"Crises in the education system are increasing." This is how Yaroslav Kuzminov, Principal of the state's Higher School of Economics, summed up the fourth year of the drive to modernize Russia's higher and secondary educational establishments. He is one of the experts responsible for the education reform who met in Moscow last week to discuss how it was proceeding.
The modernization is designed to improve the quality of Russian education, but state allocations cannot even maintain the status quo, Mr. Kuzminov stressed. In the Soviet Union 5-6% of GDP went to education (the same sums are now spent in Poland, Portugal and Sweden), however, in today's Russia the figure is 3.6%. "Russia's education system is constantly growing, but funding is not increasing," said Mr. Kuzminov. The state earmarks a mere $400 per high-school student every year.
The Education and Science Ministry responds that allocations for education have been raised four-fold in the last four years and the reform is proceeding very successfully. However, before the new academic year began on September 1, Education Minister Andrei Fursenko stated that any innovations should be "carefully thought-out." The slogan of modernization has now become "sensible conservatism." As for the media's obsession with falling education standards, the minister commented that this process resulted from less interest in education in the 1990s. "The situation is changing now," he said. "The interest in education in the provinces is even higher than in the capital."
The reform includes a transition to unified state exams, i.e. when final-year school exams double up as university entrance exams. This system is expected to save time and money, combat corruption at universities and give children from low-income families an opportunity to enroll in prestigious Moscow universities. The unified state exams are taken locally as written tests and checked by an independent commission. Schoolchildren can send their marks to several universities at a time and calmly wait for the results at home. The experiment has been underway for four years. This year, it involved 65 Russian Federation constituent members, 982,000 school-leavers, and 946 universities and their branches. "This approach has been welcomed in some regions, and the practice will be expanded," Mr. Fursenko said.
The Moscow Council of Rectors has a different viewpoint. Its chairman Igor Fyodorov, head of Moscow's prestigious Bauman Technological University, says: "We are still skeptical about the unified exams. The universities should be able to decide for themselves who they would like to enroll on the basis of the unified exams, and who on the basis of competition." Moscow universities sometimes take the view that the new system encroaches on their rights. Viktor Sadovnichy, the head of the capital's leading university, Lomonosov Moscow State University, sees another danger in the innovation: "We could lose gifted young people. If the fate of the graduates is determined by the unified state exams once and for all, then it will have tragic consequences. In a few years, schools will be merely oriented to preparing their students for the exams. This will change children's attitude to classes and leave them unable to think."
Tests can hardly reflect knowledge and abilities in full, particularly if the applicant chooses a creative faculty or a university specializing in the theater or journalism, for example. There were some cases when computers failed to process tests correctly and when members of the independent commission...failed to solve the tasks in the test. Even teachers have complained about problems being worded incorrectly. Hence the result: only one schoolchild in 10,000 gets the highest marks in the unified state exams. This is too few, given the crucial role of these exams in children's lives.
The disadvantages of the new system have prompted Moscow's schoolchildren to be cautious. Only 2,900 out of 81,300 school-leavers chose to risk the exams this year. Their results were 15-20% higher than those achieved by their provincial peers. The regions still find it difficult to compete with Moscow in terms of education quality, so the results of the unified state exams should not be expected to cause a mass inflow of provincial students into Moscow universities.
It seems the Education Ministry is inclined to opt for pluralism: the unified exams will not be the only way of checking school-leavers' knowledge. "There should be other options," Mr. Fursenko stressed.
A reasonable compromise has been found in other modernization issues. A typical Russian school is open to innovations, is introducing computer technologies and interactive training (all the 63,400 schools in the country are equipped with computers). But in their quest to adapt courses to real life, schools are not going to give up fundamental education. The number of subjects will only increase further. For example, 14-15-year-olds in 60 regions of the country study the course, My Choice, that teaches them strategies to realize their abilities. "Secondary schools can and should teach the history of religions with the use of secular textbooks," believes Andrei Fursenko. Only a few years ago, this seemed impossible.
But realistically speaking, economists argue these innovations require additional financial support, which can be secured given annual GDP growth of 6-7%. Only then will the education reform have an effect, Mr. Kuzmin concludes.
