After much thought about what to write my first post on Habré, I settled on the school. School occupies a significant part of our life, if only because it passes through most of our childhood and the childhood of our children and grandchildren. I'm talking about the so-called high school. Although much of what I will write about can be applied to any centrally controlled social sphere. There are so many personal experiences and thoughts on this subject that I think it will be a series of articles “about school”. And today I will talk about school ratings and grades, and what is wrong with them.
What types of schools are there, and why do they need ratings?
Every good parent dreams of giving their children the best education possible. There is an opinion that this is ensured by the “quality” of the school. Of course, that small class of wealthy people who assign drivers with bodyguards to their children consider the level of the school also as a matter of their own prestige and status. But all the rest of the masses of the population strive to choose the best school for their children within their possibilities. Naturally, if the school is the only one within reach, then there is no question of choice. It's different if you live in a big city.
Even in Soviet times, in that center of a not very large province, where I spent most of my school years, there was already a choice and there was competition. Schools competed with other schools for the most, as they would now say, “authoritative” parents. Parents virtually elbowed each other for the “best” school. I was lucky: my school was always unofficially ranked among the top three (out of almost a hundred) in the city. True, there was no housing market or school buses in the modern sense. My journey to school and back - a combined route: on foot and by public transport with transfers - took on average an unimaginable 40 minutes in each direction. But it was worth it, because I studied in the same class as the grandson of a member of the CPSU Central Committee...
What can we say about our time, when not only the apartment can be changed for a better life for descendants, but also the country. As Marxist theorists predicted, the degree of class contradictions in competition for resources in capitalist society continues to increase.
Another question: what is the criterion for this very “quality” of a school? This concept has many facets. Some of them are purely material in nature.
Near the center of the city, excellent transport accessibility, a good modern building, a comfortable lobby, spacious recreation areas, bright classrooms, a huge assembly hall, a full-fledged sports hall with separate changing rooms, showers and toilets for boys and girls, all kinds of open areas for sports and creativity, 25- a meter-long shooting gallery in the basement and even a school garden with fruit trees and vegetable beds, all this is buried in flower beds and greenery. This was not a retelling of the fantastic projects of our educational officials, but a description of my Soviet school. I am not writing this to evoke ill feelings towards myself. It’s just that now, from the height of my years, I understand that the rumors, on which the then unofficial rating of the city’s schools was based, had a very solid and clear base.
And this, clearly, is not the limit of the security that some schools can boast of in Russia now. Swimming pools, tennis courts, croquet and mini-golf courses, restaurant meals, horseback riding and full board - for your money, any whim (if the school is private), and sometimes for budget (if the school is departmental). Of course, not for everyone, of course, there is competition here too. But now it is not for some abstract resource of attention and elevation, as in the USSR, but, directly, for sums of money.
But in my childhood, few of us paid any attention to all this. Without any arrogance, we ran to friends in their schools, absolutely not noticing neither the lack of an adequate gym, nor any decent school grounds for holding rulers. Also, our less fortunate (in terms of the prosperity of their schools) friends, girlfriends, getting into our school by chance, were surprised at its unusual chic, maybe only for the first time and only for a moment: well, walls and walls, platforms and platforms, Just think, at school, this is not at all the main thing. And that's true.
All this “expensive and rich” would not have been worth anything if my school had not had a highly professional teaching staff. Every success and every failure has its own reasons. I do not rule out that the reasons why my school had a high level of teaching correlate with the reasons why it had the described material and technical support. The USSR had a teacher assignment system, and this system apparently assigned the best teachers to the best schools. Despite the fact that the teachers of our school did not receive the slightest advantage over other teachers in the city in terms of salary, they were nevertheless in a privileged position: at a minimum, their professional circle of friends and working conditions were better than those of others. Perhaps there were some incentives with “greyhound puppies” (apartments, vouchers, etc.), but I very much doubt that they went below the level of head teachers.
In modern Russia, there is practically no system for distributing teachers among schools. Everything is left to the market. To the competition of schools for parents and parents for schools was added the competition of teachers for jobs and the competition of schools for good teachers. True, the latter are outsourced to headhunters.
The free market has opened up a niche of information support for competition. School ratings simply had to appear in it. And they appeared. One example of such ratings can be seen .
How ratings are calculated and what it means
The methodology for compiling ratings in Russia did not become original, and, in general, repeated the approaches of foreign countries. In short, it is believed that the main purpose of obtaining a school education is to continue education in a higher educational institution. Accordingly, the rating of the school is the higher, the more its graduates enter universities, which also have their own level of “prestige”, which affects the rating of the school.
The fact that someone can dream of getting just a good secondary education is not even considered. Indeed, what difference should it make to you how this or that school teaches, if you are not aimed at taking the highest line? And how, in general, can there be a good rural school in which not a single student is studying, whose family would be able to afford a higher education for a child? In other words, they show us that they are ready to spend their efforts only on the best. If you are an element of society with a layer “below the high”, then they will not help you “emerge”. They have their own competition there, why do they need a new one?
Therefore, the absolute minority of schools are listed in the published Russian private ratings. The state ranking of schools in Russia, as in the USSR, if it exists, is definitely not in the public domain. The entire public assessment by the state of the quality of schools was expressed in the “awarding” of honorary titles of “lyceum” or “gymnasium” to them. The situation in which each Russian school will have its own public place in the ranking seems fantastic so far. I suspect that enlightenment officials break out in cold sweat at the mere thought of the possibility of publishing something like this.
Methods for calculating available rankings usually do not even take into account the proportion of graduates who entered the university, but simply their absolute number. Thus, a small school, no matter how good it is, is unlikely to be able to outperform a school that is three times larger in the ranking, even if the first has a 100% enrollment rate, and the second has only 50% (ceteris paribus) .
Everyone knows that the vast majority of admissions to universities are now based on the final score of the Unified State Examination. Moreover, high-profile scandals with fraud during the delivery of the Unified State Examination are still fresh in my memory, when abnormally high academic performance was noted in entire subjects of the Russian Federation. Against this background, such a rating, obtained in fact for a combination of the Unified State Examination and the financial viability of the inhabitants of a particular territory, without taking into account, at least, the fact of successful completion of a university by school graduates, is worth little.
Another drawback of the existing ratings is the lack of consideration for the “high base” effect. This is when a popular school is so demanding on the candidates for enrollment in its lists that a large number of incoming graduates becomes a matter of course. Thus, the school owes its rating to talented students rather than to talented teachers. And this is also not quite what we expect from an “honest” rating.
By the way, about teachers: very often we don’t notice the trees behind the forest. School ratings are, in fact, a surrogate for teacher ratings. It is teachers who are so important to us at school. Sometimes, with the departure of a single teacher, a school can lose all its dominant positions in a particular subject. Therefore, it makes sense to personalize school ratings by turning them into teacher ratings. Of course, education officials and school management (like other employers) are absolutely not interested in increasing the role of an ordinary teacher in society (as well as other lower-level employees). But this does not mean that society itself is not interested in this.
About teaching, pedagogy and professional ethics of teachers
In late Soviet times, there was a standard set of universities that were required to be in any provincial city. There was a constant need for a large number of national economy specialists. There was even a popular proverb that briefly and clearly formulated the stratification of higher Soviet education: “If you have no intelligence, go to Med, if you have no money, go to Pedagogical University, (and if) neither of these, go to Polytech.” The peasantry in late Soviet times was probably considered already basically defeated, so the proverb did not even mention Agriculture, which was often included along with those listed. As can be seen from this folklore work, studying in provincial pedagogical universities was the traditional lot of not rich, but thinking youth.
Such universities themselves (“pedagogical” in name) graduated teachers, and now, for the most part, lecturers. I have long noticed that with the passing of Soviet times, the word “teacher” began to disappear from the school vocabulary until it completely disappeared. This is probably due to its ancient origins. To be a “slave to protect and raise children” in the Soviet society of “victorious slaves” was not at all shameful, but rather honorable. In a society of bourgeois ideals, no one even wants to be associated with a slave.
It’s hard to call a university professor a teacher, because it is understood that his student is an adult and a person who wants to learn, who has decided on his priorities. Such teachers in our country usually receive more school teachers, therefore this position is often the goal of professional growth. Well, how will you be hired at a university if you are a teacher?
Meanwhile, the school needs teachers. There is little use for the (teacher) when no one is willing or able, for whatever reason, to "take" what is being given. Teacher (from the Greek ) is not just a person who has knowledge about the subject or who owns teaching methods. She is a child care specialist. The main task of the teacher is to interest.
A real teacher will never yell or be offended by a child, will not weave his personal relationships with parents into the educational process, and will not apply psychological pressure. A true teacher does not blame children for laziness, he looks for approaches to them. A good teacher is not scary for children, he is interesting to them. But how can we demand, or even ask, that teachers be interesting to our children, if these teachers themselves are not at all interesting to us? We, as a society, are to blame for the extinction of teachers; we are doing little to save them.
Real educators are most interested in the rating of teachers. It's like a Red Book for endangered species. Everyone must be taken into account in order to cherish and cherish later, to adopt the secrets of the profession. And it is also important to identify and show the world "teachers" who do not bother with pedagogy, so that the people know not only their heroes, but also their antipodes, and not confuse the first with the second.
What other schools are there, and a little about grades?
For a long time, for a short time, but everything in life changes. So, for family reasons, I suddenly changed the “elite” provincial school to an ordinary metropolitan one. It can be said that I again (like that anecdotal collective farm woman who accidentally arrived in the city and became a currency prostitute) was "purely lucky."
There was less than a year left before graduation. Parents had no time to look for a “decent” school in their new city. I was signed up for the first one that came along. I was, to be honest, quite a slob and was quite used to my average score hovering around a B (often below). But then suddenly I discovered myself to be a child prodigy.
It was the height of Gorbachev's "perestroika". Perhaps the presence in the capital of VCRs and cassettes with Hollywood films through the “pernicious influence of the West” completely decomposed the Soviet system, or maybe it was always like this in “second-rate” metropolitan schools, I will never know the reason. But the level of knowledge of my new classmates lagged behind mine (rather mediocre by the standards of my former school), on average, by two years.
And it cannot be said that all the teachers were also “second-rate”, but their eyes were somehow extinct. They are accustomed to the amorphousness of students and the indifference of the school leadership. Suddenly appearing in their "swamp", I immediately became a sensation. After the first quarter, it became clear that at the end of the year I would have all fives, except for the only four for the Russian language, which was no longer taught in the final grades of schools. When meeting with my parents, the headmistress sincerely apologized for the fact that I would not have the silver medal due to me, because “I had to order it from the GorONO back in July,” and by that time there could be no hope for the appearance of worthy students at the school.
However, it cannot be said that the average score at the new school was prohibitively low. The City Council probably didn’t complain about this either. I understood the grading system that was practiced in my class at that time as follows: listened in class - “five”, came to class - “four”, did not come - “three”. Oddly enough, the majority of C students in my new class were.
I, who had never been a student in my life, discovered only in this school with horror for myself that for some students it is considered normal to come to an educational institution in the middle of the third lesson and leave before the fifth. Of the 35 people who were in the class, usually no more than 15 were present at the lessons. Moreover, their composition usually changed during the day. I won't go into the details of the regular use by more than half of the class of not at all childish "stress relievers." To complete the picture, I will only say that two of my classmates became mothers that year.
After that, many times in my life I came across different schools where my children and the children of my friends studied. But I can safely say "thank you" to my graduating class. Of course, I didn’t get any knowledge of the school curriculum there. But the experience has been great. There I was shown an absolute “bottom”, I have never seen a lower level of attitude to study.
I hope you will forgive me for such a lengthy account of my private experience. All I wanted to prove with this is that grades are not always an indicator of the quality of education.
Grades vs grades, and what's wrong with them
Above, I have already paid attention to how changes in the language reflect a transformation in the consciousness of society, and, in particular, of its teaching part. Here is another such example. Remember how unforgettable writes about his brother's habits: "I recognize Volodya's marks without a diary." How long have you heard the word "grade" in the context of academic performance? Do you know why?
Since the introduction of ubiquitous schooling, teachers have always recorded student progress in magazines. And this notorious record was called before - “mark”. Even my grandparents just called these numbers. It's just that at the time when they were in school, the people's memory of slavery was quite fresh. Not about ancient Greek slavery (where the “teacher” comes from), but about our own, Russian. Many were still alive, born serfs. It is precisely for this reason that “evaluating” a person, that is, literally, setting a “price” for him as a commodity, was considered inappropriate and caused unkind associations. So there were no "assessments" then. However, times have changed, and "grades" have replaced "marks" even before the "teacher" came to replace the "teacher".
Now you can appreciate even more fully the mental transformation of teachers that I am talking about. If you brutally dissect it to the psychoanalytic extreme, then it looks like a simple and understandable manifesto: “We are not slaves -teachers, whether you want it or not, take what we we teach. We don't just want note the successes of others, we evaluate these others, we ourselves set a price for them.” Of course, this manifesto was never explicitly formulated by anyone. This is the secret fruit of the “collective unconscious”, which only reflects the reflections of the complex of many years of professional undervaluation of the school teacher in the Soviet-Russian economy.
Anyway. Let's leave psychoanalysis. And let's return from observing mental transformations to practical excesses on the ground. No matter what the marks are called now, let’s try to soberly see what’s essentially wrong with them.
Grades can be relative in order to highlight a student in one direction or another in front of his classmates for pedagogical purposes. They can be pretentious, and through them a personal attitude towards the student or his family can be expressed. With their help, schools can solve the problem of staying within the conventional framework of statistics imposed “from above” for political purposes. Assessments, in the form in which we have them in school magazines now, are always subjective. The most odious manifestations of bias also occur, when a teacher deliberately lowers a grade in order to hint to parents that they need additional payment for their services.
I also knew one teacher who used marks to draw patterns in a journal (like a Japanese crossword puzzle). And this was perhaps the most “innovative and creative” use of them I have ever seen.
If you look at the root of problems with estimates, you can see their principal source: conflict of interest. After all, the results of the teacher's work (namely, the teacher's work students and parents consume in schools) are evaluated by the teacher himself. It is as if the services of a cook, in addition to the preparation of dishes, also meant the assessment of eaters for how well they eat the food served, and a positive assessment would serve as a criterion for admission to dessert. There is something strange in this, you see.
Of course, the system of Unified State Examination and Unified State Examination tests largely eliminates the disadvantages I have listed. We can say that this is a serious step towards creating equitable learning outcomes. However, state exams do not replace ongoing assessments: by the time you learn about the result, it is usually too late to do anything about the process leading to it.
How can we reorganize the Rabkrin, improve the assessment system and create a rating system in education?
Is there a possible solution that could cut the whole “Gordian knot” of the problems with ratings and ratings? Certainly! And information technology should help in this more than ever.
First, let me summarize the problems briefly:
- Grades do not objectively measure student progress.
- Grades do not evaluate the work of a teacher at all.
- Teacher ratings are missing or not public.
- Public school rankings do not cover all schools.
- School ratings are methodologically imperfect.
What to do? To begin with, it is necessary to create a system of educational information exchange. I am more than sure that its likeness already exists somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Education, RosObrNadzor or somewhere else. In the end, it is no more complicated than many tax, financial, statistical, registry and other information systems that have been successfully deployed in the country - it can also be created anew. Our state is constantly trying to find out everything about everyone, so let it at least find out for the benefit of society.
As always when working with information, the main thing is accounting and control. What should this system take into account? I’ll also list it:
- All available teachers.
- All current students.
- All the facts of academic achievement tests and their results, categorized by dates, topics, subjects, students, teachers, evaluators, schools, etc.
How to control? The control principle here is very simple. It is necessary to separate the teacher and those testing the learning results and not allow the measurements to be distorted. In order for assessments to exclude distortions, subjectivity and accidents, it is necessary:
- Randomize the timing and content of checks.
- Personalize student assignments.
- Anonymize everyone in front of everyone.
- Review assignments with multiple graders to obtain a consensus grade.
Who should become appraisers? Yes, the same teachers, only they should check not those they teach, but the abstract works of other people’s students, who for them “are no one to call,” just like their teachers. Of course, it will be possible to evaluate the appraiser. If his grades are systematically significantly different from the average grades of his peers, then the system should notice this, point it out to him, and reduce his reward for the evaluation procedure (whatever that means).
What should the tasks be? The task determines the limits of measurement, like a thermometer. You will not be able to find out the exact value of the value if the measurements are “off scale”. Therefore, tasks should initially be “entirely impossible to complete.” It should not scare anyone if a student completed only 50% or 70% of the work. It’s scary when a student completes the work 100%. This means the task is bad and does not allow you to accurately measure the limits of the student’s knowledge and abilities. Therefore, the volume and complexity of tasks should be prepared with sufficient reserve.
Let us assume that there are two sets of students taught by different teachers in a certain subject. In the same amount of time, both sets were trained to a conditional average of 90%. How to determine who studied harder? To do this, you need to know the initial level of students. One teacher had smart and prepared children, with initial knowledge of a conditional 80%, and the second was unlucky, his students knew almost nothing - 5% during the control measurement. Now it is clear which of the teachers has done a lot of work.
Therefore, checks should cover areas not only of completed or current topics, but also of completely unstudied ones. This is the only way to see the result of the teacher’s work, and not the selection of candidates for admission to an educational institution. Even if the teacher may not find the key to a particular student, it happens, it’s not a problem. But if the average progress of tens and hundreds of his students “fails” against the background of the average, then this is already a signal. Maybe it’s time for such a specialist to go “teach” at a university, or somewhere else?
The main functions of the system emerge:
- Assigning tests of students' knowledge and skills.
- Definition of random checking evaluators.
- Formation of personal verification tasks.
- Transferring assignments to students and results of completion to evaluators.
- Delivery of evaluation results to stakeholders.
- Compilation of current public ratings of teachers, schools, regions, etc.
The implementation of such a system should ensure greater cleanliness and fairness of competition, give guidance to the education market. And any competition works for the consumer, that is, ultimately, for all of us. Of course, this is just a concept so far, and all this is easier to come up with than to implement. But what about the concept itself?
Source: habr.com