The director decides everything – MK

The State Duma wants to give teachers the right to be approved as a school leader

The problem, which teachers had been whispering about for a long time, became noticeable even to deputies. School directors are sometimes appointed by people who have never previously worked in leadership positions in education. Anyone who hasn’t “sniffed gunpowder” in teachers’ rooms, classrooms and as an administrator has little idea of ​​all the nuances of school life.

However, in a letter addressed to the head of the Ministry of Education, the first deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Education, Yana Lantratova, focuses on something else. The deputy is concerned not just about the mass layoffs of teachers that occur because of the “new broom” at school, but primarily about young teachers. “According to the Russian Academy of Education, from 17 to 52% of young teachers leave schools in the first five years after starting work,” the parliamentarian worries. And he adds that one of the reasons for the general flight of young professionals is “the incompetence of the school administration.”

In the same address, the deputy head of the Duma committee refers to two high-profile stories of mass dismissals of school teachers from Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg, which are not completed today. There are two cities, but the root cause is the same – the arrival at the school of a new “effective director” who “does not hold anyone back.”

The situation at school No. 22 in Yekaterinburg is noteworthy in that the parents of the students created a fuss. It’s already September, and several subjects are not on the schedule, including basic ones such as Russian language, literature, computer science (and also biology, music and geography). It turned out that with the end of the 2022-2023 school year, 17 teachers left the school in one summer: four retired, the rest “for personal reasons.” All the “flying” teachers unanimously cite the appearance of a new director at the school, Ilya Smirnov, as the reason for the dismissal.

“At first he seemed so energetic and young to us – only 34 years old,” says a teacher at school No. 22, on condition of anonymity. “But then it turned out that the principal’s main method was to get along with no one; he managed to offend even our oldest teacher, 85 years old. And make money from everything. He is much less interested in the educational process. There is little information about the director – we only know that he worked as a computer science teacher for several years and has two “effective manager” certificates. You know, I saw different times and realized who Smirnov reminds me of: “decided” from the 90s. The same manner of communication.

A similar story is unfolding in St. Petersburg – there, 17 teachers also quit at the same time from school No. 338 (and “from within” they claim that there are more – 28 “old” teachers left in a year and a half). Such staff depletion at the school is also associated with the new director – Maria Svirko… It is interesting that even the schools themselves are similar – Sverdlovsk has always been considered a good school in the city, until recently it operated the Igra theater, which “even performed at the Golden Mask ” And now all the employees have left there: “disregarding attitude and humiliating salaries.” And school 338 has historically been considered the best school in the Nevsky district. The district administration reported: teachers left “for personal or professional reasons, including retirement, relocation, local employment, and change of professional activity.”

The main reason for such situations was announced by the Yekaterinburg educational department. The school director is directly appointed by the founder. And the founder is, most often, the department of education.

For example, a couple of years ago an effective director was sent to one of the oldest schools in St. Petersburg.

“And in the shortest possible time, she destroyed everything that was possible here,” recalls the mother of two school graduates. – From a well-known lyceum with humanitarian classes, which was impossible to get into, they turned it into an ordinary multidisciplinary school. They closed the architectural program, the poetry club, philological communities, the theater… Everything they were famous for. As a result, the 26-year-old headmistress, who, as we learned, used to work as a head teacher in the deep provinces, after a lot of trouble, left. And our school, where I went to the Olympics as a girl, was merged with another school as a secondary branch.

Against the background of such direct appointments of directors by the founder, the proposal of the State Duma Education Committee to establish a procedure for voting the school teaching staff for a new leader looks somewhat utopian. They say that only those appointees for whom 75% of the teaching staff voted should be retained. In reality, voting “correctly” is not difficult, especially at school. But most likely, teachers will not be asked when appointing a new manager to an administrative position in education.