Recently, a series of educational corruption cases exposed in Anhui revealed the "hidden corruption high-incidence area" of educational administrative examination and approval. According to statistics, Miao, former deputy director of the Anhui Provincial Department of Education and former director of the Basic Education Department, has paid bribes to nearly 100 universities, vocational colleges, technical secondary schools, middle schools and other schools since last year, and the number of bribes has reached hundreds.
What harm will education examination and approval corruption cause?
The enrollment plan is corrupt: the "real power department" holds the "lifeline" of the school, and the "approval flexibility" becomes the "rent-seeking secret door"
"In the provincial education administrative departments, there is a big difference between the' real power department' and the' unpopular department'. The "real power department" has many people during the day and often has dinner at night. " An official of the Education Department of Anhui Province said that after the 18th National Congress, he apparently had less food, but the secret "blending of power and money" could not stop.
According to the reporter's investigation, several officials who fell in the corruption case of the Education Department of Anhui Province all came from the "real power department" with the power of examination and approval. For example, Yuan successively led the Planning and Finance Department (later divided into the Development Planning Department and the Finance Department), responsible for drafting the enrollment plans of provincial universities and technical secondary schools in the province, guiding senior high schools to formulate enrollment plans, and reporting and reviewing the establishment, cancellation and renaming of schools.
"Recruit one more student, and your income will increase. The enrollment plan can be said to be the' lifeline' of the school." The relevant person in charge of a provincial university in Anhui introduced that the school's annual enrollment plan should be submitted to the Financial Planning Department of the Provincial Department of Education for approval, and the province's enrollment plan has a general plan, and there is competition among schools. "The more you give him, the less you get, so many schools are scrambling to get in touch with the provincial offices."
When Yuan Wen's indictment was brought to trial, almost all the 34 schools that paid bribes to him were related to the enrollment plan, and some schools even "managed" for a long time in order to win more plans. For example, from 2007 to 20 16, the vice president of a college gave Yuan Wen cash and shopping cards six times before the Spring Festival; From 20 10 to 20 14, a vice president and a dean of a university gave Yuan Wen a shopping card of 46,000 yuan five times.
Examining and approving corruption subverts "educational value", and experts call for "simple administration and decentralization"
In addition to school public relations and personal greed, there are deep-seated reasons for the corruption of Anhui Education Department: the allocation and management of educational resources are too centralized.
A fallen horse official said in an interview that the establishment, specialty setting and enrollment plan of all provincial universities in the province, as well as the professional title evaluation and teacher transfer of some school faculty, must be approved by the provincial education department; Education funds from higher education departments and financial departments are allocated to education departments and concentrated in some offices.
"With so many majors in colleges and universities, which one should be recruited and how much? In fact, the education department is difficult to master, but you can't enroll students without approval. The number of enrollment plans for ordinary high schools and vocational high schools in the province formulated by the provincial editorial office every year is accurate to a single place, but it is difficult to implement after going up and down to various cities and counties. " A fallen horse official said.
"In fact, the examination and approval items of many school newspapers are not necessarily inconsistent with the regulations. But I can organize people to approve it right away, or I can delay it for a year or two. This is the discretion of power. " The official said that if the examination and approval items are decentralized, it will mean "loss and deprivation" of power, and the process will be "very painful". This is the biggest obstacle to reform.
"Education is a career related to people's growth, and the core value emphasized is honesty. The biggest harm of corruption in education approval is to subvert the value of education. " Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, said that these corrupt behaviors have affected the fairness of the allocation of educational resources, and will also have a series of negative effects, affecting teachers and students' outlook on life and the world.
Chu believes that the education corruption case in Anhui is not an isolated case. To curb corruption in education examination and approval, we must first limit the "impulse to expand power" of the education administrative department and not arbitrarily increase power; The second is to make the process of exercising administrative power "open" and "transparent".
Yang Dongping, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology who has been studying education for a long time and a member of the National Education Advisory Committee, believes that the core of modernizing the government's governance system and governance capacity in the field of education is to simplify administration and decentralize power, so as to change the situation that the government assumes too many responsibilities.
"The Third Plenary Session of the 18 th CPC Central Committee put forward the requirement of deepening education reform, with the goal of promoting the separation of education management, management and classification, and promoting the transformation of government functions." Yang Dongping said that the goal is clear, but the reform efforts in some places are limited. "The Anhui education corruption case once again reminds us of the necessity of decentralization of education."