In the media

School officials in the city of Athens and Limestone County have conspired to obtain more public funding by claiming to enrol full-time private students in the system's virtual schools. The two school districts were improperly paid around $7 million in state education funding for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. By November 2017, more than 500 private school students were fraudulently enrolled in Athens Renaissance schools and over 50 students in Conecuh County.

To enhance teacher’s standards and accountability in education systems, Malawi’s Ministry of Education is developing its teachers’ policy, including the Teachers Code of Conduct (COC) with the support from UNESCO’s Norwegian Teacher Initiative. The CoC will include teachers from Teacher Training Colleges and should denounce corporal punishment.

The Florida Department of Education revealed that the Sarasota County School District falsified records and placed students on alternate assessment to avoid state testing or accountability in order to benefit financially. Investigators found that 27 of 66 sampled students’ files did not include sufficient documentation to demonstrate that they were placed correctly.

A qualitative study of twelve Sri Lankan secondary school teachers has found that compared to 10-15 years ago students, current secondary school students are more self-centred and adopt more problematic behaviours in school that are harmful to themselves and others. Student misbehaviour in the classroom includes disrespect for teachers, performing irrelevant classroom tasks and verbal aggression, while school-based misbehaviour reflects disrespect for school authorities, unnecessary use of dangerous drugs and the development and support of inappropriate and harmful relationships.

Fenglan School violated regulations and used false advertising to enroll more students than its legal capacity. 400 students were found to be “missing” in the local student registration system. According to a student, the school asked them to sign an agreement saying that students would take the standardized exam as a local teenage resident not associated with the school. As a result, the students would not obtain graduation nor take the college admission exam. Some private schools would also bribe local education officials in order to obtain student registration for these unqualified students.

More than 160 students — nearly 30 percent of the student body — at D.C.’s celebrated Duke Ellington School of the Arts live outside the city and are not paying the tuition required of suburbanites who attend the District’s public schools, an internal investigation has found. The findings, which city officials announced Friday, come amid intensifying distrust of the District’s public schools, stoked by scandals involving inflated graduation rates and a former chancellor skirting enrolment rules for his daughter.

As another school year begins in Afghanistan, the country continues to face insecurity, an epidemic of corruption within its education system and old customs that keep many students and qualified teachers away from classrooms. Violence and corruption are problems that can hardly be solved on grassroots level only. Increased violence forced more than 1,000 schools to shut their doors since 2016 and according to a report compiled by the country’s independent corruption monitor, corruption is “devastating” the education system and the country.

There is a wide consensus among policymakers and practitioners that while access to education has improved significantly for many children in low- and middle-income countries, learning has not kept pace. Information is a key building block of a wide range of strategies that attempts to tackle weaknesses in service delivery and accountability at the school level, even where political systems disappoint at the national level.