That’s the latest from the Phnom Penh Post, which has a lively education beat worth following. In its articles on what I’m calling the “protests over private tutoring“, the Post implies that students who didn’t pass the second semester exam where the ones who didn’t attend private tutoring:

Hun Sen Taing Kork High School’s 52 failing students petitioned the ministry this week to allow them to retake their exams on the grounds their teachers unfairly rewarded students who could pay for extra tutoring.

Is the connection between passing and tutoring so straight forward? How many students had to attend private tutoring in order to pass? That’s a question unlikely to be definitively answered because of the secrecy involved in the business.

Nevertheless, there is some data we can use to understand the phenomenon. A 2012 report found that 94.3 percent of surveyed students had attended extra classes before the national high school exit examination.  Although the second semester test is different than the national exit examination and correlation doesn’t mean causation, the data is revealing. At the very least, that nearly all students attended extra classes suggests these classes are perceived to be necessary for the education of grade 12 students.

But did all teachers who conduct extra lessons give away answers or prepare students in unfair ways? That’s much harder to answer because generalisations can’t be made across the diversity of teachers and their practices. My firsthand experiences are mixed. On the one hand, teachers I’ve interviewed say they don’t give away answers to the test during extra lessons and if they do prepare students before the examination,they do so only by using past examinations that are public. That doesn’t seem unfair to me—aside from the inherent inequality of putting up a fee to attend extra classes—but maybe it’s just the teachers protecting themselves from self-incrimination. On the other hand, I’ve known students who had to pay $100 to their teachers to obtain a passing grade on the national exit exam. When I enquired where this money goes, the student told me the teachers the majority of it to the principal who then pays the majority of it the ministry officials. Money flows upwards, each person taking a small cut as it passes through their hands. The point being, the corruption isn’t teachers alone but actually part of a larger system based on patron-client relations.

What we do know for sure is that more research is needed in this shadowy businesses of extra classes and examinations.