levels. Although 99% of the adult population is literate, the quality of education is low, as shown by Albania‟s performance in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). More than 50% of 15 years old students found it difficult “to use continuous texts unless the texts are short and clearly sign-posted; and even with such texts, they are unlikely to be able to do more than identify a main idea or find explicitly stated information.”<sup>14</sup> The Ministry of Education and Science (MoES) is the central government body responsible for implementing education policies and managing the education system. This responsibility is exercised by staff in the MoES and in twelve administration entities (REDs) functioning at the county level. The MoES is directly responsible for the development of curricula, the selection of textbooks, the structure of the academic year, setting the pay and workloads of teachers, the allocation of resources among local education institutions, and teacher training (World Bank, 2005). The 12 REDs are responsible for the delivery of primary and secondary education in their respective districts, but they are not decentralized government units. They are responsible for the appointment and transfer of teachers, the distribution of administrative materials to schools, inspections of schools, and planning and supervising the construction of new facilities and the rehabilitation of existing ones. However, the RED directors are appointed by the MoES and have no authority with respect to the amount of funding centrally allocated to their region.

The institutional framework currently in place relies on a system that assigns the task of monitoring teachers and imposing penalties for under-performance to administrative units that are not directly held to account by service recipients, i.e., it relies on top-down accountability.<sup>15</sup> However, the MoES has recently been promoting community engagement in school governance structures through parent committees and school boards. Parent committees are composed of elected parent class representatives, and school boards are composed of two or more (depending on the size of the school) parent representatives, one teacher representative, a student representative, a community representative and a RED representative. Parent class representatives are elected by the parents of pupils in their respective classes at the beginning of the school year. They, then, elect representatives from amongst themselves to the school boards.

While school boards have always existed, they have recently been given greater responsibilities for school governance. The main functions of the School Board are to examine and approve (by voting) the school‟s mid-term and annual plans and the school‟s annual financial report. The board also has decisional power for the adoption of curricula and textbooks, as well as the school‟s budget relating to contributions from the community or other donors, or revenues from school activities. School Board

> 14 See http://www.portugal.gov.pt/pt/GC18/Documentos/ME/PISA_2009_1.pdf

> 15 The existing top-down system seems poor in terms of accountability is functioning poorly. According to our school survey, it is very common for teachers to believe that there are no negative repercussions to bad performance: about 50% indicated that they would not receive a penalty if they underperformed. Moreover, those who thought they would be penalized were unclear with respect to what kind of penalty they would receive.

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