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Aid donors get an F for education « World Education Blog - 0 views

  • This is a war zone. Families in the sprawling camp have lost everything – everything that is except a drive to get their kids an education. In the midst of the most abject poverty, parents have come together to build makeshift classrooms, hire a teacher, and buy a blackboard. Many of the kids work in the afternoon, selling charcoal to pay the $1 fee charged every term. “Being in school is fun – and people with an education can have a better life. I’ll be a doctor,” says David Ichange, aged 12.
  • If every girl in sub-Saharan Africa had a secondary education, it would cut under-five deaths by around 1.8 million. The reason: educated mothers are empowered to demand better health and nutrition provision.
  • Education in conflict-affected states is getting spectacularly short shrift. Humanitarian aid could play a vital role in keeping open opportunities for schooling in communities displaced by violence. Yet education receives just 2% of humanitarian aid – and no sector receives a smaller share of the emergency aid requested in emergency appeals.
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  • Here are the facts. We need around $16 billion in aid to achieve the international development targets in education – targets that donors have signed up for. Currently, aid levels are running at around $4.7 billion and stagnating.
  • The same holds for cutting poverty. If every child in a low income country got into school and left with basic reading skills, the growth effects would lift 171 million people out of poverty. That’s a 12% decline.
  • Of course, some countries in conflict do receive substantial support. Afghanistan gets more aid for basic education than the Sudan, the DRC, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic and Chad combined. But the general picture is one of overwhelming neglect.
  • Yet effective aid on education is an investment in creating the hope and opportunity that makes conflict less likely by breaking the link between poverty and violence. Cutting aid for education is the type of cent-wise, dollar-dumb thinking that the Tea Party has brought to the budget reform table.
  • That $16 billion that we need in aid for education represents just six days worth of what donors spend each year on military budgets. Viewed differently, it’s roughly equivalent to the bonuses dished out to investment bankers in the City of London last year.
  • So, here’s the question. What do you think offers the best value for money? A global education initiative that could put over 67 million kids in school, or a week’s spending on military hardware. Do you really think we get a bigger bang for our buck by funding the indulgences of the team that brought you the crash rather than by financing books and schools that offer millions of kids a way out of poverty – and their countries a route into global prosperity?
Teachers Without Borders

New school curriculum to be tested - The National - 0 views

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    ABU DHABI // A new curriculum cutting from 13 to a maximum of seven the number of compulsory subjects in the last three years of school is to be tested in 2012. The revamped curriculum, which will go on trial in selected secondary schools in Abu Dhabi next September, will also offer a vocational stream for non-academically inclined pupils in Grades 10, 11 and 12.
Teachers Without Borders

Nigeria: Govt dumps 9-3-4 system of education - 0 views

  • NDICATIONS have emerged that the Federal Government has dropped the 9-3- 4 system of education.   This educational system took stakeholders over three years to plan and work out its implementation strategy.   The system, which purportedly kicked off in 2009, had the components of basic, technical and vocational inputs, which pupils were expected to complete in the first nine years before proceeding on a career path in the next three years of secondary education.   Education Minister, Prof.  Uqayyatu Rufa’i, last Tuesday, proposed to the National Assembly (NASS), the need to revert to the old system of 6-3-3-4, but with a modification that would include Early  Childhood Education (ECE).
Teachers Without Borders

Gains in girls' education in Afghanistan are at risk: Real lives - 1 views

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    As of September 2011, there were 2.7 million Afghan girls enrolled in school, compared to just 5,000 in 2001. There are two main challenges here. One is the lack of security in this country. There aren't many places which are peaceful where girls can go to school easily. Secondly, we don't have enough schools, books, chairs, tables or professional teachers. These are the things that close the path to school for many girls in Afghanistan. The biggest problem here that it is a mixed school. There are four thousand female students and not enough room for them. In the morning, both boys and girls come while in the afternoon it's just girls. But it is difficult because many people are not open-minded and do not like the girls and boys being educated together. We need a separate school for the girls but right now we have no choice.
Teachers Without Borders

Canadian education awaits a hard lesson, watchdog warns - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • “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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