Nezavisimaya Gazeta: “Bureaucracy Taken Off the Curriculum”
Putin starts purging the educational environment
As promised, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got down to revising Russia's bureaucratic system, inspecting one ministry after another. In January, he deprived the Agriculture Ministry and the Emergency Situations Ministry of their excessive administrative functions. In February, the time came for the Education and Science Ministry.
Yesterday, the prime minister chaired another meeting within his campaign to improve supervisory, regulatory, and licensing policies and government services in education. Education Minister Andrei Fursenko reported on how to remove administrative barriers in the sphere. Before the meeting, I asked Andrei Fursenko whether he thought this would be his day. He replied philosophically: "Who knows whose day this will be." He was right to a certain extent, since the topic discussed was far from pleasant. Vladimir Putin's introductory speech only confirmed his disturbing presentiments. He did not make personal remarks, but was highly critical in his evaluations of the current state of Russia's education system.
The prime minister recalled that a total of 1,250 billion roubles had been allocated to education from federal sources alone over the past four years. "It is quite a big sum. It is a huge sum," he drew the balance with a bookkeeper's regret. However, increased state financing did not cure the educational system of excessively bureaucratic procedures and officials' arbitrary rule. Vladimir Putin referred to the procedures for applying for licenses, certificates, and other documents as being "burdensome and inconvenient." He added that the system was overloaded with administrative procedures that could drag on for months. Meanwhile, many supervisory measures applied to institutions of higher education are formal and fail to accomplish their tasks.
Russia currently has a total of 140,000 educational institutions, including schools, colleges and universities. According to the legislation in force, once in every six years universities undergo expert evaluations. The prime minister referred to the procedure as being tiresome and expensive. A university has to submit up to 250 various documents totaling 3,000 pages. Licenses should not be limited in term but the penalties for license and regulation violations must be toughened.
Vladimir Putin was indignant at how much the expert evaluations cost – institutes and universities paid 1.9 billion roubles for these services in 2009. The costs for university accreditation reach 1.5 million roubles, and these costs are passed on to the students in the end. He suggested that educational institutions must be relieved from licensing and accreditation fees, which should be replaced by a fixed and transparent state duty. However, it was not specified where the money for paying the state duty would come from and whether the duty would relieve students from such levies. Andrei Fursenko reported that according to preliminary calculations, the state duty would cut accreditation spending by 50%.
The prime minister also voiced the need "to clear the education system of marginally credible schools, which churned out irrelevant diplomas for profit, and offered only a low quality education." It would not be too difficult if licensing and state registration mechanisms fostered good competition in the educational sphere. Andrei Fursenko was ready to sign these words. However, the minister added that the number of educational institutions would inevitably fall due to the unfavourable demographic situation.
The Education and Science Ministry received another hit when the prime minister criticised the ministry for combining supervisory activity with payable services. "This is a breeding ground for corruption. The accreditation system must be efficient and transparent," Vladimir Putin said. Circulation of paper documents can be cut if electronic document management is introduced.
Igor Naumov
