Remember your classroom where you studied? The familiar smell of old textbooks, cracks on school desks, crumbling chalk in hands, and a teacher trying to cope with dozens of students and minimal resources. Years pass, curricula and state education standards change, but this reality remains the norm for many Ukrainian schools even today. The modern world is changing rapidly, and the requirements for education must change with it, but is the Ukrainian school really ready for these challenges? Are our children getting the education that will enable them to succeed in the 21st century? It’s time to face the truth.
The state of the quality of education
The state of the quality of education has always attracted the attention of society and was almost the most important topic for discussions. Under constant criticism, especially in recent times, education is undergoing all kinds of reforms to finally meet the needs of modern society. At the same time, if you think about it, what factors determine the quality of the educational process? The issue is rather complicated, since in fact systematic monitoring of the quality of education has not been implemented in the country. Of course, from time to time the Ministry of Education and Culture conducts some surveys of the state of teaching of individual subjects. In addition, the State Education Quality Service was established in the state, as well as the National Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education (NAZYAVO), which has an ambiguous reputation and personnel. But are all these bodies really able to detect gaps in the educational system? Probably not. Not having a database of verified data collected annually covering all participants in the educational process, and not just specific groups, they do not have a complete picture of the state of the educational system as a whole.
For data In the study “Opinions of teachers, school leaders, educational experts, students and their parents regarding the quality of education”, which was commissioned by the State Service for the Quality of Education, teachers, school directors, parents and students unanimously affirm that the mastery of key competencies is the main criterion , which affects the quality of education:
- educational experts – 91%;
- school principals – 81%;
- students – 70%;
- parents – 50%.
At the same time, teachers of higher educational institutions note in a private conversation that students do not know how to analyze information, think critically, express and justify their own opinion. So the question arises, is it possible to teach students these competencies within the framework of the school program, or did something go the wrong way somewhere?
In the conditions of a dynamically developing world, it is not possible to give static knowledge, which will be enough. A person must be flexible and adapt to modern requirements of progress and the labor market. A ready-made set of knowledge is like a fish that can be eaten only once. It is important for the school to give the same rod and teach how to fish, so that the student can use the knowledge throughout his life.
When choosing a school, parents (56%) and children (69%) focus on the professional level of teachers. But even here there is an alarm bell in the educational system. Caught in the grip of paper routines, excessive demands, oppressive responsibilities and low wages, teachers are leaving the profession en masse. There are currently 1,371 vacancies in one capital city alone. In the villages, the situation is much more complicated and there is a catastrophic shortage of teachers. There, one teacher is forced to conduct classes not only on his subject, but also on those in which he is not an expert. Of course, this cannot help but reflect on the quality of education and also in the conditions of distance learning, when not all children have stable access to the Internet due to constant attacks.
Factors affecting the quality of education
Among the factors affecting the quality of education, the respondents also singled out those related to the formation of the environment and microclimate:
- cooperation between participants of the educational process;
- safe environment for children;
- comfortable psychological environment.
You can already create legends about cooperation in the educational environment. Here the words of the Ukrainian biker Hlibov come to mind, where “the bigger beats the smaller”. There, on the mountain, in their cozy offices, officials-theoreticians, who have not even seen the children up close, spin educational standards like a gypsy in the sun. Next, they demand immediate fulfillment of the requirements and standards established without discussion from the principals, and they, in turn, place this burden of responsibility on the shoulders of poor teachers. And everyone does not care how these standards will be implemented in practice. Teachers do not find understanding and most parents, who for some reason forget that it is their children first of all, but are guided by their opinion”here we gave it to the school, let them teach“. And it even comes to the point that neither the briefcase is put together for the child, nor is it checked whether the child has sat down to do homework. After all, knowledge will not jump to your head by itself. And even a professor will not help someone who is not systematic and responsible in his studies. And the child will not come to this on his own.
Regarding the safety of the environment in today’s realities, we can talk for a long time. The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine reports on the rapid construction of shelters. By data ZN.UA has 10,111 shelters in Ukrainian schools. But currently, the Ministry of Education and Culture does not monitor the situation in schools where there are no shelters at all, and therefore cannot give a clear assessment of the extent to which educational institutions are equipped with shelters in general. There are many questions about the condition of the shelters, because there are known cases of walls collapsing and flooding, as in some schools in Kyiv region and Chernihiv region. And the very conditions of staying in these shelters, let’s say, are not conducive to learning. Shelters are designed only for children to fit in, and then everyone just kills time sitting there and doing extraneous things.
It is difficult to talk about a comfortable psychological environment in conditions of constant stress and instability caused by the war. Ukrainian schoolchildren began to show more aggression in their communication with their peers. According to the data that appeared thanks to the study “Bullying and tolerance in educational institutions after February 24, 2022”, it was established that 51.3% of Ukrainian schoolchildren were bullied. The highest level of bullying was noted in regional centers (34.4%). But in cities and villages, this indicator was somewhat lower (24.1% and 25.3%, respectively). Younger students (68.1%) asked for help in solving bullying issues more often than senior students (47.9%). 52.2% of students received help and support during conflict resolution. While 5.6% stated that they did not receive any help. 14.7% of schoolchildren even witnessed parents of classmates taking part in bullying.
Statistics of the quality of knowledge of Ukrainian schoolchildren
According to the International TIMSS study, two-thirds of fourth-graders did not cope with the tasks of applying theoretical knowledge in real life situations.
According to the results of the 2010 external examination in mathematics, only 188 applicants out of 111,000 were able to get the maximum score. Moreover, 58% of the test tasks belonged to the “easy” category. In 2014, the tasks of the external examination tests on Ukrainian language and literature turned out to be difficult for most of the participants. Only 9 applicants out of 242,611 participants received the maximum score. In mathematics – 46. And in biology and geography, not a single participant was able to show a decent result.
In 2018, monitoring of the quality of primary education was conducted, according to the results of which only 48% of schoolchildren were able to solve elementary problems for finding the perimeter and area of a rectangle. 40% of schoolchildren could not complete the task of finding and interpreting information, and 47% did not know how to operate with information at all.
International studies of PISA 2018 and 2022 showed that our students lag behind their peers from other countries in mathematics and reading literacy:
- did not reach the basic level of mathematical literacy – 36% and 42%, respectively;
- from reading literacy – 26% and 41%, respectively.
It is worth noting that during the monitoring, the schoolchildren’s reading and counting skills were not tested. Mathematical literacy assessment refers to the ability to see mathematics in real life and use one’s own mathematical knowledge to successfully solve problems. Literacy involves the ability to understand, use, evaluate, and interpret written text to achieve specific goals.
Society has already formed the opinion, convenient for everyone, that the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation have become an obstacle to quality knowledge for our schoolchildren. And there is some truth in this, because distance education has gone through a thorny path through mass isolation, lack of established communication between students and teachers, power outages, unstable Internet connection, disruption of the functioning of educational platforms. But the real reason lies much deeper.
Every year, the educational community chooses the textbooks that should be used to teach schoolchildren. Every year, publishing houses reprint existing editions and quickly print new ones. The covers and the volume of pages change, but the content does not improve. Many textbooks are printed in flagrant violation of sanitary requirements. Let’s recall history textbooks for fifth graders. Well, it is unlikely that a 10-year-old child will remember all the material that is laid out like a scientific journal, with many texts not highlighted in any font and with almost no illustrations. And what can we say about foreign language textbooks, where there is not a page, but a whole set of words, as if taken straight from the dictionary, and in such a quantity that the students physically cannot remember. There are almost no practical exercises. And what is not a lesson is a new set of words.
Perhaps the biggest concern is the tasks of the tests for ZNO and NMT. We all remember very well what a long way these tests traveled until they came to us in the form we have now. Over the years of the system’s existence, approaches to the development of test tasks have changed, tests from certain educational subjects have appeared and disappeared, information protection systems have been modernized, and new models for determining the results of external examinations have been developed and implemented. From 2018 to today, the DPA in the form of an external examination on several key subjects is a mandatory condition for all schoolchildren and students of professional (vocational and technical) education and higher education institutions of I‒II levels of accreditation. The system aims to provide transparent and unbiased results, making entry possible for everyone. Sometimes some test tasks are surprising. Thus, in 2015, the external examination in Ukrainian language and literature forced applicants to go to a rally. The wave of indignation was caused by five tasks from an excerpt from the work of modern Ukrainian writer Halyna Pagutyak. According to applicants, the proposed answers to the questions were synonymous, and the correct answers were absurd.
“It was frightening that the ZNO was unprepared, there was not enough time, because the time allotted for the test was reduced that year, this had a great impact on our answers“, – recalls former applicant Nastya Spiridenko.
During the 2021 external examination, another scandal arose, caused by only one examination of open-answer tasks. Previously, such works were checked by two examiners in turn. Each of them gave their own assessment. If these grades were different, then the work was given to the senior examiner. But in that year, due to lack of funding, the Ukrainian Center for the Evaluation of the Quality of Education (UCEQA) was forced to hire examiners for only one inspection.
“Examiners are people who can get tired and make mistakes, the results of just one test can be subjective. Everyone who wrote the final exam in mathematics, Ukrainian and foreign languages found themselves hostage to one test, which, of course, cannot be objective“, one of the examiners, Taras Tkachuk, commented on the situation in his post on Facebook.
That is why it turns out that funding is always insufficient for a high-quality evaluation procedure, mistakes are made in the test tasks, that the applicants do not cope with them, and it is only heard around, “but the teachers did not prepare the students well“. It has already happened that in our country it is customary to blame teachers for everything. And we do not understand that it is necessary to look at the root of the problem.
The problem of preparing for the ZNO and NMT often lies in the fact that the school program is overloaded. Students have to learn a large amount of material in a short period of time, which causes stress and overload. Because of this, students do not always have time to properly prepare for exams within school hours.
In addition, the level of training provided at school often does not meet the expectations of students and their parents. In order to ensure a deeper understanding of the subjects and to better prepare for the external examinations, parents are forced to hire tutors. This leads to additional financial costs and efforts on the part of the family, and also creates inequality in training opportunities among students.
Every time there is a simplification or shortening of the tasks, which does not give an opportunity to really check the level of knowledge of applicants, and therefore creates false ideas in them about the future study and the choice of a higher educational institution. After all, such an approach is no help for entrants, but a real disservice. Everyone should understand the true value of knowledge and that in order to acquire it, one must try, and not put those crosses somehow at random.
As we can see, all these problems go in a chain one after the other, are often closely intertwined and lead to one big problem – the unsatisfactory quality of education. Can the MES be accused of inaction? Recently, the Ministry of Education and Science has been releasing reform ideas like hotcakes. Only everything that is proposed without discussion with all participants of the educational process does not give positive results, but on the contrary is widely criticized.
All education reform strategies adopted by the Ministry of Education and Science since 1993 have never met the real needs of society. The content of the educational process seems to be based on the formation of competencies necessary for successful self-realization in society, and the main participants of the educational process are students and teachers, but, in fact, it turns out that these are loud words on paper. In reality, we have overloaded school programs, students tired of an excessive amount of information, who do not even know how to perceive this information, and burdened with overwhelming responsibilities, teachers who rely solely on their own enthusiasm and love for their profession. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in turn, seems to be testing the flexibility of all participants in the educational process, throwing in dubious reforms such as Lessons of Happiness, the merger of History of Ukraine and World History and other subjects, the updated subject of Defense of Ukraine according to an incomprehensible program.
The fact that 40% of teachers during the survey “New Ukrainian school in grades 5-6: challenges of implementation” was discussed for a long time in society was unable to explain the difference between NUSH and the previous approach to the educational process. But is it the fault of the teachers that only more new terms are added to the state standards every time, and the content itself has not changed for years. So we are huddled in one place, and the cart is still there.
Reforms are simply imposed by force, and obedient teachers do not have the opportunity to express their expert opinion, built up over years of experience, to point out strengths and weaknesses. Where will the understanding of reform appear here, when your experience is not trusted, but simply forced to mindlessly follow imposed doctrines? And then society is waiting for such a silent patient performer to be able to raise a strong and free personality.
The outflow of personnel in schools is also becoming a real disaster for the educational system of Ukraine. The low salaries offered to teachers not only devalue their work, but also directly undermine the foundations of school education. Qualified teachers leave schools in search of a better life, leaving children without proper attention and a professional approach. And those who stay are often forced to work multiple shifts, which leads to fatigue and a decrease in the quality of education. This is not just an economic problem, it is a threat to the future of the nation.
I wish that the high offices there would come to their senses, finally stop experimenting on our poor children and teachers, and really study the state of the quality of the educational process and join in the creation of really high-quality education. Of course, the war and economic instability put footholds and thereby complicate the process of education reform. It is important that the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine has the courage to admit the irrationality of its certain actions. After all, he who does nothing does not make mistakes. Only bold steps forward will give impetus to real changes and effective shifts.
