The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) just published a “rigorous literature review” on the political economy of education systems in developing countries. In it, the authors cite work I collaborated on with Iveta Silova in 2012/13 (see page 23). The cited work concerns teachers in Southeast/Central Europe and Southeast Asia who conduct private tutoring as a way to teach material not approved by the national government. The authors of the report place this work in the section entitled “rent seeking and patronage politics.” Private tutoring for the report’s authors is an example of patronage politics in education.

Iveta and my larger point in the cited piece was that although private tutoring can be conceptualised as a neoliberal space of education (i.e., it’s fee-based, based on choice, and necessary because government’s have reduced education spending), some teachers who actively use (and therefore create) these spaces nevertheless do so politically to undermine neoliberal reforms in education (i.e., pedagogical methods like student centred learning and curriculum standards). We called it the “double entendre” of private tutoring. You can read the full piece here.