Management Dysfunction in Optimizing the General Education System

Abstract

The optimization of Russian secondary education carried out in 2010-2014 intending to strengthen the role of municipal authorities had some negative consequences. For instance, territorial educational authorities started receiving complaints about the violation of labor standards, and teachers began to quit their jobs. The purpose of this paper is to study the dependence of the dysfunctions manifested in the general education system on the management methods used by municipal authorities. The research method involves an all-Russian representative expert survey (2018) of specialists employed at territorial and municipal education authorities. The results of the study showed that the cause of destructive phenomena that had occurred in the field of work regulation of the general education system and made teachers quit their jobs was the domination of the administrative principle in the selection of personnel at the municipal level. The prescriptive management methods began to prevail at schools because the optimization of schools and changes in teacher standards in connection with higher teachers’ salaries were supervised by federal educational authorities, which stimulated municipal authorities to strengthen directorial management methods in the interests of the successful implementation of the optimization program. For this reason, municipal authorities began to select specialists with good managerial abilities, paying less attention to their creative side. The study showed that the priority of directive character in the work of municipal education administration bodies was generated by the excessive role of federal bodies in coordinating the territorial education system in labor-regulating and financial aspects. Conclusion: the federal system of general education management needs to be decentralized and creativity should be prioritized in the selection of specialists for municipal education authorities.