Global voices Russia: Russia’s own Common Core  

Russia’s education system is moving slowly toward output-based national standards similar to the Common Core in the U.S. The next task: getting teachers ready.  

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:  

This uniformity of supply was exacerbated by the uniformity in educational philosophy. Pedagogy was standardized, curriculum was undifferentiated. In some instances, there were even laws making it illegal for teachers to use nonstandardized books and materials. Variety was assumed to be a sign of inequality . . . The problem with this policy is that a school system is not a factory. (p. 37)  

A wakeup call 

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.  

The Soviet Union had taken pride in its educational system so Russia’s performance on the TIMSS in 1995 was a call to action. 

The 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results were even more discouraging: Russia was at the bottom of the league table and below the average for participating countries. This time, policy makers started paying attention. In 2001, the federal government adopted new policy guidelines for modernizing Russian education by introducing competence-based school curriculum that emphasized outcome-based school standards and core skills over rote memorization. 

Unlike the United States, where each state can have its own standards, Russia inherited a Soviet-era school framework that required its 83 regions to use the same standards. But after 1991, when Russia became a sovereign state, they allowed regions to compose 20% of their prescribed content. Those federal standards, with a regional component, emphasized factual knowledge and were mostly input-based. They specified the content and the number of contact hours to be taught. They said nothing about what students should know by the end of their schooling and very little about skills and competencies of school leaders. As a result, teachers rarely paid attention to developing knowledge transfer skills in their students.  

The Russian curriculum developers who created the new school standards in the early 2000s were skeptical of the competency-based approach to learning and refused to believe the TIMSS and PISA data. As a consequence, the first draft of the skills-based, outputs-focused standards contained 467 generic skills. Disciplinary teams competed to identify new skills, leading to teacher confusion over how to implement the standards (Dneprov, 2004). 

Moving away from general knowledge orientation was even more challenging. Although disciplinary specialists were trying to reduce the number of facts students should know and remember, the number of facts students were expected to know kept growing. Teachers supported curriculum developers because they feared that moving toward skill-based curricula would make their students less competitive. Ironically, the State University of St. Petersburg asked 100 school principals and teachers to respond to questions students faced during a typical secondary school exit exam. The surveyed principals and teachers correctly responded to only about 40% of the questions asked of students. The advocates of the skill-based reform concluded:  

Even the teachers know only half of what is being taught. And they confess that students fail to master more than half of what is offered to them. It seems obvious that more than a half of redundant and obsolete knowledge should be thrown into a garbage bin. (Dneprov, 2004, p. 3) 

In the middle of these debates, the Federal Minister of Education resigned, and his successor cancelled the unpopular new standards. 

New national standards 

Developing new standards coincidentally overlapped with the introduction of the Common Core State Standards in the United States. The reforms were influenced more by outcome–based curricula in the United Kingdom than the U.S. The new Russian standards were to specify: 

• The goals of education at every key stage;
• The core content of the main educational programs;
• The maximum workload (lessons per week);
• The main educational outcomes of each key stage; and
• The main provisions an educational process should meet.

The new generation of standards took almost five years to develop and even longer to be endorsed nationally. The new standards set a number of very important goals such as critical thinking and other key skills development, a tolerant and multicultural school environment, and civic competencies.  

Educators expect the new standards and exams to play a significant role in preparing Russian students for challenges of the global world. 

For the first time, upper secondary students are able to choose from a variety of school disciplines. Students also can decide whether they want to achieve basic or advanced mastery for each discipline. The new standards clearly specify the expected outcomes for each stage of education in every school discipline, and teachers are to be accountable for helping students achieve the prescribed outcomes. The outcomes emphasize generic skills and competencies, and the ministry hopes the new standards will draw teacher support (Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, 2012).  

Standardized university entrance exams introduced in 2009 also pay a lot of attention to skills development. There is a special section in every disciplinary exam meant to verify whether students can indeed apply their knowledge and skills across a curriculum area. Educators expect the new standards and exams to play a significant role in preparing Russian students for challenges of the global world. 

However, people who live in ethnic regions of Russia say the new standards are a step back  because they don’t allow the regions to add new goals or content or to adapt the standard to their needs. This is seen as a potential threat to diversity in a country with over 150 indigenous ethnicities.  

Conclusion 

The new national standards are currently being introduced in Russia, so it remains to be seen whether teachers will understand and be able to implement the new standards. Having common national standards with clearly defined educational outcomes is a step toward greater school accountability but many questions remain. 

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References 

Dneprov, E.D. (2004). The education standard – updated tool for general education. Moscow, Russia: The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.  

Heinemann, S.P. (1995). Education in the Europe and Central Asia region: Policies of adjustment and excellence. In F.J.H. Mertons (Ed.), Reflections on education in Russia (pp. 1-37). Amersfort, Holland: Acco Publishers. 

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. (2012). Federal state educational standards for complete secondary education. Moscow, Russia: Author.  

 

Citation: Lenskaya, E. (2013). Global voices | Russia: Russia’s own Common Core. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (2), 76-77.