Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal : Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation

Special Issue: Educational Policies in Central and Eastern Europe Soviet, post-Soviet and neo-liberal: Governing Russian schools through quality assurance and evaluation Galina Gurova University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland Abstract This paper problematizes the dichotomy between neo-liberalism and socialism and the tendency to view the post-socialist condition as a process of convergence with ‘Western’ and ‘global’. It does so by analysing the development and implementation of a quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) policy in school education in the context of the Russian Federation. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian national QAE policy has changed greatly and currently resembles the agendas of transnational organizations in education. At the same time, the national policy and the political discourse on quality continue to draw on Soviet as well as post-Soviet legacies. Juxtaposing the case of Russian QAE policy with theoretical models of post-bureaucratic governance in education, the paper also questions clear-cut distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ governance regimes. The analysis in the paper is guided by two questions: 1) What has changed and what has remained unchanged in Russian education policy with the transition from the Soviet period to current state? and 2) How do different legacies and influences contribute to the QAE policy implemented at the local level? The brief inquiry into the history of Russian QAE policy focuses on three periods: post-war Soviet Russia, the transition period of the 1980–1990s and modern Russia. Recognizing the specific characteristics of each of the reviewed periods, the paper highlights complexities, contradictions and continuities within and between previous and present regimes of education governance in Russia. The analysis of the QAE policy implemented at the local level demonstrates the blending of diverse legacies, and the prevalence of Soviet-era practices in school governance. Keywords Quality evaluation, school governance, post-socialism, Soviet, Russia Corresponding author: Galina Gurova, University of Tampere, A ˚kerlundinkatu 5, Tampere 33101, Finland. Email: galina.gur[email protected] Policy Futures in Education 2018, Vol. 16(4) 398–415 !The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1478210317743648 journals.sagepub.com/home/pfe Introduction In recent decades quality has become a core concept on the global educational agenda and in Russian education policy. The pursuit of quality serves as justification for multiple reform initiatives, and quality assurance has become a primary responsibility of the state in education. At the same time, the concept of quality itself is relative, linked to current educational aims (Burbules, 2004; Harvey and Green, 1993; Mortimore and Stone, 1991). National interpretations of quality are grounded primarily in historical trends, current national legislative frameworks, curricular content and specific national issues responding to local needs and problems, as well as being influenced by the quality frameworks of transnational organizations (Alexander, 2008). Investigation of the interpretations of educational quality in a certain context is a way to learn about the priorities and problems identified in education in that setting. Changes in the interpretations of quality and ideas on how to ensure quality reflect more extensive changes in education governance. Scholars have proposed various theoretical models of governance to highlight the roles that policies concerning quality can play in the regulation of educational institutions. For example, Neave (1988, 1998) draws attention to the ‘cultivation of quality’ in higher education, and contrasts the ‘state control’ mode of regulation where evaluation of quality was reduced to administrative verification with the newer ‘evaluative state’ mode where evaluation functions as a steering instrument to mobilize universities to pursue self-improvement. Other researchers explore the mechanisms through which Quality Assurance and Evaluation (QAE), as a complex of policies for ensuring quality and accountability in education, enables continuous data production and constant comparison nationally and transnationally (see, e.g., Grek et al., 2009; Ozga, 2009; and other work by these authors). These scholars claim that QAE instruments create new forms of governance on both the macroand micro-level, changing the political space in Europe and promoting the self-regulation of educational institutions. Maroy (2008) speaks about ‘bureaucratic-professional’ and ‘post-bureaucratic’ models of state governance, which differ in the ways they define and assure education quality. While taking these theoretical models into account, in this article I assume a critical stance and aim to problematize the perception that distinct and entirely different governance models exist as historical realities, and that by implementing certain QAE instruments the state necessarily changes the mode of governance. I intend to highlight complexities, contradictions and continuities within and between previous and current regimes of education governance in Russia. This analysis is guided by two main research questions: 1) What has changed and what has remained unchanged in Russian school education policy with the transition from the Soviet period to the present state? and 2) How do different legacies and influences contribute to the QAE policy implemented at the local level? To answer these questions, I start with a brief inquiry into the history of QAE policy in Russia, and then proceed to analyse the conceptualizations of quality and the accounts of quality assurance practices in schools in a particular locality in present-day Russia. For the local-level analysis, I use more specific questions which are presented later in the article. As a point of departure for the analysis of Russian QAE policy I take the ‘regimes of governance’ proposed by Maroy (2008), since they focus on the national-level policy in school education. In the ‘bureaucratic-professional’ regime the state assumes the main responsibility as guarantor of education quality, and aims at ensuring it by issuing rules and norms for all elements of the education system and controlling compliance with these. Gurova 399 Inspections and audits function as primary quality assurance instruments. At the same time, in the bureaucratic-professional model, teachers exercise a certain autonomy, as their competencies and careers are regulated primarily through professional unions (Maroy, 2008: 15–18). This is contrasted with ‘post-bureaucratic’ regimes of governance: the evaluative state model in which the state sets standards and then ensures compliance with them through evaluation, and the market model, to which competition and school choice are central (Maroy, 2008: 24). These more recent governance regimes are also conceptualized as new public management (NPM) (Hood, 1991). NPM principles in education governance imply that responsibility for the quality of outcomes is shifted to local ‘service providers’ (schools and teachers) that are guided by state standards, and instruments based on comparison, such as ‘best practices’ and rankings. The state motivates education providers to improve quality through quasi-market mechanisms, introducing per capita funding that empowers ‘consumer’ choice and fosters competition between schools. In this model, it is crucial that ‘consumers’ have information on the quality of the ‘providers’, which is accomplished by introducing external evaluation of schools’ quality and publicizing the results. Another NPM mechanism of guaranteeing the quality of education is by introducing performance-based funding and salaries for educational service providers, for which ‘objective’ evaluation of the quality of outcomes by the state is also essential. These theoretical models offer important insights into the functions of QAE in education governance. However, research that utilizes these models often creates images of clear-cut distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ governance regimes. Some authors infer that NPM-istic shifts in governance signify the adoption of ‘global scripts’ (Meyer and Ramirez, 2000) or the imposition of neo-liberal mechanisms by external forces (e.g. Arnove, 2009). Seeking to develop a more complex understanding of the evolution of QAE policy in Russia, I draw inspiration from other studies of socialist and post-socialist contexts that argue against drawing a clear boundary between socialism and neo-liberalism, or viewing the postsocialist condition as a process of gradual but inevitable convergence with ‘Western’ and ‘global’. Iveta Silova (2010) claims that ‘the state of incompleteness and uncertainty is a key to understanding the post-socialist condition’ (Silova, 2010: 10), and this quality of postsocialism makes it particularly suitable for studies of divergence and difference within globalization processes. In a corresponding example of research, the study of performance audits in China, Andrew Kipnis (2008) demonstrates that familiar ‘neo-liberal’ practices of performance assessment and management in China draw on different ideological roots than those in the West. He further argues that ‘the global rise of audit cultures needs to be understood in a broad, anthropological, comparative framework, not one narrowly concerned with a critique of ideas that diffuse from the West’ (Kipnis, 2008: 286). Kipnis calls for detailed studies of local practices and contexts as particularly suitable for problematizing the dichotomy between neo-liberalism and socialism (Kipnis, 2008: 284–286). The present paper positions itself within this body of research. The development of Russian QAE policy To make sense of the current Russian QAE policy in terms of its legacies we need to cast a glance at the education policy in Russia in the periods that are commonly viewed as having cardinal differences from one another: post-war Soviet Russia; the transition period starting from perestroika in the 1980s to the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidential term in 1999; and present-day Russia. This section aims to highlight the differences between the education 400 Policy Futures in Education 16(4) policy of these periods, their core values and principles, but at the same time to demonstrate the complexity and continuities within and between these historical phases, acknowledging the partially artificial nature of such temporal divisions. Soviet quality assurance: state provision and ideological control Education played a key role in the Soviet state’s aspiration to build a society of egalitarianism and solidarity. Schools were to raise future citizens in the spirit of discipline and collectivity, and to provide them in an equitable way with knowledge, skills and the ideology necessary for their future contribution to the socialist economy and to the political project of communism. The ‘Stalin school model’ developed in the 1930s was characterized by colossal amounts of information students needed to digest, rigid discipline, ideological indoctrination and compulsory community service for students (Mayofis, 2015: 39). The state not only guaranteed the right to a free education and assumed the ultimate responsibility for education quality, but also sought to enforce this right and demanded that citizens make good use of the free education to develop themselves into efficient members of socialist society (Livschiz, 2006: 559). Every student had the obligation to study to the peak of his or her abilities, and was overseen by school workers and by the student organizations in which every student was enrolled from the first grade and the local organs of the Communist Party that had influence over parents at their workplaces. With student learning secured through these means, the focus of the state throughout the Soviet period was on training teachers, providing schools with sufficient inputs and developing curricular content in accordance with the current state needs (Kukulin et al., 2015; West and Crighton, 1999). The QAE policy that existed, with minor modifications, until the end of the Soviet period was developed in the 1940s (Livschiz, 2006). The decrees of 1944 ‘on the improvement of the quality of education in schools’ introduced a five-tier grading system, examinations and symbolic rewards for outstanding results in studies (‘silver’ and ‘gold’ medals to school graduates). Until the changes in QAE policy in the 2000s, the grades of students and indicators tied to them, such as percentages of students successfully transitioning to the next school year or numbers of graduates awarded with medals, served as the main measures of quality (see, e.g., Bakker, 1999: 296). In order to ensure that this numerical data reflected the actual achievement of students, the decrees as well as official rhetorical texts of the 1940s prohibited the evaluation of school or teacher quality based on their students’ grading, abolished the practice of socialist competition in education and condemned ‘formalistic’ grading that did not reflect the students’ actual knowledge (Mayofis, 2015: 40–41). Regular inspections in schools controlled teachers ‘objectivity’ in the way they assigned marks: The mark ... should reflect the true knowledge of students. When fighting the poor progress of students, one should not follow the path of lowering standards, as some teachers tend to do. Only through raising standards can the quality of knowledge be improved. (From an article in the Teacher’s Newspaper, 1948, quoted in Mayofis, 2015: 82) Inspections, school reports and statistics represented the main quality control instruments during the Soviet period. Despite the carefully sustained appearance of state control over every aspect of school life and constant progress and improvement of quality, Soviet education faced many challenges, and education policy addressed them in internally controversial ways (Byford and Jones, Gurova 401 2006). The post-war school worked under conditions of economic and social devastation, and state statistics registered massive dropouts and repetitions of study years (Livschiz, 2006; Mayofis, 2015). While the state lacked sufficient resources for intervention, the responsibility for these poor results was shifted to teachers, who were accused of ‘formalistic’ attitudes to teaching and of lacking the necessary pedagogical skills (Mayofis, 2015: 61–64). The development of this discourse made it possible to criticize the inflexibility and over-bureaucratization of the school system, and to call for an individualized, studentcentred approach in teaching – amid a system built upon the principles of collectivism. The individualized approach as a pedagogy was promoted by collecting and studying the ‘experience of the best teachers’ (Mayofis, 2015). The fight against ‘formalistic attitudes’ also included a critique of rote learning and a requirement to teach students to apply knowledge to practical tasks, which was probably necessitated by the new demands of the Soviet economy and the military (Mayofis, 2015: 42–43). To alleviate the shortage of resources in schools, and to regulate access to higher education, tuition fees for grades 8–10 were in place from 1940 to 1956, despite the obvious contradiction of this with the proclaimed principle of free education for all. The size of the tuition fee constrained access to education for poorer families in cities, and almost completely restricted it in rural areas where residents received no monetary salaries (Korableva, 2009). The research on Soviet education indicates that structural inequalities in the provision of resources to schools were not random but consistent, and contributed to the reproduction of social boundaries and the existence of elites in the avowedly egalitarian Soviet society (Byford and Jones, 2006). These contradictions and the internal diversity enabled by them (see Kukulin et al., 2015) paved the way for transformations in Soviet education in later periods and a gradual partial convergence of Russian education policy with global trends. A student-centred, individualized approach to teaching inspired the development of ‘innovative pedagogies’ and enabled the ‘democratization and humanization’ of education discussed in the next section. Transition: customized quality in autonomous schools In the 1980s, ideas about the tasks of the Soviet school system were greatly influenced by the political demands of perestroika and glasnost, which called for more freedom and truth in education as well as in other spheres of social and political life. Two collective actors played leading roles in introducing changes into education. One was the ‘innovative teachers’ (pedagogi-novatory) who advocated new teaching methods based on attention to the individual abilities and interests of students and evoking the creativity of teachers and students alike. Some of the most influential ‘innovators’ (e.g. Daniil Elkonin, Vasily Davydov, Leonid Zankov) were inspired by Lev Vygotsky’s theories of psychological development, which had been officially rejected since the 1930s. The methodology and teaching materials of the ‘innovators’ were disseminated through highly popular courses and seminars (Eidelman, 2007). The other agent of change was the Temporary Scientific Research Collective on Schools (VNIK) ‘Bazovaia shkola’ within the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences – a group of pedagogues who sought to implement a cardinal reform of Soviet education. The principles of the reform promulgated by this group included democratization, humanization, differentiation, openness, continuity and a developmental orientation of education. The leader of VNIK, Eduard Dneprov, became the first minister of education of post-Soviet Russia, and together with many of his colleagues from VNIK he developed the 402 Policy Futures in Education 16(4) new educational legislation based upon the aforementioned principles (Eidelman, 2007; Long and Long, 1999; Polyzoi and Dneprov, 2010). The first decade of the post-Soviet period brought radical changes to education, which can be attributed to internal calls for change and a new vision of the mission of education, but also to the conditions of economic crisis and the severe underfunding of schools. Educational governance was decentralized, which meant that particular administrative and fiscal responsibilities were shifted to regional and local authorities, school-level management was granted more autonomy and schools gained more freedom to create their own curricula. The transition to a market economy enabled the reinterpretation of education as a service and led to the partial privatization and commercialization of the school sector. At the same time, schooling was reinterpreted as a communal enterprise that should involve students and parents, and serve the interests of civil society at large (Long and Long, 1999; Polyzoi and Dneprov, 2010). The QAE policy was not specifically reformed in that period, but the concepts of education quality and quality evaluation practices in schools were influenced by the ongoing changes. New books on pedagogical management suggested that to ensure good management of a school its administration should define the desired educational outcomes on the basis of the identified needs and expectations of this school’s customers (students, families, local community, society and the economy at large), and obtain information on whether these outcomes were achievable. Quality was reconceptualized as individually tailored and to be captured through descriptive rather than numerical indicators (Gurova et al., 2015). Evaluation of quality was understood primarily as self-assessment at the level of schools, teachers and students for immediate feedback and improvement. There was also a renewed interest in testing techniques. This interest was connected, on the one hand, to the rehabilitation of the Russian psychologists of childhood and psychometricians who were banned by the early Soviet leadership in the 1930s; and, on the other hand, by the new possibilities for the collection and processing of assessment data afforded by the development of information technologies (Piattoeva and Gurova, 2018). International organizations such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and philanthropic foundations started working in Russia in the 1990s, and they recommended the reorganization of the QAE system in Russian education. They regarded the lack of standardized achievement testing that would provide commensurable statistics to the national level as a clear absence of monitoring and quality assurance policy (World Bank, 1995). At the same time, they praised the already ongoing reform efforts in Russian education policy as a whole, and attested to reformers’ intentions in the following terms: ‘These plans are all in the right direction and generally reflect where the priorities should be’ (World Bank, 1995: xiii). International actors offered three major sets of recommendations: 1) to introduce external quality evaluation mechanisms, primarily a standardized testing of learning achievement; 2) to involve diverse educational stakeholders in the quality assurance process; and 3) to develop new nation-wide education quality standards (Canning et al., 1999; OECD, 1998, 2007). In the 1990s, Russia also started to participate in international large-scale assessments of educational achievement. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) was undertaken in 1995 and 1999, and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were added in the 2000s. These studies were of particular interest to Russian researchers of education because of their methodological aspects. Russian scholars were eager to learn Gurova 403 from participation in such studies in terms of both testing techniques and the sociological analysis of educational achievement (Gurova et al., 2015). While the results of Russian students in TIMSS and PIRLS were quite high, this was not the case in PISA. Low PISA scores gave rise to public and academic discussions about the underlying causes of this ‘unsatisfactory’ performance and contributed to the intention to develop self-made, national instruments for measuring learning achievement. All these changes prepared the ground for a major reform of Russian QAE policy in education in the 2000s. It is important to bear in mind that it was a complex of internal and external influences that produced this reform, and to attribute it solely to the work of transnational organizations or to the will of particular personalities within the Ministry of Education would be an oversimplification. QAE in modern Russia: a comprehensive system resembling global trends The differentiation unleashed in education and the economic crisis of the 1990s led to a rapid increase in educational inequalities that both resulted from and enhanced the overall social inequality (Kosaretsky et al., 2014). To remedy the negative effects of the radical decentralization of the 1990s and to ensure compliance with state requirements, the Ministry of Education developed ‘state standards’ for every level of education, and implemented procedures for the licencing, attestation and accreditation of educational institutions (Filippov, 2000). Alongside these input-based procedures, the outcome-based quality assurance tool of the national school-leaving examination (the Unified State Exam (USE) or GIA-11) was introduced in 2001. Its main goals were claimed to be greater equality through facilitating all school-leavers’ access to higher education, and making the quality of school education greater, even across the country. By fostering compliance with the official school curricula, the USE facilitated the re-centralization of school education governance (Piattoeva, 2015). Another strong argument in favour of the USE concerned its role in producing ‘impartial’ and informed evidence for policy. As Tyumeneva (2013: xi) explains, given that there was no national large-scale assessment programme for ‘[s]ystem monitoring and accountability purposes, the USE has ended up being used to fill this gap’, despite the fact that it was not initially designed to yield this kind of information. Having a system of standardized tests that also produces statistics on education quality was perceived, symbolically and practically, as a means of bringing Russia closer to ‘modern’ means of regulation. Simultaneously with these discussions, the State Program for Education Development in 2013–2020 outlined a comprehensive system of education evaluation and quality control, comprising the regulation by the state of education activities, assessment of education achievement (GIA-9 and GIA-11, national examinations after grades 9 and 11, that can utilize different assessment techniques), procedures for independent quality evaluation and the participation of Russia in international studies (Government of Russia, 2012: 218). Currently, scores in national examinations serve as primary indicators of education quality in national and regional policy documents on quality assurance, school rankings and teacher performance evaluation (Piattoeva, 2015). Defining the required educational outcomes through the GIA, and then publicizing the results achieved by schools, became a means of enhancing the motivation of teachers, of school administration and of local and regional authorities to comply with state educational standards (the national curriculum) (Bochenkov, 2013). 404 Policy Futures in Education 16(4) Educational quality in the current policy documents is defined as the ‘preparedness of the learner’ in ‘conformance to federal state educational standards’ (Law on Education, 2013, as quoted in Minina, 2017: 184). Measurable learning results occupy the central position in the statements on quality, and multiple quality stakeholders including parents, teachers, education managers and employers are mentioned in this document (Minina, 2017). However, the setting of quality criteria is still portrayed as an exclusive prerogative of the state, which exercises quality control in input (through institutional accreditation and audit) and in output (through measurable outcomes) levels (Minina et al., 2018). Hence, the legal guise of a state with free-of-charge high-quality education has been rhetorically maintained. The main difference from the Soviet model is that the responsibility for providing quality in the classroom has shifted from the government to educational institutions (Minina, 2017: 186, 191-192). While the recently introduced QAE instruments are analogous to those in Western societies, researchers characterize the context of their development and implementation as increasingly authoritarian. The USE was introduced in a top-down manner, as a means for accomplishing tasks prescribed by the government, and the multiple public and expert criticisms of this examination were scarcely noted. Thus, it has become a signature instrument of the ‘authoritarian modernization’ – the dominant reform paradigm in Russia since the beginning of President Vladimir Putin’s leadership in the 2000s (Starodubtsev, 2013: 52– 54). The ‘mask of neoliberalism’ in fact facilitates the neoconservative turn in educational governance, which is a part of wider political processes of neo-authoritarian restoration in Russia (Minina, 2017: 193). Intertwined legacies at the local level Studies of education reforms at the local and school level often reveal that the reform has only had a limited effect on everyday practices, that ‘new’ practices are intertwined with the ‘older’ ones or even that no significant changes have occurred in local educational governance (e.g. Hardy and Lewis, 2017; Selwyn, 2016; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). Historical studies of Soviet education also document the ambiguity and complexity of education policies and practices at the micro-level (Byford and Jones, 2006). In this section I present the observed practices of QAE and educational governance in one locality in Russia in order to discuss how the legacies of the different periods, that is, the Soviet era, the transition period and the current agenda, appear even more mixed at the local level than they are at the national policy level. The study was conducted in the Republic of Chuvashia (population 1.3m), located approximately 650 km away from Moscow. Chuvashia is representative of a middle-sized and middle-income region with about half of its population of non-Russian ethnicity. The region has a well-developed system of QAE that received positive reviews from external evaluators and is often presented as a ‘best practice’ at training sessions for QAE professionals. The education reforms implemented in the republic were guided by a World Bank project (2001–2006). The specific case from Chuvashia examined in this research is the city of Cheboksary (0.5m inhabitants), the capital of the republic and the place where all the regional QAE initiatives originate. The term ‘local’ is used in this article broadly for all subnational levels, whereas the terms ‘regional’ (meaning ‘within the Republic of Chuvashia’), ‘municipal’ (‘within the city of Cheboksary’) and ‘school’ are applied to provide more specific identifications within the realm of ‘local’. Gurova 405 The research material analysed for this article includes observation notes, interviews and local policy documents. School-level data was collected in two public schools in the same city district, educating children from lowerand middle-income families. A total of 25 interviews were conducted in schools (apart from the aforementioned schools, the heads of a further three schools were interviewed), along with 10-week observations of lessons, staff meetings and examinations. Also, seven interviews were conducted with representatives of municipal and regional educational authorities, complemented by observations of three municipal-level meetings for teachers and school administrators. For this article I analysed the local actors’ ideas of quality and QAE that were voiced in the interviews, meetings or in informal conversations (documented in observation notes). The analysis was guided by the following questions: (1) How do local actors define the quality of education? (2) How is the quality of education evaluated by local education authorities and inside schools? (3) What are the main procedures connected to QAE? In the interviews respondents were asked these specific questions. I also noted the ways in which teachers and administrators presented their schools, how they answered other questions and what messages the representatives of education authorities communicated to school staff in local meetings. The results of the analysis demonstrate the ways in which different historical legacies and recent influences coexist in local practices and discourses, and how they affect the governance of schools. Defining and measuring quality: emphasis on conditions, student achievement and upbringing The QAE policy of Chuvashia is outlined in the “Decree on the republican system of evaluation of the quality of education in the Republic of Chuvashia” (Ministry of education and youth policy of the Republic of Chuvashia, 2007) that establishes the ‘Regional system of evaluation of education quality’ and is reinforced by other decrees addressing more specific issues, such as teacher portfolio or evaluation of school administrators. The Decree gives the following definition of quality: Quality of education is a characteristic that reflects the level of correspondence between educational results actually achieved and the conditions of the educational process, on the one hand, and state requirements and standards, social expectations and personal needs on the other. (Ministry of education and youth policy of the Republic of Chuvashia, 2007: 2) The Decree continues to specify exactly what the educational results should be, and how they should be measured. It outlines an elaborate system of desired outcomes in education, grouped into four broad categories: the quality of educational results; the quality of conditions and resources; the socioeconomic context; and the effectiveness of the utilization of resources. For each desired outcome it provides numerical indicators in terms of which it is to be measured; the number of indicators totals 80. 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Research group: ‘International Perspectives on Educational Discourses, Policies and Practices’, Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Finland. 414 Policy Futures in Education 16(4) Appendix 1. Organizations performing quality evaluation and control at the regional and municipal level. Sources: regional policy documents and ministerial reports on the system of quality evaluation. Organization What they exclusively evaluate or control Forms of data collection Actions based on data Regional Obrnadzor (regional Service for the Supervision in Education, subordinate to Rosobrnadzor, The Federal Service for the Supervision of Education and Science) Compliance with national regulations in education Inspections of school documents Licensing and accreditation fines, orders CNOT (regional Centre for New Education Technologies, subordinate to the regional Ministry of Education) GIA (national exams) scores; national surveys and tests connected to particular reforms; international tests; monitoring of professional paths of graduates Statistics, test and exam results Analytical reports, seminars, rankings Institute of Education of the Republic of Chuvashia Attestation of teachers Visiting lessons, teacher’s portfolio Promoting teachers to higher ‘categories’ Non-educational regional and municipal organizations, over 20 Compliance with laws within own area of competence Inspections (of school documents and building), statistical data (reported by schools) Fines, orders Municipal Department of Education of the City of Cheboksary Activities related to upbringing (patriotism, health, sports, crime prevention) and public participation (parents’ involvement in school and public life of the city – participation in elections, sports/ patriotic/etc., events) Reports, competitions, meetings with school administrations and parents, parent/teacher complaints Based on own data and data aggregated from other organizations (primarily Centre for the Monitoring and Development of Education, CMIRO) – staffing and funding decisions about schools’ performance-based salaries of head teachers CMIRO GIA scores; national surveys and tests connected to particular reforms; all-Russia subject Olympiads Statistics, test and exam results Analytical reports and guidelines, seminars and training Police (prevention of juvenile crime) Supervision of families and children with criminal record Reports, meetings with school administration Reports to the city Department of Education Gurova 415