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The Condition of Education 2012 - 0 views

nces.ed.gov/...pubsinfo.asp

education report US statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 03 Jun 12
     
    Description: The Condition of Education 2012 summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 49 indicators on the status and condition of education, in addition to a closer look at high schools in the United States over the past twenty years.. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available. The 2012 print edition includes indicators in three main areas: (1) participation in education; (2) elementary and secondary education and outcomes; and (3) postsecondary education and outcomes.
Teachers Without Borders

Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators - 1 views

www.oecd.org/...63238_48634114_1_1_1_1,00.html

OECD statistics report education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Across OECD countries, governments are having to work with shrinking public budgets while designing policies to make education more effective and responsive to growing demand. The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.
  • ISBN: 9789264114203 Publication: 13/9/2011 (click on the image to download the publication)   Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators Across OECD countries,
  • The indicators show who participates in education, how much is spent on it, and how education systems operate. They also illustrate a wide range of educational outcomes, comparing, for example, student performance in key subjects and the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment.
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF warns of education crisis in Somalia :: U.S. Fund for UNICEF - UNICEF USA - 0 views

www.unicefusa.org/...unicef-education-somalia.html

education unicef somalia crisis enrolment students drought famine

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The assessment, which was carried out last week, indicates that with the movement of an estimated 200,000 school-age children who have migrated to urban areas or across the border due to hunger, the gross primary school enrolment of 30% could plummet even further.  This is likely to be compounded by an acute shortage of teachers and an increase in demand for education services in areas where influxes of internally displaced people have been the greatest, such as in Mogadishu. 
  • "Education is a critical component of any emergency response," said Rozanne Chorlton, UNICEF Somalia Representative.  "Schools can provide a place for children to come to learn, as well as access health care and other vital services. Providing learning opportunities in safe environments is critical to a child’s survival and development and for the longer term stability and growth of the country."
  • Already, most of 10,000 teachers across the southern and central regions are dependent on incentives paid through the support of Education Cluster partners. Results indicate that in Lower and Middle Juba as well as Bay regions, up to 50 percent of teachers may not return to the classroom when schools reopen. 
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  • more than $20 million will be needed to carry out the plans.  Funding received to date is inadequate, and funding gaps in the education sector have reached their highest levels in the last four years.
  • Support is urgently needed to establish temporary learning spaces in camps for the internally displaced, support additional classroom space to accommodate new learners in host communities where people have migrated, provide water and sanitation facilities, provide school kits of essential education and recreational material to 435,000 children, provide incentives to 5,750 teachers and strengthen the Community Education Committee’s involvement in schools.
  • "After decades of neglect and lack of funding, the educational opportunities for school-aged children in Somalia are already dire, so it is imperative that we do everything we can to make sure the situation does not get worse,” said Chorlton.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 14 Aug 11
     
    NEW YORK (August 10, 2011)- With an estimated 1.8 million children between 5-17 years of age already out of school in southern and central Somalia, a rapid assessment conducted by the Education Cluster, in ten regions, warns this number could increase dramatically when schools open in September unless urgent action is taken. The assessment, which was carried out last week, indicates that with the movement of an estimated 200,000 school-age children who have migrated to urban areas or across the border due to hunger, the gross primary school enrolment of 30% could plummet even further.  This is likely to be compounded by an acute shortage of teachers and an increase in demand for education services in areas where influxes of internally displaced people have been the greatest, such as in Mogadishu. 
Teachers Without Borders

Developing Locally Meaningful Indicators for Child-centered Psychosocial Programming in... - 0 views

www.cpcnetwork.org/resources-results.php

uganda programming Education in Emergencies psychosocial children support

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 01 Feb 12
     
    Defining Success: Developing Locally Meaningful Indicators for Child-centered Psychosocial Programming in Uganda
Teachers Without Borders

Gaps between boys and girls in developing world widen as they get older - UN report - 0 views

www.un.org/...story.asp

gender education girls' education girls boys report UN disparity

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 25 Sep 11
     
    "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.
Teachers Without Borders

Launch of World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education - 0 views

www.uis.unesco.org/...unesco-gender-atlas-2012.aspx

gender equality women education EFA UNESCO

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 09 Mar 12
     
    To mark International Women's Day, UNESCO and the UIS have jointly released the World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, which includes over 120 maps, charts and tables featuring a wide range of sex-disaggregated indicators.   The vivid presentation of information and analysis calls attention to persistent gender disparities and the need for greater focus on girls' education as a human right.   The atlas illustrates the educational pathways of girls and boys and the changes in gender disparities over time. It hones in on the gender impact of critical factors such as national wealth, geographic location, investment in education, and fields of study.     The data show that: Although access to education remains a challenge in many countries, girls enrolled in primary school tend to outperform boys. Dropout rates are higher for boys than girls in 63% of countries with data. Countries with high proportions of girls enrolled in secondary education have more women teaching primary education than men. Women are the majority of tertiary students in two-thirds of countries with available data. However, men continue to dominate the highest levels of study, accounting for 56% of PhD graduates and 71% of researchers.
Teachers Without Borders

Welcome - Millennia 2015- ©® Institut Destrée / The Destree Institute - 0 views

www.millennia2015.org/news.asp

girls girls' education MDGs development report health

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 29 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 29 Dec 10
     
    Start with a Girl: A New Agenda for Global Health Center for Global Development   "The health of adolescent girls is everyone's business. We all need to step up to the plate to embrace this ambitious agenda."-Melinda Gates   Improving the health of adolescent girls in the developing world is the key to improving maternal and child health, reducing the impact of HIV, and accelerating social and economic development.   Start with a Girl: A New Agenda for Global Health describes the most prevalent and serious health problems adolescent girls face in developing countries, linking them to a combination of specific public-health risks and social determinants of health. It highlights the diverse ways in which governments and non-governmental organizations have sought to break vicious cycles of ill health. Finally, and most importantly, the report lays out an ambitious yet feasible agenda for governments, donors, the private sector, and civil society organizations-complete with estimates of indicative costs.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Ghana: Karaga Parents Refuse to Send Girls to School - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201012211032.html

Ghana parents enrollment girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • According to Madam Fatima, most of the Muslim parents, in spite of the Capitation Grant, School Feeding and supply of free school uniforms and exercise books by the government, still prefer to send their children to the farms, or allow them to travel down south for menial jobs such as 'Kayayei', rather than send them to school.
  • schools in the Karaga District continued to record low female enrollment every academic year, more especially, the Islamic schools. Citing her school, which is also an Islamic school as an example, Madam Fatima described it as being "highly unacceptable" to see a school with a population of 700, with only 200 females. Out of the 523 pupils at the primary level, only 160 are girls, and at Junior High 1 and 2, only 21 are females out of 134 pupils.
  • Madam Fatima told The Chronicle that even though the Karaga District Education Directorate and the District Assembly had over the years embarked on sensitisation campaigns to encourage parents and even traditional rulers to push their female wards to school, something positive was yet to come out it.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 04 Jan 11
     
    She indicated that the majority of the parents were of the view that the education of girls was irrelevant, since a woman would eventually end up in a man's house as a wife, no matter the successes she achieves in education.
Teachers Without Borders

New teachers getting ready to be graded on classroom work - JSOnline - 0 views

www.jsonline.com/...om-work-dg4fu8e-142232725.html

teachers portfolios portfolio teacher development assessment performance

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • But this spring, Johnson will take a practice version of a new performance assessment that goes beyond asking what he knows about his subject. Formally known as the Teacher Performance Assessment, the portfolio-based assessment will be required for anyone completing a teacher-education program and seeking a teaching license in Wisconsin after Aug. 31, 2015, the Department of Public Instruction has decided. Johnson and teacher hopefuls in other states taking the Teacher Performance Assessment, even if for practice, will have to submit lesson plans, reflections of their work and a video of their classroom interactions with students as part of the Web-based program.
  • All of it is aimed at answering a single, critical question: How well can you teach?
  • Developed by a team of researchers at Stanford University, the assessment will be administered by international education publishing and technology juggernaut Pearson. Once teacher candidates submit their portfolios online, trained reviewers from around the country will grade them on a scale of 1 to 5. They're looking for evidence of student learning, from the 10- to 15-minute video or teacher reflections. A 3 or higher is typically considered a passing score, though Wisconsin hasn't settled on what its passing score will be.
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  • Johnson, the student teacher in Madison, said he believes the new performance assessment will serve as a valuable tool. "Passing the Praxis II just meant I had content knowledge," he said. "What's more important is for me to show I can convey that science knowledge to a class full of students."
  • Desiree Pointer Mace, assistant professor and associate dean for graduate programs at Alverno's School of Education, likes the assessment's layers: Teachers have to provide a written reflection of their teaching practice, and the 10- to 15-minute video gives some indication of how they interact in a classroom.
  • "It doesn't test what you can recall and push out; it tests the work of teaching and how you connect to students," Pointer Mace said. "Then the whole thing must be graded by someone who is independent but knows about teaching." Alverno has long emphasized performance-based exams and the use of video as a tool for self-critique, so Pointer Mace said it's not a huge shift for the program to adapt to the new assessment.
Teachers Without Borders

One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent tormen... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...fering-persistent-torment.html

bullies cyber children bullying report UK

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Thousands of children are too frightened to go to school or suffer depression and even attempt suicide after being targeted by ‘cyber bullies’, according to a study.It found 28 per cent of children aged 11 to 16 had experienced bullying on the internet or via a mobile phone.
  • Children from an ethnic minority background are more likely to be targeted, with ‘white non-British’ youngsters the most at risk from persistent cyber bullying. The report stated this indicated ‘recent immigrants’ were most at risk.
  • The survey of 4,600 children was carried out by the charity Beatbullying and the National Association of Head Teachers, and the issue will be highlighted tonight in a BBC1 Panorama programme called Hunting The Internet Bullies.
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  • The report said: ‘There have been a significant number of child and teenage suicides caused by relentless online aggression.‘In the face of this, it is increasingly difficult to argue that the online world is not “real” when activities there can have such devastating repercussions in the real lives of young people.’
  • More than half the incidents of ‘cyber bullying’ happen on Facebook, with the MSN messenger service the second most common platform for harassment.
  • Teachers are also suffering from cyber attacks on a significant scale, according to the study.One in 10 teachers said they experienced technological harassment, 15 per cent said they felt afraid for their safety or that of their family.
  • Teachers also spent an average of six hours a week dealing with cyber bullying cases - costing the taxpayer an estimated £18million a year.
  • Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of Beatbullying, said: ‘Cyber bullying continues to be a dangerous problem for a significant number of young people and we must not ignore its complex and often devastating effects.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 08 Feb 12
     
    UK Report on bullying: One in four children targeted by cyber bullies with 350,000 suffering persistent torment
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - At a glance: Niger - Food shortages force children to drop out of school in Niger - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...niger_61582.html

Sahel Africa drought food school education Niger

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • NIAMEY, Niger, 6 February 2012 – The effect of food insecurity on children’s health is obvious; children, particularly those under age 5, are vulnerable to life-threatening malnutrition. Less obvious is the devastating impact of the crisis on children’s education. When there is not enough to eat, school can quickly become an afterthought. This is the scenario now facing countless families in the Sahel region of Africa, where a food crisis is looming. Particularly at risk are children in Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and localized areas of Senegal.
  • “We have never had so little food,” said Oumou. “Of course, I want to continue going to school, but sometimes I am so hungry and low on energy that I cannot even see the blackboard.”
  • “Last year was okay, but not this year,” Souleye said. “I eat at school during the day, but it is not enough. Sometimes, I cannot sleep at night because of stomach cramps.”
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  • In Niger, 66 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line and educational indicators are already among the lowest in the world. Given these conditions, the importance of keeping children in school cannot be overstated.
Teachers Without Borders

AFGHANISTAN: Struggling to improve education - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

Afghanistan Education Under Attack schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Sep 10 - Cached
  • KABUL, 29 August 2010 (IRIN) - Education in Faryab Province, northern Afghanistan, has never been as good as it is now thanks to the dozens of new schools built by Norway.
  • Faryab is a success story in a country where almost half of the 12,600 schools nationwide do not have a building (classes are held in the open or in tents), officials said.
  • Norway’s flag and other official symbols are not used on the schools which, according to some experts, have helped keep them immune from armed attacks. Schools, students and teachers have often been attacked and harassed by gunmen allegedly associated with Taliban insurgents.
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  • n terms of education, the southern province of Helmand, severely affected by the insurgency, appears to lag far behind Faryab Province.
  • Though it has roughly the same population as Faryab, Helmand has only 282 schools of which over 150 have been closed due to insecurity and lack of teachers, provincial officials said.
  • “Building schools does not mean improving education - any more than building a hospital means improving health care,” adding that the focus on education was good but not at the cost of other important issues.
  • Up to seven million students are currently enrolled at schools across Afghanistan, according to the Education Ministry, indicating significant progress since 2001 when only two million (boys only) were enrolled.
  • However, about five million school-age children, mostly girls in the insecure southern and eastern provinces, are still being deprived of an education due to war, poverty, lack of schools and social restrictions, the Education Ministry said.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Rwanda: Free Basic Education Increases Enrolment - 1 views

allafrica.com/...201009270149.html

Rwanda EFA teachers schools enrollment MDGs

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Kigali — Early last year, the government introduced the 9-Year Basic Education (9 YBE) programme, which offers six years of primary education and three years of secondary education to all Rwandan children free of charge.The idea was to have school-going children unable to access education in the past to do so, and be able to compete in the job market regionally. The Ministry of Education also hopes that the programme will reduce the dropout rate in schools.Information from the Ministry of Education indicates that already, the current enrolment rate stands at 97 percent for boys and 98 percent for girls.
  • According to UNESCO, this is the highest enrolment rate in the region. So far, many countries are implementing free primary education. Few, however, have put in place a programme for post-primary education.
  • Several Headteachers say the programme has gained momentum following a recent schools construction campaign that has seen thousands of new classrooms built across the country. Nearly all the classrooms have been voluntarily built by parents, teachers, university students or government officials. They say the strategy of free education for all is beginning to pay off. The enrolment rate has increased as more children go to school.
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  • The goal is to reduce the teacher-student ratio from 74 to 45 students per teacher. Though headteachers commended the government's effort to equip schools with the basic teaching materials like books, they noted that lack of computers and the insufficient lab materials for practical lessons hamper the success of the programme.
  • Electricity also remains a challenge especially for schools and students in rural areas. This has a great impact on students' performance.
Teachers Without Borders

1.5 Million Displaced After Chile Quake - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...28chile.html

tsunami disaster earthquake Chile photographs statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • More than 1.5 million people have displaced by the quake, according to local news services that quoted the director of Chile's emergency management office. In Concepción, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.
  • While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
  • Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
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  • The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900,
  • Chile’s government had not yet requested assistance. All international relief groups were on standby, and the International Federation of Red Crosses and Red Crescents said the Chilean Red Cross indicated that it did not need external assistance at this point.
  • In Talca, 167 miles south of Santiago, almost every home in the center of the city was severely damaged, and on Saturday night, people slept on the streets in the balmy night air near fires built with wood from destroyed homes. All but two of the local hospital’s 13 wings were in ruins, said Claudio Martínez, a doctor at the hospital. “We’re only keeping the people in danger of dying,” he said. Dr. Martínez said the hospital staff had tried to take some people to Santiago for treatment in the morning, but the roads were blocked at the time.
  • Cellphone and Internet service was sporadic throughout the country, considered one of the most wired in Latin America, complicating rescue efforts.
  • The earthquake struck at 3:34 a.m. in central Chile, centered roughly 200 miles southwest of Santiago at a depth of 22 miles, the United States Geological Survey reported.
  • The Geological Survey said that another earthquake on Saturday, a 6.3-magnitude quake in northern Argentina, was unrelated. In Salta, Argentina, an 8-year-old boy was killed and two of his friends were injured when a wall collapsed, The Associated Press reported.
  • The most powerful earthquake ever recorded was also in Chile: a 9.5-magnitude quake struck in the spring of 1960 that struck near Concepción and set off a series of deadly tsunamis that killed people as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
  • But that earthquake, which killed nearly 2,000 people and left more than two million homeless at the time, prepared officials and residents in the region for future devastating effects. Shortly after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Valparaíso in 1985, the country established strict building codes, according to Andre Filiatrault, the director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University at Buffalo.
Teachers Without Borders

BBC News - Chile's long experience of quakes - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8540522.stm

earthquake Chile map statistics

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • It is not possible to predict the time and magnitude of an earthquake, but certain places on the Earth know they are always at risk from big tremors. Chile is one of those places.It lies on the "Ring of Fire", the line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions that circles virtually the entire Pacific rim. The magnitude 8.8 event that struck the country at 0634GMT on Saturday occurred at the boundary between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, just off shore and at a depth of about 35km (20 miles).
  • The Nazca plate, which makes up the Pacific Ocean floor in this region, is being pulled down and under the South American coast. It makes the region one of the most seismically active on the globe. Since 1973, there have been 13 events of magnitude 7.0 or greater.
  • French and Chilean seismologists had recently completed a study looking at the way the land was moving in response to the strain building up as a result of the tectonic collision. Their analysis suggested the area was ripe for a big quake. "This earthquake fills in an identified seismic gap," Dr Roger Musson, who is the British Geological Survey's Head of Seismic Hazard, told BBC News.
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  • "The last major earthquake that occurred in this area was in 1835. This was a famous earthquake observed by Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle. This is a place where the stress has been gathering for 170 years, and finally it's gone in another earthquake that's repeated this famous historical quake." As is nearly always the case, the region was hit by a series of aftershocks. In the two and a half hours following the 90-second 8.8 event, the US Geological Survey reported 11 aftershocks, of which five measured 6.0 or above.
  • Saturday's quake was almost 1,000 times more powerful than the one to hit Port-au-Prince in Haiti. But size is not in itself an indicator of the likely number of deaths. One major factor which will limit the number of deaths in Chile will be its greater level of preparedness. Both the Chilean authorities and the Chilean people are generally well versed in how to cope in such an emergency.
  • The emergency response system is organised at national, regional and local level. "Chile is a seismic country. So, we must be prepared!" is the message from Onemi.
Teachers Without Borders

India: The Open Defecation Paradox - Pulitzer Center Untold Stories - 0 views

untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/...e-open-defecation-paradox.html

water_crisis water sanitation developing nations India toilets

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.
  • Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.
  • India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.
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  • For example, NGOs can produce statistics indicating that more households in India have cell phones and television than access to toilets. But for rural people to want to put in toilets, they have to be informed.
Fred Mednick

ISRAEL: Researchers see Tunisia as a textbook revolution | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angel... - 0 views

latimesblogs.latimes.com/...sia-a-textbook-revolution.html

Tunisia Israel Egypt curriculum peace_education textbooks

shared by Fred Mednick on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • an Israeli research group suggests Tunisia's was a textbook revolution. Not in the sense that it was a perfect storm or that it followed a certain formula -- no two revolutions are the same -- but in the sense that it may actually have begun in school textbooks.
  • A comprehensive study of the Tunisian curriculum, completed in 2009 and presented before the European parliament, found that education in Tunisia cultivates equality and is much more progressive in teaching tolerance than any other Arab country.
    • Fred Mednick
      Fred Mednick on 09 Feb 11
       
      Incredibly interesting!
  • The material still takes the Palestinian side in their conflict with Israel, researchers found, but not in a way that negates Jews or Israel. Above all, the study found the educational system to have a "profound understanding of equality and democracy."
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  • According to the group's research, Egypt is another story. With school curricula still very much under control of clerics and shaped largely by Muslim clerics and religious authorities, it does not encourage independent thinking and emphasizes war narratives, not peace. While textbooks do urge tolerance to minorities such as the Copts, according to the study, Manor says they have obliterated any mention of historic injustices they have suffered.
  • Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Belarus and even China should read the study when it comes out, as the data indicate they could be looking at civilian unrest in the near future, too. Jordan and Algeria, where democratization is low but the people's aspirations are likewise, appear to be more stable, according to the study.
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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