School System and Educational Policy in a Highly Stratified Post-Soviet Society: The Importance of Social Context

Kosaretsky, Sergey; Grunicheva, Irina; Мarina, Pinskaya

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2535806

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The differentiation unleashed in education and the economic crisis of the 1990s led to a rapid increase in educational inequalities that both resulted from and enhanced the overall social inequality (Kosaretsky et al, 2014). To remedy the negative effects of the radical decentralization of the 1990s and to ensure compliance with state requirements, the Ministry of Education developed 'state standards' for every level of education, and implemented procedures for the licencing, attestation and accreditation of educational institutions (Filippov, 2000).…”

Section: Qae In Modern Russia: a Comprehensive System Resembling Globmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ‘Stalin school model’ developed in the 1930s was characterized by colossal amounts of information students needed to digest, rigid discipline, ideological indoctrination and compulsory community service for students (Mayofis, 2015: 39). The state not only guaranteed the right to a free education and assumed the ultimate responsibility for education quality, but also sought to enforce this right and demanded that citizens make good use of the free education to develop themselves into efficient members of socialist society (Livschiz, 2006: 559). Every student had the obligation to study to the peak of his or her abilities, and was overseen by school workers and by the student organizations in which every student was enrolled from the first grade and the local organs of the Communist Party that had influence over parents at their workplaces.…”

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The QAE policy that existed, with minor modifications, until the end of the Soviet period was developed in the 1940s (Livschiz, 2006). The decrees of 1944 ‘on the improvement of the quality of education in schools’ introduced a five-tier grading system, examinations and symbolic rewards for outstanding results in studies (‘silver’ and ‘gold’ medals to school graduates).…”

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the carefully sustained appearance of state control over every aspect of school life and constant progress and improvement of quality, Soviet education faced many challenges, and education policy addressed them in internally controversial ways (Byford and Jones, 2006). The post-war school worked under conditions of economic and social devastation, and state statistics registered massive dropouts and repetitions of study years (Livschiz, 2006; Mayofis, 2015). While the state lacked sufficient resources for intervention, the responsibility for these poor results was shifted to teachers, who were accused of ‘formalistic’ attitudes to teaching and of lacking the necessary pedagogical skills (Mayofis, 2015: 61–64).…”

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

Gurova

2017

Policy Futures in Education

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This paper problematizes the dichotomy between neo-liberalism and socialism and the tendency to view the post-socialist condition as a process of convergence with 'Western' and 'global'. It does so by analysing the development and implementation of a quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policy in school education in the context of the Russian Federation. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian national QAE policy has changed greatly and currently resembles the agendas of transnational organizations in education. At the same time, the national policy and the political discourse on quality continue to draw on Soviet as well as post-Soviet legacies. Juxtaposing the case of Russian QAE policy with theoretical models of post-bureaucratic governance in education, the paper also questions clear-cut distinctions between 'old' and 'new' governance regimes. The analysis in the paper is guided by two questions: 1) What has changed and what has remained unchanged in Russian education policy with the transition from the Soviet period to current state? and 2) How do different legacies and influences contribute to the QAE policy implemented at the local level? The brief inquiry into the history of Russian QAE policy focuses on three periods: post-war Soviet Russia, the transition period of the 1980-1990s and modern Russia. Recognizing the specific characteristics of each of the reviewed periods, the paper highlights complexities, contradictions and continuities within and between previous and present regimes of education governance in Russia. The analysis of the QAE policy implemented at the local level demonstrates the blending of diverse legacies, and the prevalence of Soviet-era practices in school governance.

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Section: Qae In Modern Russia: a Comprehensive System Resembling Globmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Development Of Russian Qae Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

Gurova

2017

Policy Futures in Education

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“…General education schools existed alongside schools with a special status, such as lyceums and gymnasiums, which offered a higher level of teaching at the secondaryschool level. A study of about 1,500 schools in three regions of the Russian Federation (including the city of Moscow and Moscow Oblast) found a correlation between the official status of schools and their pupils' average performance at the Unified State Exam (USE): pupils from gymnasiums and lyceums performed better than those enrolled in schools with advanced learning, who in turn had better grades than pupils from ordinary general education schools (Froumin, Pinskaya, and Kosaretsky 2012;Kosaretsky, Grunicheva, and Pinskaya 2014). The same study also discovered that differences in school performance tended to overlap with the socioeconomic characteristics of the school body.…”

Section: E T H O D O Lo G Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

School Choice and the Children of Migrants: Unveiling Everyday Migrantophobia in Moscow

Kempf

2020

Labo

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Research for this article was conducted with funding from the French-Russian Research Center for Social Sciences (Centre d'études franco-russe) in Moscow.While many surveys point to widespread xenophobic, "migrantophobic" attitudes among the Russian population, very few studies have so far investigated the ways these attitudes may inform everyday practices and interactions between immigrants and the majority population. This article explores this topic by studying school choice practices in Moscow in the 2010s. Using qualitative methods (a series of semistructured interviews conducted with 32 Muscovite parents in 2015 and 2018), I show the ways in which ethnic and national characteristics of pupils are mobilized by parents when selecting a school. Moscow's highly stratified educational system led to an unequal distribution of children of migrants from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus among schools, to the point where some schools came to be known as "migrant schools." In this context, I analyze the strategies used by some parents in order to enroll their child into a school without children of migrants. I then reveal the underlying beliefs and stereotypes commonly associated with children of migrants. Finally, I explain why parents can use the presence of migrants' children as a choice indicator even in the absence of any clearly expressed migrantophobic attitudes. I show how, in a complex and rapidly transforming educational system, the relative presence or absence of non-Russian children came to be interpreted by many Muscovites as a reliable indicator of a given school's quality.

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Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition

Malinovskiy

Шибанова

2022

Journal of European Social Policy

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Higher education has generally been excluded from the welfare discourse, especially in transition countries. This article addresses existing research gaps by applying the ideas of decommodification and stratification to higher education in post-Soviet countries, within the comparative framework of welfare regime typology. The purpose of this study is to analyse the extent to which higher education relates to welfare state models in such countries. The research demonstrates that institutional settings and outcomes of higher education provision in Estonia, Georgia and Russia are evolving toward patterns of social-democratic, liberal and conservative models, respectively. Although the correspondence is incomplete, we argue that post-Soviet states are more similar to groups of countries representing these welfare regimes than to each other. This study argues against the assumption of a uniform post-Soviet pattern of higher education policy and shows that its structuring is embedded in the wider context of national welfare state models.

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School System and Educational Policy in a Highly Stratified Post-Soviet Society: The Importance of Social Context

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

School Choice and the Children of Migrants: Unveiling Everyday Migrantophobia in Moscow

Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition

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