A corruption scandal involving the Oita prefectural board of education is expanding. At first, the corruption concerned teacher recruitment: Five educators, including a former No. 2 board official, have been indicted in this connection. Now it is also known that teachers who wanted to be promoted to the position of principal or vice principal gave gift certificates as bribes. So investigators are focusing on suspected corruption in teacher promotions.

Acting on instructions from higher up, a former recruitment official of the board, who has been indicted, is suspected of having boosted the recruitment test scores of about 40 applicants in 2006 and 2007 from among the 82 people eventually hired as elementary schoolteachers.

Apart from the recruitment scandal, two elementary school vice principals and an elementary school principal, all from Saeki, Oita Prefecture, told police that they sent gift certificates — valued at ¥500,000 each from the vice principals and ¥100,000 from the principal — to the recruiting official for favorable treatment in promotion tests. It is also suspected that the current No. 2 official at the board received a ¥200,000 gift certificate from a former board member who had sought promotion to the board from a principal post in Saeki. This man has been indicted on a charge of giving a bribe for favorable treatment of his daughter in the recruitment test.

The Oita prefectural board of education has decided to dismiss teachers who were given favorable treatment in their 2006 and 2007 recruitment tests. But implementing the decision will be difficult because the test data have already been discarded, making it hard to ascertain irregularities. It's also possible that only the parents of the teachers in question were responsible for seeking favorable treatment.

Still, the fundamental problem is the mind-set of Oita's educational community, which apparently sees nothing ethically wrong with giving gifts in exchange for favorable treatment.