Social Partnerships in Modern Russian Schools as a Tools for Creating a Rich Educational Environment and Overcoming Inequality

The aim of this article is to analyze the potential of social partnerships at schools when it comes to solving such problems as saturation of the educational environment and overcoming educational inequality. Schools are considered as a special environment that accumulates financial, cultural, and social resources. Post-Soviet schools adopting a course towards neo-managerialism would involve relative autonomy of schools and the stimulation of competition between them. As a result, the functions and forms of social partnerships at schools are undergoing transformation in comparison with the Soviet period. It is in the logic of neo-managerialism that social partnerships are presented as the primary means of overcoming educational inequality. The empirical foundation consisted of 88 interviews with employees of secondary educational institutions of the Perm Region. Analyzing the interviews allowed for explicating interpretations of the meanings and the evaluation of the effects of social partnerships at schools by the participants of the educational process. On this basis the possible risks of social partnerships are highlighted, such as: the risk of escalating educational inequality between schools and the intrusion of schools through partnerships into the sphere of state-unregulated experimentation. The disproportion is revealed in the breadth, diversity and sustainability of partnerships between “prestigious” schools and schools that do not rank particularly high. This is consistent with the general post-Soviet trend of differentiation of schools and, accordingly, varying degrees of success in developing a diverse educational environment, which leads to the risk of increasing educational inequality. The specific features of local, organizational and structural barriers that prevent schools from establishing social partnerships are analyzed.