Efficiency of School through the Eyes of Parents

Abstract

In order to discover how parents of school students evaluate the state of things at school and what their expectations are in the light of the pay rise for teachers, in May and June of 2013 the Center for Continuing Education Economics under the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration questioned 3,300 parents (legal representatives) of school students in three regions of Russia: Sverdlovsk Oblast, Voronezh Oblast and Ivanovo Oblast, i. e. in a donor region, in a region with average social and economic indicators, and in a heavily subsidized region. The monitoring has been continued for the year 2014. Based on the data obtained, we have analyzed parental demands towards school education, degree of parents’ satisfaction, sufficiency of school education to pass the State Final Examination (SFE) and the Unified State Exam (USE), parents’ perception of the efficiency of school education in the context of the teacher pay rise. No essential difference was revealed between parental perceptions of the state of things at school in different regions, despite the significant gap between the living standards. Parental demands towards school are restricted to three core objectives: give children knowledge required for grown-up life and work; provide socialization (discipline, rules of behavior, getting into the habit of working, development of communication skills, etc.); inculcate interest to sports and productive hobbies. Parents believe that strong specialized schools are more productive in performing those functions. Thus, we conclude that teacher pay rise has not yet been helping reduce differentiation between schools by quality of education. Despite a rather high level of overall satisfaction with school education, parents tend to believe that their children won’t succeed in getting high SFE and USE scores with no test preparation courses. Almost one third of parents think that teacher pay rise could influence quality of education significantly (31.4%), while 40.3% feel changes would be inconsiderable. An overwhelming majority of parents count school teachers as middle class, which means that Russian teachers are no more perceived by parents and, hence, by students as economically unsuccessful, as it used to be in the early 2000s.