Shadow education: a double-edged sword for Czech mainstream schools in the competitive educational market

ABSTRACT

Post-transformational neoliberal reforms in the Czech Republic have established a competitive quasi-market, in which – at the lower-secondary level – academic-track schools (grammar schools or gymnasia) compete for students in the regular-track schools. These reforms have also brought a rise of shadow education (private supplementary tutoring) provided by individuals and private companies. Even public schools are sometimes providers of shadow education. The study explores gymnasia principals’ motivations to provide paid courses to prepare students for entrance examinations to their study programmes and the challenges they experience in doing so. The findings are drawn mainly from semi-structured interviews with principals and other school management members in eleven gymnasia. The study conceptualises such courses as a ‘double-edged sword’. First, because it serves as a ‘weapon’ that academic schools use in the quasi-market competition to attract more (high-achieving) students from regular track schools, and second, because it may have both positive and negative consequences (e.g., for equity in education), depending on the conditions of its provision. The paper contributes to a wider scholarly literature by expanding the understanding of ways schools behave in the competitive educational quasi-markets and by opening a new branch of shadow education research.

KEYWORDS:

• Shadow education
• school competition
• school marketing
• equity in education
• principals
• preparatory courses

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR) under grant no. 18–00939S, The link between mainstream and shadow education: the case of Czech lower-secondary schools.

The author expresses gratitude to professor Mark Bray for a valuable feedback on earlier draft of the paper, and to Prof. Eliška Walterová and Dr. Martin Chvál for cooperation on the project, participation in the data collection process and fruitful discussions of the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. MYGs existed before 1948, when the communists came to power and established single-structure lower-secondary schooling with a unified curriculum (Greger and Walterová 2007).

2. Straková and Greger analysed a sample of 4,438 students from 163 schools that participated in the Czech Longitudinal Study of Education (CLoSE) – a longitudinal follow-up study of the student cohort participating in TIMSS 2012.

3. For basic schools, these categories were small: ≤74 students, middle: ≤160 students and large: >160 students; for MYGs: small: <111 students, middle: ≤127 students, large: >127 students.

4. The surveyed basic-school principals complained about MYGs in the sense that they leech their own school of academically apt students. Under normal circumstance, they would not allow MYGs to advertise in their school.

5. They cannot be generalised to the whole population of MYGs, but at least, they provide some hints to generate hypotheses that may be tested in a prospective quantitative research.

6. This was also evident from different modes of operation. E.g., when preparatory courses were run by a private company established by teachers, the school budget did not have direct profit (even renting the classrooms was at symbolic price).

7. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers who pointed me towards a previous use of this metaphor in relation to shadow education by Addi-Raccah (2019). Addi-Raccah likened private tutoring to a double-edged sword due to its differentiated relationships with students’ attitudes towards schoolteachers according to the nature of the provision of private tutoring: “When PT is related to academic spheres, it enhances positive attitudes towards school teachers and when PT is related to socio-affective aspects, it increases criticism.” (p. 938). The metaphor in this paper is more elaborate as, besides relating to the potential effects of the phenomenon similarly to Addi-Raccah (2019), it also adds another dimension (that of a “weapon”).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grantová Agentura Ceské Republiky [18-00939S].

Notes on contributors

Vít Šťastný

Vít Šťastný is a researcher at the Institute for Research and Development of Education, Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in educational sciences. His research interests include shadow education and comparative education with emphasis on French and German speaking countries. He cooperates with the Czech School Inspectorate as an associate of the department for large-scale international assessments.