Shadow Education in Uzbekistan: Teachers’ Perceptions of Private Tutoring in the Context of Academic Lyceums

Private tutoring is a globally widespread phenomenon which can be associated with marketization and privatization. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the transition to a free-market economy in Uzbekistan facilitated the rise of informal private sector in public education. This in turn has affected mainstream schooling in many ways and changed the face of education. Considering socio-economic transformations in the country, the theory of hidden privatisation by Ball and Youdell (2007) is employed to analyse different facets of informal privatization in the form of shadow education. Drawing on 24 face-to-face interviews with teachers, (vice) principals and students and student questionnaires, this article examines the nature and scale of private tutoring as well as teachers’ perspectives on the influence of tutoring on teaching and learning process. The findings demonstrated that teachers’ overall attitudes towards private tutoring were positive and teachers mostly considered tutoring as an indispensable part of teaching and learning process. The most significant finding was that the scale of tutoring was exceptionally high (95%) in academic lyceums. The pervasiveness of the phenomenon is associated with entrance examinations, which increased the dependency of teachers and students on tutoring. The article concludes by elucidating how the emergence of shadow education in academic lyceums resulted in the change of the nature of mainstream schooling and the transformation of teacher identities.