The Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) are a network of schools for exceptional students of age 5 to 18 throughout Kazakhstan. The schools are named after Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, who has promoted the idea as a means of developing the intellectual life of the country. Each school focuses primarily on a specific set of subjects: either physical sciences and mathematics, or chemical and biological sciences, as well as foreign languages. Instruction is trilingual, in Kazakh, Russian and English, shifting to exclusively English by the senior year.
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Partnerships
The program was initially set up with the assistance of faculty members from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Subsequently, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools partnered with the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education on curriculum development; Cambridge Assessment on design of the assessment system; CiTO, Netherlands on the testing and measurement; and Johns Hopkins University on working with talented youth.
Schools
Currently there are 22 NIS or associated schools located in the following localities:
Currently NIS operates twenty intellectual schools throughout the country, in addition to an international school and specialist mathematics school in Astana.
Conferences
The NIS International Conference is one of the largest educational conferences in Central Asia, and the largest focusing exclusively on preschool, primary and secondary education, typically attracting around 1000 participants. Previous keynote speakers have included Colleen McLaughlin, Patrick Griffin, Fred Genesee, William Schmidt, Richard Phelps, Miho Taguma, David Bridges, and John Elliott.
Criticism
The Nazarbayev network has been criticized for its concentration on only the best and brightest at the expense of the bulk of the student population.