Kobakhidze, M. N. (2014). Corruption Risks of Private Tutoring: Case of Georgia (original) (raw)

2014, Asia Pacific Journal of Education (APJE), Special Issue on Shadow Education

The paper focuses on teacher-supplied private tutoring in the context of post-Soviet Georgia, and elucidates the ways in which teacher-supplied tutoring can be related to educational corruption. It attempts to contextualize the notion of teacher corruption in Georgia by identifying ethically acceptable and unacceptable educational practices based on cultural constructs and assumptions. Further, it explores as how both client-initiated (students and families) and provider-initiated (teachers) forms of corruption can affect the quality of education and distort moral values of young people. The paper draws on data from in-depth interviews of 18 public and private school teachers in different parts of Georgia in 2013. The findings of the qualitative study indicate challenges that teachers face as a result of their dual lives between schools and private tutoring. The challenges include moral dilemmas related to tutoring their own students for whom they are already responsible in mainstream schools. The benefits of tutoring are mainly associated with financial gains, which, in the context of low salaries from schools, become crucial for everyday survival. The paper discusses as how private tutoring becomes a “survival strategy” in the education system with low teacher pay, weak accountability system, and lack of monitoring efficacy. The findings also demonstrate the ways in which shadow aspects of tutoring affect human relationships as well as teacher collaboration in schools. Further, the findings provide insights into the social reality structure in Georgia, particularly showcasing strong social networks of obligation leading to favouritism. The paper highlights that the widely accepted and normalized practice in the Georgian society, teachers’ tutoring their own students, is not necessarily a form of corruption. However, it includes a high risk of corruption because of a thin line existing between teacher professional ethics and a professional misconduct. Data from teacher interviews demonstrate how teacher-student negotiation for education in the unregulated tutoring market increases the risks of corruption, which can lead to eroding professional credibility of teachers and, in a broader sense, undermine public trust in the education system. No matter the degree of teacher corruption, the quality of public education suffers from the lack of teacher investment in and commitment to public education. Understanding how teachers themselves rationalize tutoring own students, what private tutoring means to them in the course of their professional lives, contributes to the international research agenda by exploring teachers’ perspectives on private tutoring i.e., the supply side of the phenomenon that contrasts with much of the existing research, which focuses on the demand side. Further, the findings offer insights into what constitutes teacher corruption in post-Soviet Georgia, which makes an important contribution to the international scholarship on the educational corruption. The study is among the first to investigate the issue of teacher corruption from the perspectives of teachers themselves in Georgia.