Last September some 400 schools across Russia stayed shut as 16,000 teachers protested against their miserable working conditions. The year before in the same month some 115,000 teachers had struck work for three days in protest. Russia's education system is multicultural. As many as 3,300 schools teach an estimated 79 non-Russian languages. Another 9,000 schools attended by 1.6 million students teach the mother tongues as a second language.
All children have to go to school in Russia.
But a 1996 amendment to the 1992 education bill allowed school authorities to expel trouble making students, which had been impossible in the Soviet-era. Most schools are still state-run. Only some 50,000 students go to private schools. However, economic decline has meant that the cash-strapped government has been finding it harder and harder to sustain what was once a vibrant education sector. With the situation unlikely to change for a long time to come, the development of private, fee paying institutions has been put forth as one of the solutions for an ailing educational sector.