Global voices Russia: Russia’s own Common Core  

Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the fall of the Soviet empire. The Soviet Union had taken pride in its educational system. Kindergarten for 90% of 3- to 6-year-olds cost less than 5% of an average family income, and students had access to 10 years of mandatory public schooling for all — four years in primary school, four in lower secondary, and two in upper secondary. It offered free higher education for 5 million students annually and was an almost perennial winner in the international math and science Olympiad. At the same time, the system faced challenges. Its education system was too centralized, and it discouraged diversity of values; the national curriculum was too rigid and prescriptive, not just in what to teach but also in how to teach. Teachers had to follow very detailed manuals, and any deviation resulted in a penalty by inspectors.  

Yet, most of the public seemed to agree that such rigidity was necessary to guarantee high-quality school outcomes. This is why changes introduced after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s were targeted at diversifying the education system, including allowing teachers to choose a mode of delivery and allowing ethnic regions to add some new content, like their ethnic language and history within the limits of the inherited core curriculum. As Stephen Heinemann wrote in 1995:  

The country saw the need for systemwide standards reform when Russia finished 14th among 21 participants in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1995. Some education experts expressed concern that Russian students mostly managed to master the curriculum’s knowledge base but that they had difficulty transferring this knowledge within and between disciplines. Russian policy makers countered that the TIMSS exams were unfair because they tested concepts that neither Russian students nor teachers had been given the opportunity to prepare for.