Diverging school missions and principals’ roles in the age of nationalism and academic competition

• In Event: How school in Russia’s mass education system reproduce inequality

Proposal

During the past three decades there were many changes in the Russian school system—among them, education standardization, introduction of Unified State Exam at the end of high school, schools rankings based on this exam score, and the introduction of programs that financially support schools initiatives on a competition basis. These and other changes aimed to increase simultaneously schools’ accountability and autonomy. These changes almost certainly influenced principals’ roles and their vision of their school’s mission, and, via this, to shape school climate and how much students learn. At the same time, these changes were responded to differently by schools working in different social contexts.

In this paper, we test principals’ functional roles and schools’ missions as understood by schools’ administrators and teachers. Our findings are based on an analysis of interviews with principals, vice-principals and teachers in 30 schools located in different Russian regions. We find that principals’ roles can be divided into four major types. Most principals can be characterized as administrators-controllers. These principals are found in schools of different sizes, located in a variety of social contexts. They see setting tasks and control of the school’s operation as their main responsibility. All the tasks related to educational programs, teachers support, school facilities etc. are delegated to other agents. Principals of the second type can be called economic executives. They mainly focused on the school’s funding, its environment, facilities, and technical conditions, but not on education issues. Principals of these two types are not involved in academics. They prefer stability to changes in education and do not compete with other schools to improve students’ outcomes and or the school’s resources. Instead , the school’s mission is viewed as students’ adaptation to society and the formation of good citizens. We met principals of the third type – transformational leaders – in urban schools of an average size. These principals are more focused on school development programs, are more involved in teacher support and more oriented to innovations in education. Finally, in large school complexes in big cities, we met principals that may be called corporate heads. Like controllers, they are not involved in any school process that delegates responsibilities. Like transformational leaders they tend to focus on their school’s development. Principals of the last two types compete for educational resources and finances taking part in government programs. Corporate leaders also may compete to improve students’ outcomes as their schools have more resources to pursue these goals.

Author

• Andrei Zakharov, National Research University Higher School of Economics