Knowledge for the elites, competencies for the masses: political theatre of educational reforms in the Russian Federation

Abstract

ABSTRACT International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students’ performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations’ economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of education. Hybridising competency discourses circulated by international organisations, Russian reformers introduced new school standards that created a bifurcation of the educational system along the lines of socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This bifurcation is evident in the standards’ focus on providing in-depth disciplinary knowledge to students from privileged backgrounds and competencies ‘to adapt to the world’ to students from underserved groups. The significance of this analysis lies in demonstrating how appropriations and hybridisations of competency discourses in the Russian Federation work to produce elites that govern and workers who accept low positions in social hierarchies of the neoliberal world order.