Page 19 64. The institutional framework currently in place in Albania is centralized and top-down in nature, since it assigns the task of monitoring teachers and imposing penalties for underperformance to administrative units that are not accountable to service recipients. However, recently the MoES has been trying to improve teachers‟ performance and quality of education by promoting community engagement in local governance structures, such as parent committees and school boards. School boards have always existed within school administration units, but they have recently been given greater responsibilities for school governance. Moreover, in an attempt to reduce possible “elite capture” their composition has changed and the school principal is no longer allowed to be a member of the board.

65. Among the members of the school boards, there should be at least two parents, elected by elected representatives of parents of pupils in all classes, and at least one member of the community who should not be a parent in the school.<sup>23</sup> One teacher representative – elected by all teachers – and one or two student representatives are also members of the board. Moreover, a representative of the Regional Educational Department/ Educational Office, and a representatives of the local government unit (municipality or commune), appointed by the mayor, should also be part of the board.<sup>24</sup> 66. The main functions of the school board are to examine and approve (by voting) the school‟s mid-term plan and annual plan submitted by the school director, as well as 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 (if any) generated by public funds, contributions of the community or other donors, or revenues from school‟s activities. School board members may also discuss problems related to the performance of teachers, or the school director, in response to complaints of parents, students, or teachers. MoES has been debating whether the responsibilities of the board should be extended in the near future to hiring and firing of teachers.

67. Regarding the composition and functioning of the school board, we register the number of meetings of the board in the previous semester (January-May 2009)<sup>25</sup> ; whether the school director usually participates in the meetings and votes; whether the parent representatives are elected by parents rather than appointed by teachers or the school director; and whether the teacher representatives are elected by teachers rather than appointed by the school director.

68. In order to account for the _de facto_ functioning of participatory institutions, we ask parents whether they are informed about the existence of school board and parent class representatives. Conditional on positive answers, we also collect information about parents‟ participation in the election of parent representatives. To further investigate the extent of parental involvement, we register whether parents know the names of their children‟s math and language teachers, and the number of parent-teacher meetings they attended in the previous semester (January-May 2009). We also gather information from teachers about the proportion of parents that usually participate in parent-teacher meetings, and we ask parents whether they ever filed a complaint concerning education matters. Finally, we elicit all the opinions of all surveyed stakeholders with respect to the extent of parental involvement in the school; we report the proportion of respondents who believe that lack of parental involvement is a moderate or serious problem in the school.

> 23 No details about the selection of the member of the community have been officially provided.

> 24 The Guideline for “Establishing and Functioning of the School Board” (MoES, 17 October 2007) established that “when the Regional Educational Department/ Educational Office or the local government (municipality, commune) covers a great number of schools, they are represented in board by their delegate, who as a rule should be a member of the scholastic community”.

> 25 We also asked about meetings in the current semester (September –December 2009), but the comparability of answers across schools is compromised by the fact that the survey was administered in different schools at different times of the first semester of the year 2009-2010.