‘Quality revolution’ in post-Soviet education in Russia: from control to assurance?

Abstract

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of ‘educational quality’ in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the ‘quality revolution,’ proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of ‘quality assurance.’

Keywords:

• Russian education
• education reform
• neoliberalism
• quality assurance

Notes

1. Methodologically, unpacking a national account of educational quality is a notorious challenge. In contrast to measurable frameworks proposed by international educational organisations, some scholars believe educational quality to be an inherently relative category (Green 1994; Harvey and Knight 1996), with the main dimensions of relativity being culture and stakeholder. From this perspective, stakeholder-relative quality frameworks are impractical and hardly achievable as those would involve defining key international and local stakeholders, spelling out criteria used by each one of them and taking into account competing views – all within a single quality framework (Green 1994). However, most agree that a national vision of ‘quality in education,’ whether defined through measurable quality indicators or through a ‘culture of quality,’ accurately reflects a country’s goals and priorities for education, as well as various degrees of significance assigned to quality variables by social actors and stakeholders (Alexander 2008; Green 1994; Pring 1992).

2. For popular accounts of educational quality through standards, see Minina 2014. I find that public interpretation of educational quality continues to draw on paradigms of ‘quality culture,’ welfare state and government paternalism. Up until 2013 public demands continue to focus on reaffirming the state’s quality-guaranteeing functions of education and on the government’s ‘return’ to education as a quality assuring body. The key issue of quality improvement is formulated as ‘restoring’ the bygone quality of the Soviet era and modernising curricula while preserving its fundamentality.

3. In respect to education in the UK, for example, quality assurance frameworks has been defined as follows: ‘(…) distinctions are made between quality control and quality assurance. “Quality” is seen in terms of fitness for purpose, that purpose being established partly by the customers of the service but mainly by the Government as the custodian of the interests of the customer. “Quality control” refers to the particular procedures for ensuring that those purposes are established and that the performances conform to specifications (that, for example, x number of students obtain the grades in different subjects which indicate that the learning objectives have been met). “Quality assurance” refers to the mechanism for ensuring that the “quality control” techniques are carried out – the “audit” of this second tier of performance (for example, the monitoring meetings and the external evaluation).’ (Pring 1992, 10)

4. Linguistically, quality control is said to be ‘provided’ (obespechivaetsia) rather than ‘exercised’ (osushestvliaetsa), in the same manner educational quality itself is ‘provided’:

The provision of state control and educational quality management (obespechenie gosudarstvennogo kontrolia i upravlenia kachestvom obrazovania) on the basis of independent assessment of the quality of student preparedness (na osnove nezavisimoi otsenki kachestva podgotovki). (Passport 2005)

Systematic use of quality and control as agents of the verb ‘to provide’ (obespechivat') serves to normalise the semantic blurring between the two concepts.

5. The mechanistic nature of the relationship between educational stakeholders is accurately captured by a lay commentator of the 2011 Draft Law:

“The proposed project [the reform of educational quality] looks like a manual for a marathon race. The authors of the project elaborate in detail on the rights and responsibilities of the ‘runners’ (learners), ‘coaches’ (teachers) and even ‘fans’ (parents). [The authors] are trying to map out the entire ‘running track’ on the basis of opportunities and resources of certain participants of the process. Finance mechanisms, and the rights of the ‘head controller’ (glavnii kontroler) are laid out in great detail. What’s missing is the main thing: the relationship of this law with the goals for the country’s educational development. The issues of public demand, long-term planning and strategic development (…) are left out [of the discussion]”. (zakonoproekt2012.ru).

6. The ubiquitous rhetoric of novelty has been so persistent that ‘contemporaneity’ as the ultimate expression of novelty has become a synonym for quality. Contemporaneity has come to rhetorically serve as the ultimate criterion for new educational quality: a criterion that, paradoxically, contemporaneity itself has not begun to meet: consider widespread oxymora such as ‘the most contemporary’ (samii sovremennii) (Our New School 2010) and ‘contemporary school of the future’ (sovremennaia shkola budushego) (ibid.).