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Last December, 1,055 high school communities around Mexico – comprising almost 1.3 million students – engaged in a transparency and accountability exercise. This involves each principal of public high schools completing three electronic forms covering more than 100 indicators. These range from income and expenditure, to enrolment and academic performance, to the condition of school equipment and infrastructure.

Despite the promises of great reforms in education made by the new President, the Soviet system is still running. Many allege that the bureaucrats involved in the renovations of schools frequently sign dual contracts with foreign construction companies, deliberately designed to allow a huge portion of the reported contract costs to disappear. Moreover, bribes are still viewed as a secondary prerequisite for university admission after one's scores on standardized entrance examinations.

The Secondary School Teachers Union of Zambia (SESTUZ) has blamed parents for rampant examination malpractices. Parents are actually in the fore-front organising and buying leaked examination papers for their children. According to SESTUZ the government needed to build more schools because the population of Zambia had increased drastically while the number of schools remained static.

Poor performance in the 2004 Primary leaving Examinations has been blamed on the many teachers who used fake academic documents and poor sanitation in numerous schools. Of the 5,655 pupils who sat for PLE last year, only 90 passed in grade one, while 3,892 failed.