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9 - Turning Social Capital into a Working Wage

How Teachers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Earn Their Pay and Their Keep

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2025

By
Raisa Belyavina Schwanbeck
Edited by
Colleen McLaughlin  and
Alan Ruby
Colleen McLaughlin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Alan Ruby
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

This chapter examines how teachers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, overcome economic adversity owing to the high cost of living in urban areas and low official compensation for teachers. Focusing on ten schools in Bishkek, this study investigates the mechanisms employed by teachers, principals, and school administrators across the city to counter a single teacher salary reform introduced in 2011 and maintain the status quo. The study illustrates the endurance of longstanding norms and social hierarchies within the teaching workforce in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. It identifies a number of mechanisms employed by teachers and administrators to overcome their disadvantaged position in the labor market. This includes utilizing agency and drawing on social capital to forge ties between teachers and principals (as well as policymakers) in order to maximize formal earnings and to normalize the practice of unofficial school fee collection from parents. The chapter illustrates ways in which teachers and schools have the capacity to ignore, modify, and altogether undo centrally mandated education reforms.

Keywords

Kyrgyzstanteacher salaryignoringmodifying and undoing of reform initiatives
Type
Chapter
Information
Politics and Knowledge Shaping Educational Reform , pp. 135 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

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