

a small school requires

additional, increased funding in order

for a child to receive exactly those

opportunities that a child

studying in a school complex has. Yes, if I may add here

as I understand it

the logic of consolidation looks roughly

as follows

If a school is good, then that is

the credit of the school’s management; if a school is

bad, then accordingly that is a failure on their part

of school management: if we

apply the management model of a good school

to a weak school by attaching the weaker one to

a strong one, then supposedly we will thereby

pull that school up. But it seems to me that this logic

is fundamentally flawed, because

it is by no means certain that the principal of a good school

is also a good

crisis manager, an anti-crisis

manager. Yes, in any case there is no

direct causal link between the two.

He may be very good at managing an already

well-established, stable system, but

then he gets a school that has

problems. Besides, yes, I think

my colleagues will support me here: a good school

— and there are not that many of them in Moscow, by the way —

is a very, very delicate kind of

organism, and breaking it by

merging it with another school, even an average one,

is very, very easy. It disrupts

the internal climate, and teachers accordingly

will have to move, including to

other schools. Yes, and most likely

the sick organism will infect the healthy one, and

the healthy one will not survive. I understand

the logic. I understand that under certain

circumstances it may even be

the right approach. Yes, but again, time

will tell. But in my view the risks are too

great, and the likelihood of negative

consequences is higher than the likelihood of positive

ones.

No, there is a very important point here.

This really is case-by-case work.

You need to analyze very carefully what

to do with each specific school. But here we have

something like a campaign, so to speak, a kind of

mass collectivization (a reference to Soviet-era forced consolidation). I was given an example

at one meeting with voters:

they told me about a school to which

they had attached

a technical college there...

and now they are attaching more schools.

Right, right. It is as if, conditionally speaking, we pour

a bucket of noble wine into it and

expect to get something wonderful. Another image: a passenger car is driving,

and next to it a heavy cart-horse is pulling a wagon.

The car moves fast, while the horse moves

slowly. So let us unhitch the horse from the wagon

and hook the wagon up to the car. But then

there is a good driver in the car, so just watch

how it will go — until when, or whether it will move at all.

This is the logic of Putin's regime. I once

read in a book that one expert

spoke with Putin's team back in the early days

and said: why are you proposing complicated

solutions? We need simple ones; we do not understand

complicated ones. Incidentally, the return to

the Soviet school model is one of those simple

solutions.

Here we should also pay attention

to one more aspect. In fact, this kind of

merger is impossible without a decision by

the governing council. Then the question

arises: why are school governing

councils — how independent are they

in making management decisions? Why

do they give their consent to such

a merger? Because in principle

Moscow legislation has created

a certain barrier: a merger

must be voluntary. Why then, as you

say,

is this campaign-style approach happening in every

school? Citizens— wait, this is...

Isn't the question really whether teachers

are very strongly subordinate to the principal?

The governing council is not teachers. It is

parents, parents. Not entirely — there are examples,

there are examples where mergers were fought off,

when active parents were involved.

This can be done; technically it is

quite simple. The problem is that

these councils include only those parents

who already do what the principal

tells them. Any troublemaker is simply

squeezed out. The Department of Education is simply

pursuing a policy of asking

the public how ready they are to take

governance into their own hands.

You know, people are afraid. They are afraid that if they...

What are parents afraid of?

It is perfectly clear: if I make a fuss, they will

treat my child badly. That is

what everyone is afraid of. All the teachers speak

as if with one consolidated opinion:

do it this way. And if you go make a scene,

tomorrow you will have a problem. One must

understand that very well. By the way, I have

a question here

about how teachers' salaries are determined. I

have tried to understand it. There are probably, certainly,

people who definitely

understand how it is calculated, but frankly

it is not a simple system. To what extent is there

here

an element of arbitrariness, or manual control,

on the part of the principal,

who in this way controls

the teachers and turns them into

a consolidated mass with which

no parents' councils can then really

deal? Alexei Ivanych (a familiar form of patronymic), well, we begin the school year

by signing off on

the pay allocation sheet, and in that statement it says

how much I receive for teaching hours,

how much I receive for an extracurricular club, how much I

receive for various credentials or distinctions, and so

on and so forth, and there is a final total amount.

At least that is how it is for us; I do not know

how it is in other schools. To what extent are there

bonuses, discretionary funds — that is the issue,

namely, to what extent there is room

for manipulation. In fact, this model

was introduced not only in Moscow but

across Russia as a whole, and it places

the school principal at the center. In other words, no one...

No one can tell him how, exactly, to do it.

how to formulate the incentive system—this is

set out in the remuneration policy

of the given educational institution, which

I would note that this has not only

drawbacks, but also serious advantages, very serious ones.

Advantages, yes—but again, it all depends on

how the governing board, the school council,

and the trade unions performed, and so

on. Because when the resolution was issued

on the introduction of new pay systems,

No. 583, it stated that the director

of an institution—not only an educational one—

could receive no more than five average

salaries for the institution; now they have reduced

that gap to somewhere around 2 to

2, or somewhere up to 3, but in any case

no one except the school principal can

determine how much this or that

teacher will receive. Now, here you

mentioned trade unions. The problem is that we

hardly have any militant, functioning

trade unions in Russia, including in Moscow.

I don’t know about Moscow, but as for Russia, I don’t

agree with you. There is a small union,

Teacher, a real trade union, because

sorry, the Merkulov/Pерово union

is not a trade union. I disagree with you, it

is not a trade union, because in Moscow there isn’t one.

There is only Teacher. No, there is a trade union,

Teacher—it is a very serious one, but it simply

doesn’t cover, yes, a large

number of teachers. And the main thing is that

the problem is the same: whenever any

social activity by teachers or

parents leads to a situation where

a person comes into conflict with the principal,

they get less money, they get some kind of

problems for themselves, and so on. This is not only

a school problem.

I would like to draw attention to one point

that has been mentioned, and here we will

touch on it indirectly here.

Since terms were mentioned, such as

“good school” and “bad school.”

Yes, this is also written in your program:

financial indicators should

depend on performance results

of the school. Well, frankly, in the

program this sounds weak,

declarative. A school’s performance results

are a huge, serious problem—the

most difficult issue, which people have only now

approached from the angle of the Unified State Exam (Russia’s national school-leaving exam), and everyone

saw—or rather, many saw, as I understand it,

not everyone—that many saw the danger

of such an approach, because as soon as

people start evaluating results, there arises

a very powerful temptation for all participants

in the educational process to tweak

those results. Yes, and not only for the student,

for whom it is beneficial, but also for the teacher whose

work is being assessed. I do not want to say that everyone

does this; of course there are many people who

take their own profession honestly,

but a system in which it is advantageous—when a minister,

not in Moscow,

thank God, but a minister of a republic,

gathers people and says: do whatever you want, but

make sure the Unified State Exam is at the national average, and

so on and so forth. That is, as soon as the Unified State Exam

becomes

an indicator, it becomes distorted.

That is Campbell’s law; it is a well-known thing. Not

only that—this is related to the question that

schools’ performance results must be treated

seriously. First, this is why we

hold meetings like this: in order to

fine-tune our

program. And second, and most importantly, when

we say that school funding

should depend on indicators,

I do not mean only exam scores, of course we

understand that a teacher who turns a C student

into a B student may even

deserve to receive more money than one who

simply works

from the outset in a strong school, where

all the students score 100 points. Naturally, we understand

that probably a person who works with

children with what is called attention

hyperactivity syndrome, yes, which nowadays

seems to be diagnosed in everyone, should receive more

than someone who works in an excellent

school with children from well-off families. Of course,

this must be a complex issue which, nevertheless,

we need to try to reduce to some

objective indicators. Right. So,

the performance results of a school—I come from

a family of teachers; my father is a school principal

and my mother worked in a school all her life.

For as long as I can remember, from about

six or seven years old, people were talking about how

to evaluate a teacher’s work. This problem is not solved.

The problem, in fact, is: what is a good

school? Everyone knows—it is the one everyone wants to go to.

A good teacher—everyone knows that too.

Although formalizing it is impossible.

You see, this is also connected with

this latest campaign now underway:

the introduction of the so-called effective

contract, even though no one has yet

explained to me what it actually is. And it is still the same

enormous problem: how do you assess

the result, how do you measure it in complex

fields like education, in

healthcare, where the result is difficult

even to define—what counts as a result? Where

the result, as a rule, is

not an individual result but

a collective one. A graduate, after all,

is shaped by the whole school, not

by just one, let’s say, Ivan Ivanovich.

In short, it is a difficult question. This is

indeed one of the

key issues, and in international practice

the evaluation of results does not always

work in such a simple way: “Aha, a good result.”

So, we'll give you more, and you'll get worse results.

If your results are poor, we'll shut you down — and that's far from

always the case; more often, the outcomes are bad. Let's

sort this out.

Why is that, and what needs to be done to bring you

up to at least the average level? You've touched on

a very important problem, actually.

You really cannot tie

funding directly to results, um.

That is, baseline funding according to a set standard

should go to everyone, and then

there should be a system of programs, um, programs

of support with funding for schools that have

many children with difficulties, with deviant behavior,

or children for whom

Russian is not their native language, at the very least, and

additional programs for schools with

an advanced level, and so on. There should

be a whole range of programs that would

supplement that standard

funding that goes to the school. But

when we simplify and flatten this environment,

when we make it primitive, then accordingly

there is no point expecting results, because

there can be no single overall result, no single overall quality.

Quality can only be measured by

certain individual elements, and only in

that case can we say that

yes, under this program we achieved

a certain result, and next

year we will continue funding it.

That's also an option — these kinds of modules, so to speak.

Yes, you take on a module,

and you receive funding. What I wanted

to draw attention to is that you cannot

measure things only by USE scores (the Unified State Exam); that's dangerous. This is already

clear to everyone. Otherwise, then it will just be Chechnya and

Dagestan (Russian republics in the North Caucasus); in five years they will be in every

region, and that's absurd when, for us,

one of the indicators of a regional governor's

effectiveness is the result on the

USE. Well, what do you think any

governor will do? I personally believe that

USE results should belong

to the child and should not be known to anyone

except them — that's my position.

Because then it would be impossible

to manipulate them. As a parent, of course I

would still like to know the average score on the

USE at a school. I understand that probably for

most teachers this is something

painful, but people want to know it, this is

something everyone wants to know. Our desire immediately becomes

a match tossed into a bonfire that

heats everything up.

The USE should be separated from the school altogether — that's what needs to happen.

This is, of course, not a Moscow-specific problem, but in

general, there could be separate centers where you take the USE; it is

not necessarily

being discussed that the USE should exist only

for university admission. Another interesting

move: Bolotov, who at one time was

one of the chief advocates of the USE, at the Yaroslavl Forum

in April of this year, in effect

acknowledged that this strong distortion

is, as it were, directly

a feature of the USE system, and proposed

a monitoring system so that the quality

of education would be assessed not by the USE but by

a monitoring system. Just a few days

ago, Medvedev signed a decree launching

this monitoring. I don't want to say anything either

good or bad about the monitoring

because it doesn't exist yet. I'm afraid it will again be

some kind of bureaucratic

and serious burden. But at least

the idea of separating the USE from the evaluation

of school performance — this monitoring, in what

form will it take? Will they come into lessons? No,

of course not; we'll be the ones filling things out.

Yes, I think that when you hear the word “monitoring,” it

means there will be correlations of one thing with

another, and all those little tables of yours that

you'll be churning out endlessly again.

Or will it be some kind of chart-filling exercise, and then

if it were the child's property, then this

could be... If I may add something — yes.

Since I was already mentioned at the very

beginning of the discussion, I am not

a supporter of evaluating a school by the average

USE score, but whether we like it or not, we cannot get away

from using USE results

in assessing the quality

of teaching. As was rightly said earlier,

this is what concerns parents.

It is a kind of final outcome, and moreover an outcome that

covers not two, say, not two students,

not 2%, but all students. These are genuinely

quite useful data. So we

should be asking here that

first, the format of the USE should truly

make it possible to assess a child's learning, and

second, about

a system for combating corruption around the USE.

What we've ended up with is rather

a story like this: suppose we have, conditionally speaking,

a car with low suspension, and it

doesn't drive well on our

roads. Well then, maybe we should repave the roads somehow.

Yes, the situation is that

the quality of the USE affects the quality

of education, because people are not teaching,

they are coaching for the USE. But that is not always

the fault of the USE, you understand. That is, maybe

we should work with teachers? No, not

always, not always. The point is that the subjective

factor — as soon as the USE becomes an evaluation metric,

it objectively begins to distort things. I'm not

saying that we should use it

directly. As far back as three years ago, I

and colleagues from the journal *Teaching

History at School* wrote a letter,

an open letter at the time, then still

to Education Minister Fursenko, in which

we proposed introducing a correlation coefficient

between USE results and school grades. That is,

what is the idea?

The idea is this: yes, all of us — yes, here at school...

the grading system, and everyone knows that

it really is, in fact, a fucking

system, and everyone knows that a grade of three in

one school is a five in another school. Well,

that's a fact, yes. So the Unified State Exam (EGE, Russia's standardized school-leaving exam) results need to be

linked precisely to that grade. That is,

if a teacher was giving fives all year

through 11th grade, and that teacher's student scores

60 points, then something at that school is

wrong, because that already tells you

this needs to be worked out, and yes, accordingly

that way, broadly speaking, well, at least we will

be able to understand something. God forbid

that they should hang

a plaque on the school wall saying that last year our children

scored 70. Actually, Alexei

Anatolyevich, it seems to me that when you

say that, as parents, you are interested in

the EGE results, you as parents

haven't fully thought through your position

because it seems to me that what interests you as

parents is which university the child can get into

the child

enter. That is, even if it remains

the child's own information and you know nothing about it

but you do know where the graduates were admitted

that would also be quite

satisfactory for you as a comprehensive assessment. For me,

by the way, a brief digression:

all my life I lived in places where there was only one

school, in military towns, and when my

wife, who was born in Moscow, after

our daughter was born, said, "Let's choose

a school," it was a revelation to me

Choose? They're all the same. In

general, what difference does the school make? So when

I started looking into it as a parent,

it turned out to be this huge, astonishing whole world

there's enormous stress there for parents, for

children, this race for the "best" school, for

teachers, and so on. So

of course it's not just about the EGE. I want her to

get in, I want her not just to

get a top grade in English. I want

her to actually know English

naturally. And this, this, this is really

the whole issue of the best school. I believe that the concept of

the "best school" is simply different for each

student. For a child with certain

difficulties, the best option may be

a special education school, while for another

child who works better with their hands,

the best school may be one with more of those kinds of subjects

like that. So this is a question of

differentiation, yes, and the question of what is "better"

is connected precisely with that. And the EGE is

just standardization, nothing more

that's all. And right now we're again seeing

a return to the Soviet unitary system. In

the 1990s, schools of different

types did emerge, and this is exactly what the education system

needs to develop. This needs to be

introduced and encouraged so that there are schools

of different types, so that, well, truly

you understand, legally and lawfully

gymnasiums, lyceums, ordinary

schools, special education schools, and so on, can exist

including, by the way, language schools. And a very

important issue is private education

simple arithmetic alone

shows that a private school in Moscow

simply cannot survive. The cost

of rent is such

that neither a kindergarten nor a school can

operate. This is an important issue for us

in general, the cost of rental rates. Because

right now a private school appears

in only one case: when a developer

builds up a district and decides to allocate one

building for a private

school. The city's task is to make sure that

everyone who wants to open a private school and

has qualified staff

or a private kindergarten has

the opportunity to do so, because this

for the city and the city authorities is

not a business, it's part of residents' infrastructure. That

is, these are simply opportunities that

residents should have. We should not profit from this

the city does not need this

rent; the city needs children to be educated

children

the city's children. I completely agree. Also, right now

there is the problem of special education schools

special schools. Since we've

brought it up, they are planning to transfer them from the

Ministry

of Education to the Ministry of Social

Protection, and these children are in effect simply being

removed from the general system. Instead of inclusion,

they are being pushed, on the contrary, into this ghetto, and

the problem of inclusive

education in Moscow really does exist, although

there is a program, there is neither

funding for it, nor teaching guidelines, nor any

real programs, nor classes that

would serve as pilot projects—there is nothing at all

and the system that would allow children with

special needs to study in an ordinary

school, or, if they want, to be able to

continue studying in a special education

school that remains

within the education system, also

exists, and attention needs to be paid to it as well

It may seem secondary, but

it is a very important aspect of the human-centered

nature of our government in general. Yes, if

we have, so to speak, built ramps badly

and, by the way, done it absolutely atrociously

one could show and describe a great deal

then inclusion in

education absolutely must be there

because otherwise there will be no one to use those

But this issue is not being solved, first of all, there is no real

that's exactly why not a single school is ready to take wheelchair users

because a ramp is not just

a financial investment. The question is whether this

child will be able to feel comfortable

It has to exist. Well, we need programs, we need...

We need teaching guides, we need people, training, and so on.

I know a school in Anapa (a resort city in southern Russia), an ordinary school,

where

the principal—I don’t remember the school number, I mean,

I just know the principal personally, I don’t remember the number.

So, the principal decided on her own, out of

a sense of mission, that at her school

children should study together with other children, including

children who use wheelchairs. She convinced the parents of this,

and convinced the children too, even though her school

is not especially accessible—there are no ramps.

So what did they do? The older students there

carry them when necessary. So, from this—well,

that is, this is a huge... You say, yes, it’s

a huge undertaking: we need methods, we need

programs, we need all of that. But if there is

goodwill, if there is a genuine desire, it

works. But right now, it is being held together by

the selfless dedication of certain people, not by

any kind of

system. And this also requires money.

Additional money. Because children who are in

mainstream educational institutions are

very expensive students to support—these are children who are

ten times more expensive than an ordinary child in

a regular school. That money really should

follow that student.

When, after the closure of a

special-needs school, a child comes into a regular

class—yes, that child needs additional

funding, and quite substantial funding at that.

They are supposed to have a tutor for each child—

a separate tutor for every child, according to

the standards—but in reality this is nowhere to be found. If

you have a child sitting in a classroom, then

that child should have—well, the child should have

a person who is constantly with them,

accompanying them and helping them. But where is

that? We don’t have it. Well, thank

God, this is ultimately not a financial problem so much as

a staffing problem.

And

this is a question for our universities; it is

Moscow financing—these are such...

The Moscow education system—it can’t be said that it is now

—you can’t say that it is now

receiving a huge amount, a truly huge amount,

of investment. But these are capital

investments of a very questionable kind.

This is also what I wanted to say:

the Department of Education’s financial activity is not at all

transparent. What does it do,

where does it spend money, what does it buy—there are no

reports, nothing. We know nothing. And in fact,

there are plenty of cases when

some extremely expensive equipment is purchased

at inflated prices, then it gets dumped in a basement,

yes, and it just rots there, and no one

distributes it, because the money has already been spent

and that’s it, end of story. And in principle, this is

not purely an education problem. As we were discussing with colleagues,

the question is how much money municipalities and districts

actually have. That is, they are practically

financially

completely

powerless. It is not the municipalities that finance schools.

Well, this is, by the way, another

problem: to what extent is it

really sensible to finance everything from this

monster,

rather than asking whether there is a need for some

degree of decentralization. As for how we relate to this,

I personally believe that

the need is very great indeed.

That is why we wrote into the program that all

funding and authority concerning simply

school education should be at the

municipal level, because that is where

the deputies live, the children who go to

school live, the parents live, and the teachers live.

And they will absolutely be able to make any

decisions, from routine or

major repairs all the way to

whether to merge schools or not. I personally

absolutely believe that the effectiveness

of these decisions will be higher than if they are

made personally by

someone at the top.

The question of changing the whole system is not simply

about appointing new officials at the

municipal level. It would also require

breaking things up a little and restructuring them.

Who are these regulations for?

If—well—who decides what

schools in Maryino (a district of Moscow) should be like, other than

me, a resident of Maryino, and the local deputies?

And when local teachers from

my school tell me, “You know, we’re

filling out 133 forms every month,” I

say: I don’t need that, I don’t need forms.

There is some minimal

federal standard—send that in, and

for everything else, please focus on

my children. That is a normal approach. It seems to me

that this is the only possible approach:

the local community should regulate it.

This goes back to the fact that in America, originally,

local communities in general

formed around schools; in fact, their

municipalities were built around

them and play a colossal role. We should

return to that. In a small American

town, 80% of the tax that is collected

goes to funding the local school. That is

the main reason they pay

local taxes at all. In general, that is how it originally

came about: taxes arose as

a necessity.

I think this is a very important point.

But I would return to it and

emphasize it: this is a question of returning to

uniformity versus the need for diversity

in education. That is, education

in Moscow should ultimately be organized in such

a way that children can find

their own educational opportunities,

their own educational paths.

In this sense, incidentally, tutors could also play a role.

The tutors that were mentioned here could also be

important, but it seems to me that the system so far

Well, the system has not yet incorporated them. They

do exist, but the system still has not adopted them.

It seems to me that for Moscow’s

education system especially, when, well,

there really is an enormous number of options available here,

this is not a military town

where there is no choice of school. This is a very

important issue. I either didn’t see it in your program

or perhaps it simply isn’t there, but

when we are talking not about finances but about

substance and content, this may be the very

first thing that should exist at all:

diversification of strategy, of course. Otherwise we

But here, again, we run into

a certain contradiction, really.

To devolve everything only to the municipal level—that is, as it were,

there should also be—I’m not talking about the municipal component

from the parent’s or child’s point of view, that’s clear, but the point is

precisely that

choice requires going beyond

the boundaries of one’s own municipal district; there must be an opportunity

there really may be

several levels of school governance in

this sense, so that

again, I don’t mean that, as it were, a school

really, a school in

a municipal district—but there could also be

a municipal school with a specialization, with provision for that.

But look, regarding municipalities:

under our current political situation,

when municipalities are controlled by United Russia (the ruling political party),

excuse me, but we have

a problem with extracurricular clubs. This is

well known. These clubs and studios,

municipal ones, used to operate in buildings that

belonged to the municipalities, and this

was the story of the entire 2000s,

when established groups were simply forced out

—groups that children had attended

for years. Why was this done? Because

it was corruption. Because sitting there was

a person who didn’t give a damn about any

municipality; he just needed to launder money.

That’s why he came there as a deputy, and so

to say that we’ll simply devolve things to the

municipal level and everything will be fine—that

is also wrong, because the issue is that

power there must belong to the people in that

municipality. And here, unfortunately, we

run into problems far bigger than

simple organization. We are talking about

education—education, the judicial

system, and healthcare—we will not fix any of them

until the political issue is resolved properly.

As for school and municipal clubs,

they are also very important, but

there also need to be certain municipal-level

barriers to prevent situations where,

if an institution is located here, it can

be subjected to this kind of forceful intervention—so that

some private security company doesn’t come in and throw it out.

That is exactly what happened all those years. I would support

that, yes. The topic of supplementary education

also doesn’t really appear in your program, and that

is probably a gap. It is an important thing.

A great many people care about it—both the best

students and, perhaps conversely, even

the weakest students as well, because, say,

and teachers too, of course. At one point, in some

music school, they told me that whoever

comes to us to study the bayan (a type of accordion)—you understand who

comes to study the bayan. If they don’t come to us,

they’ll just stay out in their courtyard,

and become that same street hooligan crowd. But here

there are still boundaries, and maybe a social elevator (path to upward mobility)

of some kind, and so on. So

this is a very important part of education

that for some reason remains somewhat

At present in the country—no, no, no, it does not

remain neglected. There is a presidential decree

on the development of supplementary education, and money is

currently being directed there. That is, up to 2020, they may

actually develop this area even too intensively,

namely supplementary education,

in order to fulfill the presidential decrees.

The danger here is that all of this becomes overly formalized.

All of it.

Take a school theater studio: before,

well, whoever signed up with me—I had

a separate register for supplementary

education, and I would write down the list of participants

in my theater studio.

Now, in order to get this

opportunity to attend the theater

studio, parents must register

their child on the website of the Moscow Department of Education, and I

then, accordingly,

also have to fill out

a certain form.

The rule that two are free—two per month—this is

very correct. Why? Because

they report participation rates of 130 and 140 percent,

and so on. That is impossible.

This is not the development of a supplementary education system, when

a person first comes to one club, then

signs up for a third, fourth, fifth; everywhere

teachers are assigned, and everywhere

money starts flowing. This makes supplementary

education paid. That is not

right. Secondly, it encourages schools to push

something out of the regular school program into supplementary

education—that is, to shift it into paid

services. Supplementary education institutions are

supposed to be free, and in fact

no.

An increase in funding for that area is in fact

happening now under the state

program, so that is actually

not correct. But the fact that you simply registered people—

in Perm, for example, the electronic registration system

and electronic vouchers and so on

for placing children in supplementary education institutions—

that system works well.

Yes, it is true that budget money there only covers

roughly two hours a week, but

The rest is paid for by the parents. This system

works, but without oversight. When we write off

it under the name of Vanya Pupkin (a generic placeholder name, like “John Doe”). Excuse me, uh,

15 hours a week there — that’s already, so to speak,

the kind of system that no longer flies. Now everyone

thinks, well, it’s just a control system. It

should not simply lead to

bureaucratic hell for teachers. We have

mechanisms of oversight, but the registration itself

After all, in many ways we build these things on

trust: the parents themselves sent

a simple text message

to sign up, and it took them 15 seconds

This works because, after all, a large

share of the money is spent on all sorts of things or

simply squandered

on so-called major renovations, each of which

has 100 million rubles (about 100 million RUB) written off

under the table, and where there is absolutely no

oversight — it’s completely closed off. Try getting even

a single school renovation cost estimate — it’s impossible. But

on the other hand, a teacher who spends whole

days filling out forms because of

an extra 300 rubles (about 300 RUB) for an after-school club — the main thing is

that these limits of two are hypocritically

explained by saying it’s bad for the child’s health

to attend more than two clubs. Although this is

a complete lie, of course. Health-

preserving technologies are simply some kind of catastro-

One important topic that, it seems to me,

we absolutely need to touch on in our

discussion is a problem of recent years,

probably the last seven years: children of

migrants in schools. How widespread is this, really?

To what extent do we actually

have classes in Moscow where a large

share of students do not have Russian

as their native language? Well, no more than — my

daughter-in-law works at such a school where

they can barely fill two first-grade classes.

They have a great many immigrant children.

The problems are these: a child comes in

wanting to enter fifth grade, but their knowledge

is only at a second-grade level. In her

class, there were 10 children at the start of the year,

who were migrants; six left. They are constantly

moving around, their parents do not take care of their schooling,

and no one works with them on the Russian language.

That is their terrible problem. At

home they naturally speak their native language,

and at school no one, and no special

— there are special schools where this

is developed; there is experience in Moscow with schools where

they work with such children. But here is the important thing:

if we create specialized

schools, then we will be creating a ghetto

plain and simple.

If integration, after all, and not

segregation, is the goal, then support programs for children

for

additional classes are needed.

This really does require

additional resources. If a child arrives,

they may, for example, have to repeat a year,

but they will study and catch up on

the areas where they are behind, as in all countries

that deal with this today — it is possible

to do. In situations where parents, as you

say, are not involved — well, you cannot

force them.

And very often, among us, even our own

migrant parents are often

more interested than

one might expect. Naturally, it is harder for them

to integrate into society; it is harder for them

to succeed. They are like the children

of emigrants — you know, our emigrants, yes?

They are very focused on making sure their children

receive a good education,

integrate into this society, and that too

— we know examples of this. Well, I also will not

name a specific school outside Moscow (in the Moscow region),

where the principal says quite unequivocally

that, so to speak, among the children of

local alcoholic parents,

there are significantly more problems than among those

who sleep in greenhouses there, but they

go to school, they take an interest, they

ask questions; it matters to them that their child

gets an education, because for them

it is a chance to break out of this

poverty. Language matters to them. There is also

another, opposite problem:

preserving the ethnocultural component.

Nevertheless, yes, yes — balance is necessary.

Perhaps a school directly with an

ethnocultural component is not something that should

be built around just one group. Maybe either

multicultural schools of some kind, or

special centers where children come after school

to study their own language — that would be

better than attending such schools with a single component. Well,

mm.

It’s a fact, yes, it does happen. Absolutely right. So,

the problem is actually very old.

The first schools with an ethnocultural

component appeared in Moscow at the end of

the 1980s, around 1989.

I would be glad to

pass along to Alexei Anatolyevich such a

report. I am not promoting it; I did not

write it. It is from MIO, 2007: *Integration*

*of Migrants: The Moscow Experience*, from 2007. So,

I worked with it, and you know, it is a very

simply astonishingly interesting story.

As for these schools, there are not very

many of them in Moscow; I think there were more

than four dozen in 2007. Moreover,

the authors

identify five types of schools with an

ethnocultural component. Only in

one of these types is it

truly a monoethnic school where

the majority are

children of some, let us say, non-titular

nationality, yes — corresponding

to that particular ethno-, that particular

ethnocultural group. These are otherwise ordinary schools, that is,

For example, there is School No. 1086 in Konkovo (a district in Moscow) — it is

a Korean school; indeed, about a third

of the students are ethnic Koreans. But these are

the descendants of those Koreans who were left to us,

if you'll pardon the expression, as part of the

heavy legacy of the tsarist regime,

whom Stalin had already deported at the end of the 1930s.

The situation is different now: it is no longer simply Armenians

coming together in one school to preserve

Armenian culture. Now we simply have

just two.

You know what's interesting?

The Moscow city government sees this problem.

In the mid-2000s, they

launched a pilot project to create,

that is, to set up Russian-language schools within

general education schools. There, a one-year

program gave a child

from a migrant family — usually aged 6 to 14 —

the opportunity

to study Russian as

a foreign language. The program also provided

psychological support to help them adapt

to a new environment, and so on. For a year

or a year and a half, the whole thing worked.

The Moscow City Department of Education

met at some roundtable discussion and

decided — I think this was in 2007 — that

the experiment had been successful and should be rolled out.

They said an experimental

platform should be created. Again, that was in 2007; now it is

January 2013. A trick question: how many do you

think such schools

had been created in Moscow by May of that year?

I don't have the data. That many?

The same number? I have the figures.

Thirteen. Thirteen. Unfortunately, there are no figures for how many children study there,

but these are data

from *Rossiyskaya Gazeta* (the Russian government newspaper) for May 2012.

So, there are no exact data on how many children

study there specifically. But in one

school, 46 are enrolled; accordingly, 46 times

13 gives 598 — roughly 600

people, as you rightly said,

for roughly 2 million migrants. Though there is

another, even more interesting point. Do you

know how many

representatives of Central Asia there are in Moscow,

according to the 2010 census?

Let me remind you, it counted not only citizens,

but the entire resident population present at the time.

100,000 people.

Well, that differs from the general impression.

Moreover, according to the census, there are fewer Turkmens in Moscow

than Poles.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. For us, this was a very important

discussion. And as I already said, for me and

my team, it is important that the program remain

alive, that it be expanded, that it

continue to develop. So I am very grateful

for the additions and for the criticism

that was voiced regarding the program. Important points

for me that were raised today include

the fact that we must finally free teachers

from this routine of filling out

endless paperwork; that the process

of merging schools must not be

mechanical; this is exactly the kind of

hands-on management that needs to be

introduced. And there were other important things: we spoke

today about the problems migrants face in schools, about

the problems of special education schools, and so on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, thank you very much. Very cool.