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Session Submission Summary

How school in Russia’s mass education system reproduce inequality

Mon, April 15, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific F

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The hope of most educational policy makers is that greatly expanding education will reduce inequality. Under Communism, the Soviet Union invested heavily in education and created one of the better educational systems in the world—a system marked by universal basic education (to 9th grade), relatively high quality teacher education, a strong curriculum, and a very high percentage of young people attending and completing university. Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists, the economy of the Russian Federation largely operates on market principles, yet many of the elements of the Soviet educational system are still in place. Enrollment in higher education expanded rapidly after 1991, and today, more than 60 percent of the relevant age cohort of young people attend university and about 70 percent of those graduate. Yet even this impressively high access to university has not saved the system from a significant degree of social stratification in assigning access to higher education, and especially high stratification in who gets access to elite universities. The most important mechanisms to reproduce social stratification in an educational system with such great access to high levels of education and relatively high quality inputs, are the existence of a relatively anachronistic vocational education system and the recent imposition of end-of-secondary test which also serves as an entrance test to higher education.

The proposed panel is organized to discuss a recently completed book on Russian middle schools, especially focused on the 9th grade, where students choose/are pushed to take two different educational trajectories: into academic high school, which is a direct route to university for a high percentage of those who take it; and vocational education, which still can lead to university, but is much more likely to place people in lower level technical and menial jobs.

The book is based on teacher and administrator interviews and videotaped mathematics classroom in 30 schools in five Russian regions, chosen on the basis of the results of a value added study of more than 4,800 students in more than 200 schools that took the 2011 TIMSS test in the 8th grade and were followed up in 9th grade with the PISA test in 2011 (Carnoy et al, 2017). The 30 school were stratified across three social class groupings, low, middle, and high, and among schools that had high and low “value added” on the PISA math test relative to the TIMSS test a year earlier. All the schools chosen were K-11 schools—that is, typical Russian schools encompassing primary, middle, and high school in one institution.

The results of the study paint an in depth picture of Russian middle schools—how the principals and teachers view the mission of their school, the coherence of that mission, teachers’ attitudes toward students’ capacity to learn mathematics, teacher practices in mathematics classrooms, how students are counseled regarding their choices of future academic trajectories, and the revealed strategies by schools in selecting students for their academic secondary school. The study shows how schools are highly class structured in the way they define their missions and the variety of ways they stratify students within classrooms, and define ways to select them for further academic study. The study finds that most, but not all, schools are highly conscious of maintaining high college entrance scores at the end of high school, and often select students for further study on that basis. Each of the panelists will describe one area of the study, focusing on this common line of understanding the subtle class reproductive nature of Russian schools.

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