Topic Guide: Corruption in Education

Quality control mechanisms involving bottom-up and top-down approaches are also important and complementary tools to address corruption in education. Bottom-up approaches usually involve students, teachers, parents and communities in monitoring the quality of education services against a set of national or regional standards (for example, structurally sound schools, availability of textbooks for students, teacher attendance) to identify problematic institutions or aggregate the sector’s areas of weaknesses. The use of citizen report cards or crowdsourcing platforms that can be used to inform advocacy campaigns and government efforts can be very fruitful, as in the case of the Check Your School initiative.

Top-down approaches to quality control includes commissions or school boards responsible for overseeing academic quality and ethics. These bodies can be either established by governments or by service providers, but should ideally be independent to avoid the risk of political capture. Governance rankings of educational institutions can be used to promote greater transparency and incentivise good governance of educational institutions. Such governance rankings can be integrated as a dimension of centrally established university rankings, such as standard university league tables. The Romanian Academic Society, for example, produced a ranking that took into account transparency, academic integrity and enforcement of rules, and contributed to improved procurement transparency. The Academic Society – a Bucharest-based think-tank and NGO worked actively with universities to help them improve their rankings.[2]