🛀🏽 🚤 👨🏿‍🚀 Schools, teachers, students, their grades and ratings 🙍 ☂️ 📣

After much thought about what to write my first post on Habré, I stopped at school. The school occupies a significant part of our life, if only because most of our childhood and the childhood of our children and grandchildren pass through it. I'm about the so-called high school. Although much of what I will write about can be applied to any centrally-managed social sphere. There are so many personal experiences and thoughts on this subject that, I think, this will be a series of articles “about school”. Today I’ll talk about school ratings and grades, and what’s wrong with them.

What schools are there and why do they need ratings

Any good parent dreams of giving their children the best education possible. It is believed that this is ensured by the "quality" of the school. Of course, that few class of wealthy people who put drivers with bodyguards to their children considers the school level to be a matter of their own prestige and status. But all the rest of the population strives to choose the best school for their children within their capabilities. Naturally, if the school is the only one within reach, then the question of choice is not worth it. Another thing if you live in a large city.

Even in Soviet times, in that center of not the largest 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 say now, “authoritative” parents. Parents virtually pushed their elbows for the "best" school. I was lucky: my school was always unofficially listed among the top three (out of almost a hundred) in the city. True, the housing market and school buses, in their modern sense, did not exist. My road to school and back - in a combined march: on foot and by public transport with transfers - took on average an incredible 40 minutes in each direction. But it was worth it, because I was in the same class as the grandson of a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU ...

What can we say about our time, when not only the apartment can be changed for a better life for posterity, but also the country. As the theoreticians of Marxism predicted, the degree of ~~class contradictions in~~ competition for resources in capitalist society continues to increase.
Another question: what is the criterion of this very “quality” of the school? This concept has many facets. Some of them are purely material in nature.

Nearly the city center, excellent transport accessibility, nice modern building, comfortable lobby, spacious recreations, bright classes, a huge assembly hall, a full-fledged sports hall with separate changing rooms, showers and toilets for boys and girls, all kinds of outdoor areas for sports and creativity, 25- meter-long shooting gallery in the basement and even your school garden with fruit trees and vegetable beds, all this is buried in flower beds and greenery. It was not a retelling of the fantastic projects of our educational officials, but a description of my Soviet school. I am writing this not to evoke unkind feelings towards me. Just 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, of course, is not the limit of the security that some schools can boast in Russia now. Pools, tennis courts, croquet and mini-golf courses, restaurant meals, horseback riding lessons and full board - any whim for your money (if the school is private), and sometimes for budget ones (if the school is departmental). Of course, not for everyone, of course, there is competition too. But now it is not for some abstract resource of attention and exaltation there, as in the USSR, but, directly, for money.

But in my childhood, few of us paid at least some attention to all this. Without any arrogance, we ran to friends at their schools, absolutely not noticing either the lack of an adequate gym, or any decent school grounds for holding rulers. Also, our less fortunate (in terms of the prosperity of their schools) girlfriends, getting on occasion to our school, were surprised at her unusual chicness only for the first time and only for a moment: well, walls and walls, platforms and platforms, You think, at school, this is not at all the main thing. And that is true.

All this “expensive-rich” would not have cost anything if there had not been a highly professional teaching staff in my school. Each success and each failure has its own reasons. I do not exclude that the reasons why my school had a high level of teaching correlate with the reasons why she had the described material and technical security. There was a teacher distribution system in the USSR, and this system obviously distributed the best teachers to the best schools. Despite the fact that the teachers of our school did not get the slightest advantage over other teachers in the city in terms of salaries, they were nevertheless in a privileged position: at least, their professional circle of contacts and working conditions were better than others. Perhaps there were some incentives for “greyhound puppies” (apartments, vouchers, etc.), but I really doubtthat they went down below the level of the head teacher.

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 work and the competition of schools for good teachers. True, the latter were outsourced to headhunters.

The free market has opened a niche of information support for competition. It simply had to appear school ratings. And they appeared. One example of such ratings can be found here .

How ratings are considered and what it means

The rating methodology 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 school education is to continue education in a higher educational institution. Accordingly, the rating of the school is the higher, the more its graduates go to universities, which also have their own level of "prestige", which affects the rating of the school.

The fact that someone might dream of getting just a good secondary education is not even considered. Indeed, what difference should you have as this or that school teaches, if you are not aimed at taking the highest level? And how, in general, can a rural school be good in which not a single student is studying, whose family would be able to afford the child's higher education? In other words, they show us that they are ready to spend efforts only on the best. If you are an element of society with a layer “lower than high”, then they will not help you “emerge”. There they have their own competition, why do they need a new one?

Therefore, an absolute minority of schools are listed in published Russian private ratings. State ranking of schools in Russia, as in the USSR, if any, is definitely not in the public domain. The entire public assessment of the quality of schools by the state was expressed in the "awarding" of the honorary titles of "lyceum" or "gymnasium". The situation in which each Russian school will have its own public place in the ranking seems so far fantastic. I suspect that officials from education are sweating cold at the mere thought of the possibility of publishing such a thing.

The methods for calculating available ratings usually do not even take into account the proportion of graduates who have entered a university, but simply their absolute number. Thus, a small school, no matter how good it is, is unlikely to be ahead of the school, which is three times more, even if the first one has a 100% share and the second only 50% (ceteris paribus) .

Everyone knows that the vast majority of admission to universities is now based on the final exam score. Moreover, loud scandals with fraud during the exam, when an abnormally high academic performance was noted in whole regions of the Russian Federation, are still fresh. Against this background, such a rating, obtained essentially for a combination of the Unified State Examination and the financial solvency of the inhabitants of a particular territory, without taking into account, at least, the fact that graduates of schools successfully completed the university is not enough.

Another drawback of the available ratings is the lack of taking into account the effect of the “high base”. This is when a popular school is so demanding on candidates for admission to its lists that a large number of graduates who have arrived turn into something for granted. Thus, the school owes its rating to talented students rather than talented teachers. And this is also not quite what we expect from an “honest” rating.

Speaking of teachers: very often we do not notice trees outside the forest. School rating is, in fact, such a surrogate for teacher rating. Teachers are so important to us at school. Sometimes, with the departure of a single teacher, a school may lose all its dominant position in a particular subject. Therefore, it makes sense to personify the ratings of schools, turning them into teacher ratings. Of course, education officials and school management (like other employers) are absolutely not interested in enhancing the role of a simple teacher in society (like other lower-level employees). But this does not mean at all that society itself is not interested in this.

About teaching, pedagogy and professional ethics of teachers

In later Soviet times, there was a standard set of universities that were required to be in any provincial city. There were a lot of specialists in the national economy. There was even a popular proverb that briefly and clearly formulated the stratification of higher Soviet education: "No mind - go to Honey, no money - go to Ped, and (if) neither one nor the other - to the Polytechnic." The peasantry in the late Soviet times was probably considered to have been largely defeated, therefore the proverb did not even mention Selkhoz, which often existed along with those listed. As can be seen from this folklore work, training in the provincial Pedagogical Universities was the traditional destiny of not rich, but thinking youth.

Such universities themselves (“pedagogical” by name) graduated teachers, and now, for the most part, teachers. I have long noticed that with the departure of the past Soviet era, the word "teacher" began to disappear from the school vocabulary until its complete disappearance. This is probably due to its ancient origin. To be a “slave for the protection and education of children” in the Soviet society of “victorious slaves” was not at all shameful, but, as it were, honorable. In a society of bourgeois ideals, no one even wants to associate with a slave.

The language cannot be called a teacher of a university professor, because it is understood that his student is an adult and a person who wants to study, who has decided on his priorities. Such teachers usually receive more school teachers from us, 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. A little benefit from the (pre) server, when no one wants or cannot for some reason “take” the served. The teacher (from the Greek "leading child" ) is not just a person who has knowledge of the subject or owns teaching methods. This is a specialist for working with children. The main task of the teacher is to interest.

A real teacher will never scream or be offended by a child, will not weave his personal relationships with parents into the educational process, and will not exert psychological pressure. A true teacher does not blame children for laziness, he is looking for approaches to them. A good teacher is not scary for children; he is interested in them. But how can we demand, or even ask, for teachers to be interesting to our children, if these teachers themselves are completely not interesting to us? We, as a society, ourselves are to blame for the extinction of teachers, we do little to save them.

Real teachers are most interested in the ranking of teachers. It's like a Red Book for endangered species. It is necessary to take into account each, then to cherish and cherish, to adopt the secrets of the profession. It’s also important to identify and show the world “teachers” who do not bother pedagogy, so that people know not only their heroes, but also their antipodes, and not confuse the former with the latter.

What other schools are there, and a little about grades

Whether long or short, but everything in life is changing. So, for family reasons, I suddenly changed the "elite" provincial school, to the usual capital. We can say that again (like that anecdotal collective farmer who accidentally arrived in the city and became a currency prostitute) I was “lucky."

Less than a year was left before leaving school. It was not enough for parents to look for a “decent” school in a new city for themselves. I was recorded in the first one. To be honest, I was pretty slobbery and quite used to my average score, fluctuating around the four (often from the bottom). But then suddenly I found myself a child prodigy.

This was the height of the Gorbachev "perestroika". Perhaps the presence in the capital of VCRs and cassettes with Hollywood films through the "corrupting influence of the West" completely disintegrated the Soviet system, or maybe in the "second-class" metropolitan schools it always has been, 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 previous 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 used to the amorphousness of students and the indifference of 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 will have all fives, except for the only four for the Russian language, which were not taught at that time in graduation classes. The headmistress, when meeting with her parents, earnestly apologized that I would not have the silver medal put to me, because “I had to order it in GORONO back in July,” and by then there could be no hope of worthy students from the school.

However, it cannot be said that the average mark in the new school was extremely low. Probably, for such a GORONO also did not favor. At that time, I understood the grading system that was practiced in my class this way: I listened to “five” in the lesson, came to the lesson “four,” and did not come to “three.” Oddly enough, there were a majority of threes in my new class.

I, who had never been a student in my life, only at this school I found with horror that it was considered normal for some students 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 course of the day. I won’t go into the details of regular use by more than half of the class of completely non-children's “stress relievers”. To complete the picture, I can only say that two of my classmates themselves 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 graduation class. Of course, I did not get any knowledge of the school curriculum there. But the experience gained enormous. There they showed me an absolute “bottom”; I have never seen a lower level of attitude towards studies since then.

I hope you will forgive me for such a lengthy narrative of my private experience. All that I wanted to prove with this: 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 language reflect a transformation in the consciousness of society, and, in particular, of its teaching part. Here is another such example. Recall how the unforgettable Agnia Lvovna writes about her brother’s habits: “I will recognize Volodina’s marks without a diary.” How long have you heard the word “mark” in the context of academic performance? Do you know why?

Since the introduction of ubiquitous schooling, teachers have always noted student success in journals. And this notorious record was called before - the “mark”. My grandparents also just called these tsiferki. Just at the time when they were in school, the memory of the people about slavery was fresh enough. Not about ancient Greek slavery (that is where the "teacher" comes from), but about our very own, - Russian. Still alive were many born serfs. That is why “evaluating” a person, that is, literally, assigning a “price” to him as a product, was considered inappropriate and caused unkind associations. So there were no “ratings” then. However, times have changed, and “grades” replaced the “grades” even before the “teacher” replaced the “teacher”.

Now you can more fully appreciate the mental transformation of teachers that I am talking about. If you cruelly dissect it to the psychoanalytic extreme, then it looks like a simple and understandable manifesto: “We are not slave teachers , whether you want to or not, take what we teach . "We don’t just want to celebrate the successes of others, we value these others, set the price ourselves." Of course, this manifesto has never been formulated explicitly 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 a school teacher in the Soviet-Russian economy.

Anyway. Leave psychoanalysis. And let us return from observing mental transformations to practical kinks on the ground. No matter how the marks are called now, let us try to soberly see what is essentially wrong with them.

Grades can be relative to highlight a student in one direction or another in front of classmates for educational purposes. They can be pretentious, through them a personal attitude to the student or his family can be expressed. With their help, they can solve the school’s task of staying in the conditional framework of statistics, lowered “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 the teacher deliberately underestimates the grade in order to hint to parents the need for additional payment for their services.

I also knew one teacher who drew marks in the magazine marks (as in the Japanese crossword puzzle). And this, perhaps, was the most “innovative and creative” application of them that I have ever seen.

If you look at the root of the problems with assessments, you can notice their principal source: conflict of interests. After all, the results of teacher’s work (namely, teachers and students consume teacher’s labor in schools) are evaluated by the teacher himself. It is as if the services of the cook, in addition to the preparation of the dishes themselves, also meant an assessment of the eaters for how well they ate the served food, and a positive assessment would serve as a criterion for admission to the dessert. There is something strange about this, agree.

Of course, the test system of the exam and the exam in many ways eliminates the disadvantages I have listed. We can say that this is a serious step towards the formation of fair learning outcomes. However, state examinations do not replace current grades: when you find out about the result, it is usually too late to do anything with the process leading to it.

How do we reorganize Rabkrin to improve the grading system and form a rating system in education

Is there a solution that could cut the whole designated “Gordian knot” of problems with ratings and ratings? Of course! And in this, more than ever, information technology should help.

To begin with, I will summarize the problems briefly:

Grades biased evaluate student success.
Grades do not evaluate the work of the teacher at all.
Teacher ratings are absent or not public.
School public ratings do not cover all schools.
School ratings are methodologically imperfect.

What to do? First you need to create a system of educational information exchange. I am more than sure that its semblance already exists somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Education, RosobrNadzor or somewhere else. In the end, it is not more complicated than many tax, financial, statistical, registry and other information systems successfully deployed in the country - it is possible to recreate it. 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 in working with information, the main thing is accounting and control. What should this system take into account? I will also list it:

All cash teachers.
All cash students.
All the facts of performance checks and their results, sorted by dates, topics, subjects, students, teachers, assessors, schools, etc.

How to control? The control principle here is very simple. It is necessary to separate the training and checking training results and not allow to distort measurements. In order for the estimates to exclude distortions, subjectivity and randomness it is necessary:

Randomize the time and content of checks.
Personalize student assignments.
Anonymize everyone in front of everyone.
Check assignments by many appraisers to get a consensus assessment.

Who should become appraisers? Yes, they are the same teachers, they only have to check not those who are taught, but the abstract works of foreign students, who for them are “no one should call,” 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 colleagues, then the system should notice this, tell him and lower his remuneration for the grading process (whatever that means).

What should be the tasks? The task defines the limits of measurements, like a thermometer. You will not be able to find out the exact value of the quantity if the measurements are “off scale”. Therefore, the tasks should initially be "impossible to complete." It should not scare anyone if the student has completed the work only 50% or 70%. It is scary when the student completed the work 100%. This means the task is bad and does not allow you to accurately measure the limits of knowledge and abilities of the student. Therefore, the volume and complexity of tasks should be prepared with a sufficient margin.

Suppose that there are two sets of students taught by different teachers in a certain subject. For the same time, both sets learned as a result of a conditional average of 90%. How to determine who taught harder? To do this, you need to know the initial level of students. One teacher had smart and trained children, with an initial knowledge of 80%, and the second was not lucky, his students did not know almost anything - 5% with a control measurement. Now it’s clear which of the teachers did a great job.

Therefore, the checks should cover areas not only covered or current topics, but also absolutely not studied. This is the only way to see the result of the teacher’s work, and not the selection of candidates when enrolling in an educational institution. Let the teacher not find the key to a particular student, this happens, it doesn’t matter. But if the average progress of tens and hundreds of his students “falls through” against the background of the average, then this is a signal. Maybe it’s time for such a specialist to go “teach” at a university, or else to hell?

The main functions of the system are emerging:

Appointment of tests of knowledge and skills of students.
Definition of random reviewers.
Formation of personal verification tasks.
Transfer of assignments to students and performance results to evaluators.
Deliver assessment results to interested parties.
Drawing up actual public ratings of teachers, schools, regions, etc.

The implementation of such a system should ensure greater purity 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 only a concept so far, and all this is easier to come up with than to implement. But what about the concept itself?