Raising the Pay of Schoolteachers: How the Goals Are Being Achieved

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Notes

English translation © 2015 Taylor & Francis, from the Russian text © 2013 “Narodonaselenie.” “Povyshenie oplaty truda uchitelei: kak dostigaiutsia tseli,” Narodonaselenie, 2013, no. 4, pp. 63–72. A publication of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies of the Population (ISEPN), Russian Academy of Sciences. Translated by Kim Braithwaite.

^1. The field surveys were carried out under the auspices of the Russian Academy of the National Economy and State Service under the president of the Russian Federation. A total of 1,149 schoolteachers and thirty-seven school principals were surveyed.

^2. With the exception of the regional capital cities that were rated as successful or average, there is no rigid functional relation between the type of population center and the degree of its “successfulness.” For example, regional capital cities were classified as “successful” territories in 69 percent of the cases; cities in 26 percent of the cases; and villages in 5 percent of the cases. Cities were classified as “depressed” in 75 percent of the cases, and villages 25 percent of the cases. In regard to villages, the level of their “successfulness” (as applied to the goals of the present survey these include the size of the population and, accordingly, the number of students in the schools, as well as the level of solvency of the local inhabitants) is influenced, first and foremost, by their proximity to a relatively large and economically prosperous city.

^3. It is useful to note a definite differentiation between urban and rural areas in terms of the percentage of pedagogical cadres of a particular qualification (category). The maximum number of educators of top category is concentrated in regional capital cities. At the same time, among rural schoolteachers only one out of every ten has the top category; the situation is slightly better in the case of villages where educators belong to Category I—one out of every five teachers. Similar correlations are also found in regard to the degree of the economic prosperity (successfulness) of the area in which a school is located.

^4. It is sufficient to recall that the first edict handed down by B.N. Yeltsin, who was elected to serve as the first president of Russia in 1991, was devoted to education, but this did not prevent keeping Russian education on starvation rations throughout the 1990s. And even during the 2000s, in spite of all the oil and gas revenues, the rate of growth of spending on education lagged substantially behind the rate of growth of spending on other items of the federal budget—for example, spending on bodies of state administration and law enforcement agencies.