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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.

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.

Gender “Gender” refers to the social differences and relations between men and women which are learned, vary widely among societies and cultures, and change over time. The term “gender” does not replace the term “sex”, which refers exclusively to biological differences between men and women. For example, statistical data are broken down by sex. The term “gender” is used to analyse the roles, responsibilities, constraints, opportunities and needs of women and men in all areas and in any given social context. Gender roles are learned behaviours in a given society, community or other social group. They condition which activities, tasks and responsibilities are perceived as male and female. Gender roles are affected by age, class, race, ethnicity and religion, and by the geographical, economic and political environment. Changes in gender roles often occur in response to changing economic, natural or political circumstances, including development efforts or structural adjustment, or other nationally or internationally based forces. The gender roles within a given social context may be flexible or rigid, similar or different, and complementary or conflicting. Both women and men are involved in reproductive, productive and community management activities and play roles within social and political groups. Their involvement in each activity reflects the gender division of labour in a particular place at a particular time. The gender division of labour must be reflected in gender analysis.

What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said.

Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.

A shortage of teachers in the fields of accounting, mathematics, languages, computer studies and geography has been identified.

even though the government has subsidised secondary school education, parents are still digging deep into their pockets. GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetA" ); GA_googleCreateDomIframe('google_ads_div_AllAfrica_Story_InsetA' ,'AllAfrica_Story_InsetA'); Each student, under the Free Secondary Education introduced in 2008, is allocated Sh10,265 a year. But the burden on parents remains heavy because of other requirements. For Ms Maureen Ngui, shopping for her first born-daughter, Grace Aurelia Akinyi, life has never been more hectic. "I have spent Sh30,000 on personal effects and textbooks yet it seems I am only halfway through," she said.

Under the "Child Friendly Schools" campaign launched in partnership with the United Nations, the students who will be joining secondary schools today shall not be allocated duties in the roster until the middle of the first term.

The principals are also organising a series of talks, commonly referred to as barazas, to hear the views of the students on various issues.

t is not so much the city’s modern core, where two sleek Trump Towers and a huge airport terminal were built to withstand a major earthquake that is considered all but inevitable in the next few decades. Nor does Dr. Erdik agonize over Istanbul’s ancient monuments, whose yards-thick walls have largely withstood more than a dozen potent seismic blows over the past two millenniums.His biggest worry is that tens of thousands of buildings throughout the city, erected in a haphazard, uninspected rush as the population soared past 10 million from the 1 million it was just 50 years ago, are what some seismologists call “rubble in waiting.”

Istanbul is one of a host of quake-threatened cities in the developing world where populations have swelled far faster than the capacity to house them safely, setting them up for disaster of a scope that could, in some cases, surpass the devastation in Haiti from last month’s earthquake.

the planet’s growing, urbanizing population, projected to swell by two billion more people by midcentury and to require one billion dwellings, faced “an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses.” Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan, Katmandu, Nepal, Lima, Peru, or one of a long list of big poor cities facing inevitable major earthquakes.

n many ways, Ceibal can, and perhaps should, be seen not so much as an education project, but as a larger societal transformation project (of the sort often associated with e-government initiatives), with the education system as the primary and initial dissemination vector.

Under Plan Ceibal (earlier blog post here), Uruguay is the first country in the world to ensure that all primary school students (or at least those in public schools) have their own personal laptop.  For free.  (The program is being extended to high schools, and, under a different financial scheme, to private schools as well).  Ceibal is about more than just 'free laptops for kids', however.  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.  Visiting Uruguay last week, I was struck by how many references there were to 'one laptop per teacher' (and not just 'one laptop per child', which has been the rallying cry for a larger international initiative and movement). 

There is no doubt about the numbers (over 380,000) in Uruguay -- the laptops are not sitting in boxes under an awning at the Ministry of Education collecting dust.  You see them everywhere you see school children.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 31 March, 2010 – You only have to mention the word 'school' and a sparkle comes into Taïma Celestin's dark brown eyes. It's not hard to understand why. The scheduled reopening of Haiti's schools on 5 April will be the first real opportunity for this confident 10-year-old to leave what is today her home – a tiny lean-to covered with a blue tarpaulin in a former sports ground in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince.

During the day, Taïma joins several hundred other children for informal classes run by volunteer teachers inside two large white tents that were provided by UNICEF along with 'School-in-a-box' kits full of learning materials, and a recreation kit.The classes are noisy but good-natured. They pause briefly to allow members of a local non-governmental organization to distribute fruit juice and snacks to the children.

It may be part of the healing process that has led children in the camp to invent their own name for the earthquake. "When we talk about it among ourselves, we call it 'Monsieur Gudoo-Gudoo'," Taïma says, shaking her arms in rhythm to the words, "because that was the noise it made."

Gender Gender refers to the roles and responsibilities of women and men that are created in our families, our societies and our cultures. The concept of gender also includes the expectations held about the characteristics, aptitudes and behaviours of both women and men (feminity and masculinity).