New research suggests that females such as Ms. Lee may be particularly vulnerable to bullying from other females, even as rates of male bullying decline. It’s a troubling finding that highlights where parents, educators and policy makers may need to focus their efforts to counter the effects of school-related bullying.
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Benin's progress in education: Expanding access and narrowing the gender gap ... - 0 views
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In 1990, Benin had one of the world's lowest primary and secondary school enrolment rates, with enormous gender, socioeconomic and regional disparities in access to education. Since then, initial access to primary education has been approaching universality. The gender gap has narrowed substantially, and has in some regions been eliminated.
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The bullying gender gap: Girls more likely to be targets - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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A comprehensive report released last month by researchers from the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that while overall rates of bullying have remained relatively stable in recent years, some significant gender disparities have emerged.
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The study found that nearly one-third, or 29 per cent, of students reported being bullied since the start of the school year.
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The report, called the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, has been conducted every two years since 1977, making it the longest continuing survey of young people in Canada and one of the longest in the world. Nearly 9,300 students in Grades 7 to 12 from 181 different Ontario schools participated in the most recent survey, which was conducted from October, 2010, to June, 2011.
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Online or cyber-bullying was also much more common among females, with 28 per cent of girls reporting being targeted by cyber-bullying compared to just 15 per cent of boys.
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The overall rates haven’t really changed since 2003, the first year CAMH monitored bullying at school. But the survey found that females are more likely to be bullied. Thirty-one per cent of adolescent girls reported being victimized in the most recent survey, compared to 26 per cent for boys.
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This raises several questions: Do boys get along better than girls? Have programs aimed at curbing bullying failed to reach girls?
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“The problem is girls do it all underneath the surface,” said Haley Higdon, a facilitator with the SNAP for Schools program.The SNAP (Stop Now and Plan) model is designed to help reach children with behavioural problems or other issues. As a facilitator, Ms. Higdon works in classrooms in the Toronto District School Board. Often, the behavioural problems she encounters stem from bullying.
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With boys, bullying is typically much easier to detect because male bullies often resort to physical measures, such as fighting. With girls, the behaviour can be much more subtle, making it more difficult for teachers to detect.
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Bullying can take on many forms. It’s not just one child pushing another in the schoolyard – it is any aggressive or unwanted behaviour that involves a real or perceived imbalance in power, according to StopBullying.gov, a U.S. government website.
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Notes from the Field | Not again! - 0 views
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And yet, there's an additional heartache for Haiti in hearing this news. Why was it so much worse here? Chile's quake registered at 8.8, about 500 times more powerful than Haiti's. But the numbers of Haitian dead have already surpassed 220,000 – close to the horrendous toll of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Chile's dead, at last report, number some 700 – a tragic loss, but orders of magnitude fewer than Haiti's. What explains this deadly disparity?
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Where Chile had strict building codes, Haiti suffered from haphazard construction. Poor, rural people had for years flooded into the capital, living in precariously built shantytowns. Lack of enforcement, corruption and weak governance all contributed to grossly magnify the proportions of the catastrophe. It's easy enough to see the exceptions here, which might have been the rule if earthquake-resistant building codes had been enforced: a few solid structures still tower above the rubble – scarred and cracked, to be sure, but standing all the same.
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I worry that, as so many times in the past, Haiti will quickly fade from public consciousness, once the world's TV screens are no longer broadcasting terrifying pictures from Port-au-Prince. All the more important that those of us who are working hand in hand with the Haitian people maintain our commitment for the long term, not just with material support but with the determination to rebuild safely and prudently.
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CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Education against the odds - AlertNet - 0 views
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Central African Republic schools education Education Under Attack
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Decades of political violence in northern Central African Republic have caused widespread destruction and displacement. The educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools”.
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“Needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening,” Farid Boubekeur, chief education officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in CAR, told IRIN.
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For about 200 pupils of the primary school Ecole Ouande, in the Linguiri Village of the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture in the northeast of the country, lessons are conducted under a big tree with five pupils sharing each wooden desk.
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Many of the pupils attending schools in the area were forced to flee their homes due to the conflict between rebel groups and government forces, and are now living in informal settlements in and around the village.
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“Finding teachers who would want to work in this area is very difficult. But pupils’ parents are very supportive and voluntarily contribute with 100 CFA each [50 cents] to support the trainee teacher,” said one of the teachers.
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Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views
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Egypt Tunisia unemployment education EFA democracy teachers
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Gaps between boys and girls in developing world widen as they get older - UN report - 0 views
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13 September 2011 – A new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) highlights significant gaps in areas such as education and health, mostly favouring males, as boys and girls in developing countries grow older. “While there is little difference between boys and girls in early childhood with respect to nutrition, health, education and other basic indicators, differences by gender appear increasingly more pronounced during adolescence and young adulthood,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director.
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The data shows that girls are significantly more likely to be married as children (under 18 years of age) and to begin having sex at a young age. Young women are less likely to be literate than young men and are less likely to watch television, listen to the radio and read a newspaper or magazine. In addition, young men are better informed about HIV/AIDS and are also more likely to protect themselves with condoms during sex. Young women in sub-Saharan Africa, the report says, are two to four times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than young men.
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"While there is little difference between boys and girls in early childhood with respect to nutrition, health, education and other basic indicators, differences by gender appear increasingly more pronounced during adolescence and young adulthood," said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director.
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Countries struggling to meet rising demand for secondary education - UN - 0 views
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25 October 2011 – The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest, released today by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of children who want to enrol in secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa.
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“There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. “This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today’s globalized world.”
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Yet, the agency adds, a child in the last grade of primary school only has at best a 75 per cent chance of making the transition to lower secondary school in about 20 countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The region also has a shortage of secondary school teachers.
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“Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never even spend a day in school,” states UNESCO. Girls are the first to suffer from this inequality, the report says. In sub-Saharan Africa, the enrolment ratio for girls in lower secondary education is 39 per cent compared to 48 per cent for boys. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in which the gender disparities against girls are getting worse at the upper secondary level, with 8 million boys enrolled compared to only 6 million girls, according to the report.
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“All of these data underscore a central message: secondary education is the next great challenge,” states Hendrik van der Pol, Director of UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics. “According to the Digest, about one third of the world’s children live in countries where lower secondary education is formally considered to be compulsory but the laws are not respected. We need to translate the commitment into reality.”