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YEMEN: Revenge killings keep children out of school | Yemen | Children | Education | Se... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx

Education Under Attack Yemen school_safety education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Thousands of children in three of Yemen’s 21 governorates have stopped going to school for fear of being targeted by revenge killings, according to international NGO Partners-Yemen (PY)
  • Revenge killings have led to the closure of several schools, especially in al-Jawf and Shabwa governorates. The situation is not quite so bad in Marib, said PY.
  • "I haven't gone to school since 2005 when I was in grade six. I fear that armed tribesmen from Hamdan tribe may kill me,"
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  • The three governorates have a high illiteracy rate: "Fifty-six percent of the male population and 70 percent of the female population… are illiterate," he said.
  • PY has been getting children in schools that remain open to chant the slogan "To those who deprived me of my father; don't deprive me of my education", but thousands of children have stopped going to school for fear of crossing tribal boundaries.
  • "As many as eight schools in Maraziq and Al Sayda areas have been closed for five years now," he said, adding that thousands of boys and girls had dropped out of education as a result.
  • more than a dozen schools in his governorate have been deserted for several years as a result of revenge killings.
  • Few students have moved to other safer areas to complete their education; most have stopped going to school since then," he said.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Africa: Abolishing Fees Boosts African Schooling (Page 2 of 2) - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201002181133.html

Kenya Malawi Africa developing nations schools tuition girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Malawi struggles to cope GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); GA_googleCreateDomIframe('google_ads_div_AllAfrica_Story_InsetB' ,'AllAfrica_Story_InsetB'); Other countries have been less successful. Malawi eliminated its school fees in 1994. But with less than half of Kenya's gross domestic product per person and fewer financial and human resources to draw on, it still faces difficult challenges in providing universal primary education.
  • As in many other African countries, notes the UN study, "the adoption of universal primary education was triggered by political demands rather than by rational planning processes." Although Malawi had lifted some fees for Standards 1 and 2 and waived primary education fees for girls prior to 1994, the decision to eliminate all fees coincided with the return of multiparty elections that year. The focus, the researchers found, was on increasing enrolment. "Very little attention was paid to quality issues."
  • One immediate response was to hire 20,000 new teachers, almost all of whom were secondary school graduates who were given only two weeks of training. Plans to provide on-the-job training failed to materialize. Instructional quality declined sharply as the pupil-teacher ratio climbed to 70 to 1.
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  • The lack of facilities meant that many classes met under trees, and books and teaching materials arrived months late, if at all. Despite increases in the education budget, spending per student, already low, declined by about 25 per cent and contributed to the decline in quality. As a result nearly 300,000 students dropped out during the first year, and high dropout rates continue to this day.
  • Overall, reports the UN study, only about 20 per cent of boys and girls successfully complete eight years of primary education in Malawi. This is largely a function of the country's deep poverty, the researchers say, and the lack of resources, such as nutrition programmes, to help poor children remain in school.
  • The abolition of school fees is a precondition for getting large numbers of poor children into school, but it must be accompanied by strong public and political support, sound planning and reform, and increased financing.
  • fter systems adjust to the surge in enrolment, they argue, resources must be directed at improving quality and meeting the needs of the very poor, those in distant rural areas and children with disabilities. The analysts say that a particular focus should be girls, who face a range of obstacles to attending and staying in school, including cultural attitudes that devalue education for women. Improved sanitation and facilities and better safety and security conditions can make it easier to keep girls in school.
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Bullying guidelines brought in by education council - The National - 1 views

www.thenational.ae/...rought-in-by-education-council

bullying guidelines education Abu Dhabi UAE

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 11 May 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 11 May 12
     
    ABU DHABI // The capital's education regulator is bringing in guidelines to help schools prevent bullying and other behavioural problems in pupils. Related ■ School violence: the truth behind a tragedy ■ Parents 'must act' if a child is being bullied Topic Abu Dhabi Primary schools High schools The guidelines, developed last year by the Abu Dhabi Education Council (Adec), will add to a disciplinary code issued by the Ministry of Education in December. Adec is training educators on how to use the guidelines in workshops.
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Crossing the Line: Sexual Harassment at School - 0 views

www.millennia2015.org/news.asp

school education sexual_harassment harassment report US

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 14 Mar 12
     
    Sexual harassment has long been an unfortunate part of the climate in middle and high schools in the United States. Often considered a kind of bullying, sexual harassment by definition involves sex and gender and therefore warrants separate attention. The legal definition of sexual harassment also differentiates it from bullying. Based on a nationally representative survey of 1,965 students in grades 7-12 conducted in May and June 2011, Crossing the Line: Sexual Harassment at School provides fresh evidence about students' experiences with sexual harassment, including being harassed, harassing someone else, or witnessing harassment. The survey asked students to share their reactions to their experience with sexual harassment and its impact on them. It also asked them about their ideas for how schools can respond to and prevent sexual harassment.
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Foundation Center - PubHub - Poverty & Race Research Action Council; Century Foundation... - 0 views

foundationcenter.org/...pubhub_item.jhtml

schools integration outcomes students charter diversity

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 31 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 31 Jul 12
     
    Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? Poverty & Race Research Action Council; Century Foundation Kahlenberg, Richard D.; Halley Potter Published: May 2012 Examines how current policies and philanthropic priorities create high-poverty, racially isolated charter schools, benefits of socioeconomically diverse charter schools, and approaches taken in successful examples. Proposes policy and funding reforms.
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | ZIMBABWE: Thousands of girls forced out of education | Zimbabwe | Childre... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

Zimbabwe education school girls girls' education Education Under Attack gender

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 16 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • HARARE, 7 November 2011 (IRIN) - Poverty, abuse and cultural practices are preventing a third of Zimbabwean girls from attending primary school and 67 percent from attending secondary school, denying them a basic education, according to a recent study which found alarming dropout rates for girls. ''Sexual harassment and abuse by even school teachers and parents, cultural issues, lack of school fees, early marriage, parental commitments and early pregnancies are some of the contributing factors to the dropout by the girl child,'' said the authors of "Because I am a Girl" by Plan International, a nonprofit organisation that works to alleviate child poverty.
  • According to the Plan International report, the long distances that children in rural areas have to travel to reach school, and the burden that girl children face because they often have to assume the responsibilities of being head of the household after the death of their parents, are other factors contributing to the high dropout rate for girls.
  • A 2005 government programme of forced evictions, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out Trash), which uprooted some 700,000 people from urban areas across the country, compounded the difficulties of accessing education for girls from affected households. Amnesty International, in its report ''Left Behind: The Impact of Zimbabwe's Forced Evictions on the Right to Education'' released in October 2011, documents the ways in which the evictions disrupted the primary and secondary education of an estimated 222,000 children.
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  • The Amnesty International report notes that many girls at Hopley became sex workers, entered relationships with older men, or married at a young age after eviction from their homes, and the government's failure to support them to re-enrol in school.
  • Zimbabwe's education system, once considered a model for other African countries, has been steadily declining over the last decade due to the economic crisis. Many schools lack text books and other supplies.
Teachers Without Borders

Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-the-flames-in-the-arab-world

Egypt Tunisia unemployment education EFA democracy teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.
  • In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.
  • For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.
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  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
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Schools and students face uncertain future in Japan - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

Japan earthquake children students teachers schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Tokyo (CNN) -- Students in many districts across Japan brushed off their uniforms and shouldered their bookbags for the first day of the new school year on Wednesday. But while most were worried about meeting their new teachers or what their class schedules might be, some were facing the threat of nuclear contamination or the loss of former classmates.
  • "I just got a letter from my mom," he said. "It says that she is hurting because we're separated. But she says don't worry, we will go home together after the nuclear power plant settles down."
  • "I haven't got used to the life yet, because I have to live separately from my mom," he said walking into the Minamisuna Primary School. "I miss her."
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  • Dozens of schools were wiped out or too badly damaged to reopen in Miyagi prefecture.
  • Governments and educators are scrambling to repair schools, round up teachers and cope with the tens of thousands of displaced people.
  • A different set of problems in Fukushima, where authorities have begun testing schools, kindergartens and playgrounds across the prefecture after parents expressed worries about high levels of radiation.
  • "In response to it, we conduct to check radiation level to secure the (safety) of the children."
Teachers Without Borders

Violence breaks out amid massive street protests in Chile; Students demand education re... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAMW4C5I_story.html

chile student protests violence education teachers demonstrations

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • SANTIAGO, Chile — Violence erupted on the streets of Chile’s capital and other cities Tuesday as tens of thousands of students staged another protest demanding changes in public education.
  • Five days after a banned march ended in nearly 900 arrests, students and teachers marched peacefully in Santiago and elsewhere in Chile on Tuesday, calling for the government to increase spending on schooling and provide “free and equal” public education.As in previous demonstrations, protesters danced, sang, wore costumes and waved signs. But then groups of masked protesters split off and tried to break through police barricades blocking the way to the presidential palace.
  • High school and university students have refused to attend class, taken over schools and staged demonstrations to press their demand for fundamental changes in how Chile finances public education.
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  • The current system also leaves underfunded municipalities in charge of high school education nationwide. This has starved most schools of resources, while leaving some wealthy neighborhood schools well off. Chile’s small upper class sends its children to private schools or even overseas for their education.
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South Korea: Kids, Stop Studying So Hard! - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,9171,2094427,00.html

South Korea exams testing education learning students schools cram

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.
  • South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
  • There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
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  • South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.
  • The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.
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Education International - France: Unions oppose government plan to test pupils from pre... - 0 views

www.ei-ie.org/...1985

education france unions test evaluation testing

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 20 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 20 Oct 11
     
    EI's French affiliates, SE-UNSA and SNUIPP, have condemned a government plan to ask teachers to test children as young as five on their behaviour and learning abilities. The government is seeking to classify pupils into one of the three categories: nothing to report, risk, and high risk. Children's evaluation would be based on four skills: behaviour at school, language, mobility, and phonology (awareness of individual sounds). According to the Education Ministry, this evaluation will be an 'identification tool' for pre-school students who 'show signs that they pose a risk to learning.' It is supposed to 'identify each student's needs in preparation for primary school.'
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Canadian education awaits a hard lesson, watchdog warns - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article2197017

Canada teachers education report

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “Canada is the only country in the developed world that has no stated national goals for education,” he said.
  • Canada is a top-performer, and a fair one. For more than a decade, Canadian students have outperformed their international peers on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s assessments of reading, math and science. They placed in the top 10 in every subject in the most recent results.What has made other countries take notice is that household income and immigrant status matter less to a student’s results here than they do elsewhere.
  • The report also raises concerns about the desirability of the teaching profession, and whether limited employment opportunities and constant reforms are scaring away the best candidates for teachers college.This raises alarm bells because research has shown that teachers are the single biggest in-school influence on learning.“Teachers are a fundamental question for Canadian education – how we train, assess and pay them,” said Peter Cowley, an education policy researcher at the Fraser Institute.
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  • Canada also has the weakest record on teaching national history that the council could find it its review of school curricula in other countries. Most Canadian provinces require only one high school course in Canadian history, and they tend to put a very regional lens on the material.Canadian schools are doing an especially poor job of history education when compared to American ones, said Jeremy Diamond, a director for the Historica-Dominion Institute.“We don’t start young enough, we don’t make it a priority, and we have a generation of young people who don’t know the essential things we as Canadians should know about our history,” he said.
  • The Canadian Council on Learning says there needs to be more school-industry partnerships, like those in part of Central Europe where there are a number of apprenticeship options available to high school students. In Canada, however, a bottleneck occurs as students struggle to find placements in their area of training.
  • It also recommends that Canada set up a national French-language teacher training college, “in order to preserve and enhance bilingual education.” Canada is facing a shortage of French-language teachers, both in the French school boards outside Quebec and for French immersion programs.
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State school truancy in England reaches record high | Education | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ate-school-truancy-record-high

school education truancy England

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • The number of pupils skipping lessons in England's state schools climbed to a record high last autumn, statistics show.An analysis of figures published by the Department for Education reveals that an estimated 64,000 children played truant on a typical day over the autumn term last year, compared to almost 57,200 in the same period of 2006.
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High schools join the fight against depression - 0 views

www.smh.com.au/...depression-20120306-1ui7n.html

schools depression mental_health teacher development teachers Australia

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 12
     
    Distinguishing between mood disorders and the normal difficulties of adolescence is not always easy, but a new program has been developed by the institute to give teachers and students a better understanding of mental health issues. Advertisement: Story continues below The HeadStrong program uses classroom activities to share information and prompt discussions on depression and bipolar disorders, at-risk personality types, coping strategies and where to get support. The institute will train 1500 high school teachers across Australia in the HeadStrong teaching resource over the next three years. It will reach 90,000 students, with a focus on those in rural and remote locations.
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Chinese children endure 'world's most dangerous school run' - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...most-dangerous-school-run.html

China schools development remote teaching students children

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Four times a year, 80 children from a remote village in the Pamir mountains set off on a school run that would make most parents blanch, scaling 1000ft-high cliffs and fording swollen rivers to get to class.
  • "There is only one way to get to the village, and you have to climb up in the mountains," said Su Qin, the head teacher at Taxkorgan Town boarding school, where the children study. "The village is completely cut off. The roads only take you further away," she added.
  • The most dangerous part of the route is a path, which narrows to just a few inches wide, that has been cut into a cliff face some 1,000ft above the valley beneath. Without safety harnesses, the teachers gingerly shepherd their charges along.
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  • "Actually the parents think it toughens the kids up, and gives them good experience," said Ms Su. "However, some of the parents are reluctant to let their children go to school. They are so cut off from the world they do not appreciate the importance that having knowledge will play in their children's lives."
  • Guo Yukun, the local Communist party secretary, told China Central Television (CCTV) that a road is now under construction to the village. However, because of the difficulty of the terrain, it is not expected to be finished until late 2013.
  • "Our main task is to get these 80 primary and middle schoolchildren out of Pili village [and bring them to the school] safely. Our national policy is to make sure children have a free education. So the teachers take good care of them," he said.
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Unique education programmes brighten the future for Afghanistan's young women... - 0 views

www.educationandtransition.org/...e-for-afghanistans-young-women

Afghanistan BRAC girls' education girls schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • While life for many women in the country remains difficult, today Herat’s Gowarshad High School – named for the powerful Timurid queen who founded the city – is full of confident young girls who are well aware of their rights.
  • “If a woman is educated, she can effectively participate in society and transfer her knowledge to her children,” said Fariba, the school’s volleyball captain. “A society must not be led by men only.”
  • the Bangladeshi non-governmental organization BRAC runs a community-based school where girls who have not been able to enter the formal education system can get a basic education. There girls are tutored for two years, at which point they are prepared to join the formal school system at the fourth-grade level.
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  • UNICEF provides BRAC schools with educational materials, including recorded episodes of a Dari-language version of its ‘Meena’ cartoon series, a successful advocacy and teaching tool developed in South Asia. Like other viewers of the cartoon programme, girls at the BRAC school are fond of Meena, a spirited nine-year-old girl who braves the world tackling issues that affect children just like themselves.
  • BRAC currently supports over 2,500 community-based schools in Afghanistan, with some 84,500 students – mainly girls – enrolled.
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Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Standards for Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...11educ.html

standards US education schools learning K-12

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • a panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents released a set of proposed common academic standards on Wednesday. The standards, posted on the panel’s web site, lay out the panel’s vision of what American public school students should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.
  • If a majority of states were to adopt them over the next few months, which experts said was a growing possibility, the new standards would replace the nation’s motley current checkerboard of locally written standards, which vary greatly in content and sophistication. And adoption of the new standards would set off a vast new effort to rewrite textbooks and standardized tests.
  • The Obama Administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the new standards.
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  • The proposed standards outline concepts to be learned, but do not lay down a specific curriculum. In English, for instance, they do not prescribe individual works of literature, but instead offer a list of texts “illustrating the quality, complexity and range” of student reading that would be appropriate for various grades. The middle school list includes “Little Women” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” as well as works of nonfiction like “Letter on Thomas Jefferson” by John Adams. The 11th grade nonfiction list includes Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
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Pupils voice their demands - The Star - 0 views

www.thestar.co.za/-voice-their-demands-1.1045011

South Africa education reform schools protests students

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 22 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • About 20 000 pupils from primary and high schools in Cape Town marched in the city centre to mark Human Rights Day and to demand equal rights and access to education. Led by Equal Education, an NGO advocating for equal education rights, the pupils marched to demand minimum norms and standards for school infrastructure in terms of Section 5A of the South African Schools Act.
  • They demanded that Motshekga provide adequate classrooms, a laboratory, a library or media centre, a computer centre and sports field for each school. Textbooks for every child in every subject, training and decent pay for teachers and the eradication of the more than 400 mud schools in the country were also among the demands made by the pupils and the organisation.
  • “Sometimes we have to go to libraries in Delft and Khayelitsha because the library in Mfuleni does not have enough books with the information we need or there are just too many people there,” said Msebenzi.
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  • Equal Education spokeswoman Yoliswa Dwane said she was “disappointed” that the minister had not come to accept the memorandum, but the organisation was happy with the turnout of school children. “Young people in the province showed today that they have an interest in their education.
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Diane Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ed-testing-undermines-teaching

education teaching NCLB testing standardized ravitch

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 May 11 - No Cached
  • "I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."
  • "The whole purpose of federal law and state law should be to help schools improve, not to come in and close them down and say, 'We're going to start with a clean slate,' because there's no guarantee that the clean slate's going to be better than the old slate," says Ravitch. "Most of the schools that will be closed are in poor or minority communities where large numbers of children are very poor and large numbers of children don't speak English. They have high needs. They come from all kinds of difficult circumstances and they need help — they don't need their school closed."
  • "Regular public school parents are angry because they no longer have an art room, they no longer have a computer room — whatever space they had for extra activities gets given to the charters and then they have better facilities. They have a lot of philanthropic money behind them — Wall Street hedge fund managers have made this their favorite cause. So at least in [New York City] they are better-funded ... so they have better everything."
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  • "Race to the Top is an extension of No Child Left Behind. It contains all of the punitive features. It encourages states to have more charter schools. It said, when it invited proposals from states, that you needed to have more charter schools, you needed to have merit pay — which is a terrible idea — you needed to judge teachers by test scores, which is even a worse idea.
  • On teachers unions "They're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national test, that state is Massachusetts — which is 100 percent union. The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. I think what's happening in Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida and Indiana is very, very conservative right-wing governors want to break the unions because the unions provide support to the Democratic Party. But the unions really aren't the problem in education."
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allAfrica.com: Uganda: School Children Demand an End to Child Labour - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201106221321.html

uganda school children child_labour children's_rights education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • School children have asked government to explain its commitment to end rampant child labour in the country. The children, in both primary and secondary schools, said despite several efforts and the laws in place, child labour has persisted, thereby posing dangers to their growth and health. "We are always abused. Is it right for children to work in construction companies? What solution do you have for those who employ children in bars and other places and what is government doing to such entrepreneurs?" Hamidu Kamoga, a secondary school student from Comprehensive College, Kitetikka in Wakiso District said.
  • The young people made the demands during celebrations to mark the commemoration of the World Day Against Child Labour 2011 at Kyambogo University. The celebrations attracted workers organisations, activists and children in and out of school under the theme; 'Warning! Children in hazardous work; end child labour.'
  • A International Labour Organisation (ILO) report released this month warns that a staggeringly high number of children are still caught in hazardous work with some 115 million of the world's 215m child labourers, under 18 years.
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  • "...Although the overall number of children aged 5 to 17 in hazardous work declined between 2004 and 2008, the number aged 15 to 17 actually increased by 20 per cent during the same period. It increased from 52 million to 62 million," reads the report.
  • "It is difficult to establish facts and figures about Child Labour, that is why we have to apply different techniques thus creating relationships with people involved in child labour," said Ms Kort emphasising that children below 14 years are not supposed to work while children aged 14 to 17 are supposed to do light work. Ms Helen Grace Namulwana, the Platform for Labour Action senior programme Officer in charge of child labour said there is need to enhance the fight for the children at the risk of falling into labour because it is their right to go to school.
  • We criticise any acts that get said children involved in child labour and we believe that every child has a right to education, so nothing should stand in the way to observing those rights," said Ms Namulwana.
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