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When Uzbekistan’s 15-year-olds sat the OECD’s PISA assessment for the first time in 2022, the country placed among the lowest of 81 economies tested: an average of 364 points in mathematics against a global benchmark of 472, 336 in reading against 476, and 355 in science against 485. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev did not downplay the results. He described them as a signal of urgent need for reform — and then disclosed a figure that went further still: 86,000 of the country’s 220,000 teachers, or 37 percent, had been rated unsatisfactory in their own subject knowledge.
Those two data points sit at the centre of a compounding crisis in public education. Across roughly 10,000 state schools, a combination of chronically low pay, a management culture that tolerates the public humiliation of educators, endemic favoritism in admissions, and severe overcrowding has driven away the teachers the system most needs — and pushed millions of families toward a parallel private-tutoring economy that has become, in effect, the real backbone of secondary schooling.
A Salary Promise and Its Limits
In his November 2021 inauguration speech, President Mirziyoyev pledged that teachers would reach $1,000 a month within five years. By September 2025, roughly 60,000 teachers were earning between 10 and 12 million UZS — approximately $830 to $1,000 — but they represent a narrow slice of the workforce. Base salaries for public-school teachers currently run from about 3.2 to 4.7 million UZS per month, or roughly $265 to $390, depending on qualification category, with the sector-wide average near $385. Officials point to an advanced certification pathway that can push earnings to 10–20 million UZS, but the government’s own figures show that barely 3 percent of teachers actually reach the 10-million-UZS threshold — and access to the qualifying exams is thinner outside Tashkent. A base-pay increase took effect in October 2024, though critics argue it still does not cover a family’s basic costs.
The gap between the promise and the payslip has direct consequences for staffing. Teachers who can leave, do — moving to private schools, tutoring centres, or abroad. The shortage has grown severe enough that since 2021, third-year students at teaching colleges have been permitted to run their own classrooms. Those who remain in state schools frequently supplement their income through the same private-tutoring market that is eroding confidence in public education; reporting from Tashkent has described teachers quietly favouring students whose families pay for extra lessons or provide gifts, and penalising those who do not.
The result is a two-tier system that parents have come to regard as normal. A mother of three in Tashkent, identified as Saodat, told The Diplomat in 2024 that her children attend public school five days a week largely as a formality: the real learning, she said, happens with private tutors. The private-tutoring economy — known locally as repetitorlik — has become so entrenched that its existence is itself treated as evidence of what the public system cannot deliver.
A Management Model Inherited from the Soviet Era
Pay alone does not explain the exodus. Uzbek schools continue to operate under a management structure largely unchanged from the Soviet period: a single principal who answers primarily to local government officials rather than to any independent professional body. Both principals and the officials above them have routinely treated teachers as subordinates to be disciplined rather than professionals to be managed, and educators have little formal recourse.
The consequences have been documented in specific incidents. In February 2022, the principal and a group of teachers at a school in Andijan province were made to stand before a room of parents, heads bowed, and publicly beg forgiveness after too few of that year’s graduating class had passed university entrance exams — an outcome shaped by a 2020 government rating system that scores schools by university placement rates. One teacher involved said colleagues were left regretting their career choice. In March 2026, a district mayor in Navoi province ordered an entire school’s teaching staff to the local administration building and kept them standing for nearly an hour — some of them fasting at the time — after students struggled to answer his questions during a visit; two assistant principals resigned in the aftermath. A year earlier, a Tashkent principal was filmed berating female teachers in front of first-graders.
The pressure does not originate with principals alone. District officials have themselves been filmed beating and humiliating school principals over matters as minor as a poorly attended Independence Day celebration — a pattern that illustrates how principals frequently relay downward the pressure they receive from above rather than acting as its source.
The cumulative effect on recruitment is measurable. Teacher-training advocates note that capable graduates now rarely choose pedagogical universities, and multiple accounts describe the desirability of teaching declining sharply among younger Uzbeks — driven not only by pay but by what the profession has come to represent. In the OECD’s 2024 survey of teaching conditions, roughly half of Uzbek teachers identified administrative paperwork as a major source of stress.
Corruption and Overcrowding
Layered onto these structural problems is a culture of favoritism that Uzbekistan’s own institutions have acknowledged. The country’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index fell to 32 out of 100 in 2024, placing it 121st of 180 countries — its first decline since 2012. Both parliament and the national anti-corruption agency have identified education, alongside healthcare, as among the most graft-prone sectors in the country. Much of the corruption operates through tanish-bilish — connections and personal networks rather than cash alone, though prosecutors have pursued cash cases too: the general prosecutor’s office reported 83 corruption cases in education in 2024, most linked to admissions.
Physical capacity compounds every other problem. The country’s roughly 10,000 public schools were designed for approximately 5 million students; they now serve 6.4 million, pushing many classes to 40 or 50 pupils against an official cap of 35. The gap between urban and rural access adds a further layer of inequality that aggregate national figures tend to obscure.
Reforms Underway, but Structural Questions Remain
The government has not concealed the scale of the problem. Mirziyoyev’s own public remarks did more to publicise the PISA collapse than any external critic, and a substantial reform programme has followed. A shift to 12-year schooling and unified state exams is planned for the 2026/27 academic year, intended to base university and college admission on test scores rather than connections. Approximately 300 new schools are planned annually to keep pace with a school-age population expected to exceed 7.6 million this year. In June, a $100 million World Bank-backed programme was launched to improve basic literacy and numeracy for 2 million primary schoolchildren across six provinces.
None of these measures, however, directly addresses the chain of command inside the schoolhouse itself — the unchecked authority of principals and local officials whose treatment of teachers has already pushed a generation of promising graduates toward other careers. Reforming the curriculum and expanding the school estate does not, by itself, change the conditions that make teaching an unattractive profession or dismantle the informal networks through which admissions and appointments are allocated.
For the millions of families already navigating the system, the practical reality is a dual structure: a free public school that satisfies the legal requirement, and a paid private-tutoring arrangement that does the actual academic work. Until those two systems converge, the reforms announced for 2026/27 will be arriving for a generation of students whose secondary education has already been shaped by the gap between them.