Hot Topic: Teachers and Parents Oppose the All-Russian Testing Work

The Teachers union "Uchitel" has posted a petition "Cancel the All-Russian Testing Works (VPR / ARTW)!", which received massive support.

Irina Mishina

More than 28 thousand people have already supported the petition "Cancel the All-Russian Testing Works (VPR)!" Why did the usual, as Rosobrnadzor writes, control cause such a massive protest in Russia?

Rosobrnadzor (Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency) and the Ministry of Education call the all-Russian testing works "diagnostics". With the help of VPR / ARTW officials will find out the quality of student training. This year, more than 7 million schoolchildren will write VPR / ARTW.

On the eve of the All-Russian verification work, officials from Rosobrnadzor (Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency) tried to calm down the school community as best they could. The head of the department Anzor Muzayev even devoted a special press conference to this and made a statement. "Teachers should not" train "schoolchildren on the All-Russian test works, which are designed to assess the real knowledge of students and the state of affairs in the subject", - said Muzayev. At almost the same time, State Duma deputy Elena Strokova proposed abolishing the VPR / ARTW.

It is noteworthy that the initiators of the petition were Moscow teachers, who, unlike regional ones, have a sin to complain about insufficient funding or lack of benefits. Novye Izvestia asked the press service of the Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency, is it planned in this regard, the abolition of the VPR / ARTW?

“It is not planned to refuse from VPR / ARTW, this is just one of the tests that are regularly carried out in every school”, - the press service of the department explained to us.

According to Rosobrnadzor (Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency), the results of the test should not affect the final grades. By the way, in social networks, we did not find a single post of schoolchildren who would be unhappy with the VPR / ARTW. The protest comes primarily from teachers. Maybe this is a problem for teachers who fear that a low level of knowledge of students will thus also show a low level of teaching?

“I could agree with this, if not for the mass of organizational overlaps”, - said Marina Baluyeva, co-chair of the Uchitel interregional union, a teacher from St. Petersburg, to NI. - In Russian schools, children study according to different programs and different textbooks, there is no single program in the country. This difference inevitably leads to different levels of knowledge. Often Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency gives tasks that do not coincide with the material covered in the curriculum of a particular school. Therefore, on the eve of CDF, children are often urgently removed from lessons, there is a rush of preparation, they are running to study topics that have not yet been covered.

"The school actually drops out for 2 weeks from the educational process. Schools also have different funding levels. And therefore, the level of knowledge in some rural school in Chukotka, where children by the 5th grade barely master arithmetic operations, cannot be compared with the level of Moscow and St. Petersburg students, for whom the doors of additional education courses at the most prestigious universities are open", - Marina Baluyeva believes.

"In the Union of Teachers "Uchitel" we were also informed that errors and inconsistencies in several subjects were found in the tasks of the VPR. “There was, for example, an error in the geography assignments. There, a question was asked, on which river the city of Voronezh stands, and the wrong answer was indicated as the correct one: Voronezh actually stands on the Don River. Not only absurd assignments cause dissatisfaction, but also the fact that teachers prepare for VPR / ARTW and check them free of charge, although this is not included either in the curriculum or in the teacher's duties", - the organizing secretary of the Uchitel interregional union Olga Miryasova told Novye Izvestia.

“Teachers are forced to print all assignments on paper at their own expense, process all of this and then, after checking, report on what they are planning to do to correct mistakes. This is additional work that is not paid. The preparation for the VPR / ARTW is also not paid for”, - complains Marina Baluyeva, co-chairman of the Teacher's union.

Obviously, the problem associated with VPR / ARTW has a material aspect as well.

According to the official data of Rosstat, the average salary of teachers for 2019 in Moscow as a whole was 116.7 thousand rubles. In addition, class teachers receive a monthly city remuneration for performing the functions of a class teacher in the amount of up to 12.5 thousand rubles for a class of 25 people. “Also, teachers of the city who actively use the MES (the online platform "Moscow Electronic School") receive an additional 10 thousand rubles a month, and the authors of the most popular and demanded materials can apply for grants from the Moscow government for their contribution to the development of the MES in the amount of up to 300 thousand rubles", -said the press service of the Department of Education in Moscow.

According to the portal Gorod Rabot.ru, the average salary of a teacher in Russia in September 2020 was 37,923 rubles . The salary of a teacher, according to data from open sources, consists of a basic salary (at least 18 hours of teaching lessons per week, the more hours a teacher has, the more his salary), a separate fee for checking notebooks and additional classes; in addition, almost every month a teacher can receive a stimulating bonus, it is paid for the winners and prize-winners of school Olympiads and for the introduction of new technologies. 5,000 rubles allowance - for classroom leadership. Work with disabled children and various health groups is considered separately. In addition, a rural teacher costs more hours than his urban counterpart. Also, the salary depends on the length of service and qualifications.

According to the data provided to us by the teachers union "Uchitel", in St. Petersburg the average salary of a teacher is 50-60 thousand rubles, in Volgograd and the region - about 20 thousand rubles. In the regions, a teacher's salary may not exceed 6 thousand rubles. Of course, in such conditions, the additional payment for the additional workload that teachers have in connection with VPR / ARTW would not be superfluous at all.

But there is one more aspect. If the results of VPR / ARTW for a particular teacher and for the school as a whole are low, this may cause complaints from the regional authorities. Sanctions can also be applied against a specific teacher.

“If a school shows a low result on VPR / ARTW, this will lead to a decrease in its rating and, accordingly, it will lose grants and will not receive additional funding. As for specific teachers, the situations are different. If the teacher is not very loyal to the school administration, the low results of the VPR / ARTW can become a pretext for administrative sanctions against him. Rosobrnadzor convinces us that VPR / ARTW is an internal matter of the school, but in fact, the results of these tests are monitored and thus reveal weak schools. Now in St. Petersburg, for example, the chairman of the education committee has made a proposal to unite strong and weak schools. This will inevitably affect the quality of education. All sorts of manipulations with regard to educational structures will be possible”, - Marina Baluyeva, co-chair of the Teachers union, shared with Novye Izvestia.

That is why VPR / ARTW often turns into profanation. Schools interested in high performance allow teachers to give hints to schoolchildren and even help in solving tasks - after all, VPR / ARTW is not written under cameras, like the Unified State Exam; control over the objectivity of decisions is not provided.

Can a VPR / ARTW be avoided? Let's say the child does not want to write the All-Russian test or the parents are against it for some reason. What to do?

It is highly likely that the student will still have to write VPR / ARTW. In its letter from 2017, Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency gave more or less detailed explanations about the VPR / ARTW. It says that for schools, participation in the CDS is considered mandatory, since Rosobrnadzor wants to diagnose the knowledge of schoolchildren and assess the quality of teachers' work. If this is a must for schools, then it is for students too.

In 2016-2018, some schools refused to participate in VPR / ARTW and chose other forms of knowledge diagnostics. According to Ch. 28 of the Federal Law "On Education in the Russian Federation", an educational organization has autonomy, which means independence in the implementation of educational, scientific, activities, and also free "in determining the content of education, choosing educational and methodological support, educational technologies for the educational programs they implement". In Art. 47 of the same law refers to the academic freedom of teachers who have the right to choose methods, programs and approaches to teaching. Articles 34, 44, 45 define the rights of schoolchildren and their parents to protect their interests in the field of education. But for some reason these legal norms do not exist for Rosobrnadzor (Federal Education and Science Supervision Agency).

Many parents have also signed the Petition of the Teachers Union "Uchitel" for the abolition of the VPR / ARTW. This is not surprising: after all, the preparation of a child for VPR / ARTW rests mainly on their shoulders - the teachers do not have the responsibilities and plans of preparing for the All-Russian Testing Work. Therefore, the list of parents' appeals to education officials is growing.

As the mother of an eighth-grader from the Leningrad region told on the blog platform of Mel teachers, one of these officials, in response to her letter about the refusal of the VPR / ARTW, said that testing works are extremely important: they say that advanced training institutes on this basis will develop tasks for improving teacher qualifications. In other words, to create the appearance of work for numerous bureaucratic structures that spring up like mushrooms after rain on the basis of invented checks.

If you walk around the bookstore, in the section "School Aids" you will find today most of the manuals for preparing for VPR / ARTW. Prices for them, for example, in the Labyrinth chain, range from 213 to 530 rubles. Now let's think about it: is it worth sacrificing the interests of your children and your own to the interests of education officials?