Kazan teachers fear that Russian legislators will deprive schools of their last staff members

The goal is to improve the quality of personnel

The authors of the initiative believe that teachers should receive additional professional education at the direction of the employer only in state and municipal educational organizations. The list of permitted ones also includes educational organizations in the federal territory of Sirius, at Skolkovo innovation centre and in the territories of innovative scientific and technological centres.

In fact, this means a ban on teaching for those teachers who have improved their qualifications or mastered an additional specialty in non-state educational centres. The State Duma has already considered this bill in the first reading.

The purpose of these changes is indicated in the explanatory note to the bill — “to improve the quality of professional training of teaching staff and Russian education in general” and “to guarantee high-quality additional professional education for teachers.”

“What can you learn remotely, without practice, in a short time?”

“The issue of the quality of additional education and professional retraining has been discussed for a long time, and first of all the issue was about doctors,” State Duma deputy from Tatarstan and chairman of the State Duma Committee on Nationalities Ildar Gilmutdinov told Realnoe Vremya. “Now many are studying and retraining remotely, but what can you learn remotely, without practice, in a short period of time? Even in Soviet times, when we studied and correspondence students came to the institute, the quality of correspondence education was low. We helped them, solved problems for them, and then they graduated with diplomas and already at work, other problems were solved for them. And when doctors are trained like this, public health is at risk, and when teachers are trained, the quality of education suffers.

Gilmutdinov emphasized that teacher training should be carried out using proven methods and clear, approved standards. Today, according to him, there are a sufficient number of state institutions in the country that can provide high-quality training and retraining of teachers.

The deputy also noted that no one is going to act rashly, and it will be necessary to take into account the fact that today in Russia such activities are carried out by non-governmental institutions with a good reputation, strong teachers who have proven themselves well:

“It turns out that they will be able to train specialists, but will not be able to improve their qualifications. And there are strong teachers working there who have retired and are passing on their knowledge and experience. When the law comes into effect, it will be necessary to see what happens to them, and, perhaps, make changes taking all this into account.”

The interlocutor added that it will take a long time to get out of the personnel “piss-off”, and the government is purposefully trying to solve the issues of providing specialists, specific steps in this direction, a set of measures that will need to be taken are being discussed. In addition to these measures, according to him, it is necessary to change the attitude towards teachers in society in principle:

“Today, some parents have simply hounded teachers, they illegally interfere with their activities. And if we do not protect teachers, including from this, then even if we give them mountains of gold, we will not lure young people to work in school.”

A diploma of the established form for 7,000 rubles

Today, many non-governmental and private educational organizations offer teachers to improve their qualifications or get a new specialty. They conduct training remotely — just pay money.

Search engines helpfully throw out links to the site, for example, of Expert from Krasnodar, a representative of the Novosibirsk Institute of Continuing Professional Education Goszakaz. Ironically, the certificate of the regional agent, a scan of which is posted on the website, contains a typo in the most visible place. And they undertake to give a second profession to teachers here for 260-510 academic hours (distance learning) for only 7,000-9,000 rubles.

Realnoe Vremya was unable to reach the management of the institution and receive official comments on the quality of education and the prospects of teachers trained in this way by phone numbers that are publicly available. But in the chat on the website, when asked what kind of diploma an engineer who graduated from a technical university will receive if he pays for the retraining course of pedagogy of professional education, teacher of information and mathematical disciplines, they answered: “You receive a diploma of professional retraining of the established state form... You can teach in any organization.”

The Centre for Professional Personnel Training registered in Kazan, undertakes to retrain as a physics teacher for 15,200 rubles and 256 hours of study in absentia. Their diploma of the “established form” will be issued to the newly minted teacher here remains a secret.

Also, teachers (and not only teachers) are taught remotely by the Voronezh Institute of Modern Education founded by the local Institute of Management, Marketing and Finance founded by Russian citizens Anatoly and Olga Zaytsev and Elena Zabiyako. Here, Realnoe Vremya was honestly informed that they issue a diploma from the Institute of Modern Education.

“Let's take a rural school where one teacher teaches 6-7 subjects”

Director of the Innopolis Lyceum, Arman Kostanyan, who received the title of the Teacher of the Year of Russia in 2023, is convinced of the timeliness of the measures taken by Russian legislators:

However, according to one of the best teachers in the republic, it is necessary to start solving the problems that have accumulated in the sphere of school education with more pressing issues. For example, by increasing teachers' salaries so that they are not forced to work with huge overloads, but receive decent money for one position. Then, he says, a stream of teachers willing to work will come to school, and this will allow filtering, weeding out weak specialists, and therefore, the quality of education will improve.

“Today, teachers do not go to university, but study and retrain in accelerated programs in order to quickly get a diploma,” says Kostanyan. “They need to quickly formalize everything and teach classes, because there are no teachers in the school, there is a shortage of personnel. Let's take some rural school, where one teacher teaches 6-7 different subjects, not related at all. There are teachers who teach chemistry, biology, geography, physical education, and something else. I understand where this is coming from, and I would solve the issue a little more globally than is currently proposed.”

“People don’t go remote because they have a good life”

The republican Ministry of Education and Science responded briefly to Realnoe Vremya’s request about the expected consequences of the adoption of the law, which introduces a ban on teachers who have undergone retraining in non-governmental organizations working in schools — that teachers whose training is paid for from the budget will not have problems. Difficulties may only arise for those who study at their own expense on paid courses.

The director of one of the Kazan schools shared her opinion anonymously, she believes that the adoption of amendments to the law on education could turn into a disaster:

“If such teachers are fired, this will completely strip schools bare. Training in commercial organizations is not always worse. Moreover, the Institute for the Development of Education is often taught by people who are far from school, from modern life, and they often rely on ancient, outdated methods, and life is changing. Plus, this institute is located on the Orenburg highway — it takes a long time for a teacher to travel from the other end of the city, it is inconvenient because of transfers and expensive. Kazan teachers do not earn enough to ride several hundred rubles a day on our expensive public transport! So they do not go to distance learning because they have a good life.”

In addition, the head of the school noted, full-time education of a teacher already today has a negative impact on the quality of education in the school where he works. Since there is often only one teacher for one subject in a school, and if he went to study on his own, there is simply no one to teach the subject:

“There is no one to replace him if there is only one biologist, one Chemistry, one Physics teacher at school!”

The director of an ordinary Kazan school agrees with the head of the super-lyceum, Arman Kostanyan: there is only one alternative to these measures — decent wages for teachers. As long as the teacher's salary remains at the same level as the cleaner's salary, the teacher remains in a humiliating position, and it is with this problem that we must begin to solve the problem of the quality of education.

Is the school raising its sails?

Director of the Kazan school SolNtse Pavel Shmakov also believes that the innovation will “expose” secondary educational institutions. And he also sees the solution to the problem of the quality of teaching staff in ensuring decent wages for teachers:

Shmakov says that his students' computer science is taught by their parents, who are IT specialists, and English is taught by specialists in this field, and it doesn't matter whether they graduated from a pedagogical institute — what's important is their knowledge in the right school in the region. First of all, in his opinion, the above-mentioned subjects, taught by people who have completed various types of retraining courses, will be “exposed” in schools, and this will become a problem. However, in general, he perceives the upcoming changes positively:

“Firstly, the attention to school itself is already good. Simply because, from my point of view, many officials are largely indifferent to school. Generally speaking, they think very little about school, they talk very little. Periodically, there are periods in the life of the country when they suddenly start talking about it, for example, in the 80s, when many innovative teachers appeared. If they start talking about it again now, that's good: a sailboat easily sails against the wind, but in calm weather it doesn't sail at all. For me, school is a sailboat that sails when someone needs it.”