Parental informal payments in Kyrgyzstani schools: Analyzing the strongest and the weakest link

This paper aims to explain why parental informal payments emerge and then spread in different manners in Kyrgyzstani schools and to examine their interaction as informal institutions with the school as a formal one. It is argued that the main reason behind informal payments is the survival of the schools; parents' acceptance of them was a result of necessity. In a small percentage of experiences where marketization of public schools was successful, there was a socioeconomic segregation of pupils, advancing toward a de facto privatization of public schools. Then, while the key logic behind informal payments was the upgrading or elitization of schools, the nature of the engagement of givers and receivers was by choice rather than by necessity. Finally, following Helmke and Levitsky (2004), I link the survival strategy to a substitutive relationship to formal public school outcomes, and to the elitization strategy, a competing nature with the formal logic of Kyrgyzstani basic education. Special attention is given to the social function approach toward informal economy practices, and to the significance of social stratification on how those informal practices work. The paper focuses on the comparison of informal payments in two schools representing the two strategies previously described: an elitnaya school from the center of Bishkek, the 13th Gymnasium School; and the conventional 21st Middle School in the novostroika (new settlement) of Enesay, the capital's periphery. The fieldwork of this research was developed in two stays during the months of July/August and October/November in 2011