Fighting Corruption in Education: What Works and Who Benefits?

Autonomous Schools and Strategic Pupil Exclusion

“…Dee et al (2017) document regular test score manipulation in New York's high school exit exams, known as the Regents Examinations, which hurts better students and helps worse students who are at risk of dropping out. Borcan et al (2017) also find evidence of grade manipulation on high-stakes exams at the end of high school in Romania. Angrist et al (2017a) find evidence of teachers' cheating in smaller classes in Southern Italy, and they interpret this as a form of cheating that is induced by the lack of accountability of teachers in the Italian mezzogiorno, rather than an excess of it.…”

The regional effects of international migration on internal migration decisions of tertiary‐educated workers

“…Provided that many developing countries are also plagued by chronic corruption problems (especially in the education system) the tendency to equate tertiary‐educated individuals with high‐skilled individuals may be problematic. Also, because of the seriousness of chronic corruption within higher education institutions (HEI's) (especially in Eastern Europe; Borcan, Lindahl, & Mitrut, ; Heyneman, Anderson, & Nuraliyeva, ; Valentino, ), one must be careful in making assumptions/conclusions about the regional economic impact of human capital accumulation. In such cases, both rural and urban regions may potentially lose as a result of inefficient use of remittances in human capital development: rural communities do not get the specialized human capital required to boost the productivity and competitiveness of their economies, while urban communities gain lower‐skilled professionals who may have bribed their way through college – using the additional income from remittances – and eventually crowd higher skilled professionals forcing them to emigrate.…”

“…Provided that many developing countries are also plagued by chronic corruption problems (especially in the education system) the tendency to equate tertiary-educated individuals with high-skilled individuals may be problematic. Also, because of the seriousness of chronic corruption within higher education institutions (HEI's) (especially in Eastern Europe; Borcan, Lindahl, & Mitrut, 2017;Heyneman, Anderson, & Nuraliyeva, 2008;Valentino, 2007), one must be careful in making assumptions/conclusions about the regional economic impact of human capital accumulation. In when they state that tertiary-educated individuals may be prone to move to the capital city region by accepting jobs requiring lower skills and thus displacing the local workforce.…”

“…International remittances that are used to fund rural students' education may also make it easier for some of them (especially those with lower abilities) to pay bribes to pass the rigorous acceptance and graduation exams of the Moldovan HEI's located in urban centers(Borcan et al 2017) Heyneman et al (2008). provide statistics of high levels of corruption in HEI's across Central and Eastern Europe, including Moldova.…”

Corruption in schools? The scale and sources of corruption perceptions in Poland

“…bribes and informal payments) versus non-pecuniary (favour-based reciprocations). The recent developments in the field also suggest that the peculiar feature of corruption in education is that it often consists not of individual corrupt acts, but of collective ones, such as bribes from the class or group to pass an exam (Sabic-El--Rayess and Mansur, 2016;Borcan, Lindahl and Mitrut, 2017).…”