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Teachers Without Borders

In Somalia, UNICEF constructs classrooms and trains teachers for children displaced by conflict | Back on Track - 0 views

www.educationandtransition.org/...children-displaced-by-conflict

somalia children education teacher development teachers UNICEF classrooms

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • “You can’t compare what we have now with how it used to be. Now we have good space for the children to learn, we have classrooms and furniture, toilets and hand-washing facilities.” says Mr. Odol. There are now 305 children – 234 of them girls – enrolled at the small school. It runs two shifts, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, to accommodate the increasing number of students. The effect has been startling. “Children are learning better now. We have a better environment and enrolment has doubled because children prefer to spend their time in school,” says Mr. Odol.
  • Although the incentive he receives is not much, Mr. Odol says that he will keep teaching in his community. “I want to continue to teach these children, my children,” he says. “I hope that the children I teach will grow up to know how to help themselves and their families.”
  • UNICEF is constructing classrooms, training teachers, supplying learning and teaching materials and school uniforms, and distributing vouchers to families to ensure that children are released to spend time in school instead of working to support their families. UNICEF is also providing financial incentives for teachers.
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  • NICEF is helping to pay incentives to over 1,100 teachers across Somalia,” says UNICEF Education Officer Salad Dahir. At Shabelle School, each child has a complete set of textbooks and learning materials that have been provided with UNICEF support.
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | SOUTH AFRICA: Poor marks for education | South Africa | Children | Education | Governance - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

South_Africa education study teachers teacher development

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 05 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • CAPE TOWN, 11 May 2011 (IRIN) - Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.
  • The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.
  • The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.
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  • Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.
  • When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.
  • many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.
  • "The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."
  • n recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.
  • Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.
  • The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Pakistan - Pakistan flood crisis, one year on - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...pakistan_59461.html

Pakistan floods flooding schools children UNICEF education students

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • PUNJAB, Pakistan, 3 August 2011 – “Before the floods, this village had a one-room Masjid [mosque] school. Most of the children sat under a tree. We now have this beautiful school, and the children love it,” says Mukhtar Ahmad, Headmaster of the Government Primary School in Mullanwala village, located in the Muzaffargarh District of Pakistan’s Punjab Province.
  • Last year’s unprecedented floods in Pakistan forced the bulk of the population in Mullanwala to relocate to safer areas. When the floodwaters receded and people returned, they discovered that not a single structure in the village was standing – not even the one-room Masjid school.
  • Now, a year after the floods, the TLC has turned into a transitional school housed in semi-permanent buildings. As part of its initiative to quickly improve education facilities for flood-affected children in Pakistan, UNICEF plans the construction of 500 such transitional schools by December 2011. Indeed, the process is already under way.
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  • Its teachers use a ‘child-friendly’ approach to schooling that takes the needs of the whole child into account – including needs for protection, recreation, safe water and sanitation, and more.
  • “Before the floods, I used to go to a one-room school,” recalls Shahbaz. “When the floods came, we moved to high ground in Muzaffargarh. When we returned after the floods, our school had been destroyed. Then we got a tent school, books, bags and everything else. Later, they made us this school building.”
  • “Teaching without corporal punishment is something new in this environment,” she notes. “Since children don’t get beaten up in school, parents are also learning that physical punishment is detrimental to a child’s upbringing.”
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

Libyan children start school year without Gadhafi | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...9852254

Libya education schools curriculum children teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 21 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Associated Press= TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Boys and girls chanted slogans against Moammar Gadhafi and teachers hanged an effigy of the fugitive leader Saturday as many Libyan children started their first school year without the "brother leader" dictating the curriculum. Euphoria filled the halls, but teachers admitted a lot needed to be done to overhaul an educational system where a main goal for nearly 42 years was to instill adoration of Gadhafi and what he touted as the greatest system of rule in the world — the "Jamahiriya," a utopian "rule by the masses" that in reality boiled down to rule by Gadhafi.
  • Not all facilities in Tripoli opened their doors, and school officials urged patience, saying it will take time to build a new curriculum and provide new equipment after years of strict control by Gadhafi's regime. "I believe the National Transitional Council will give us new books, computers and tapes," said headmistress Moofidha Nashnoush as she rushed through the halls hanging up new flags and hugging her colleagues. "We need to help the children forget the Gadhafi era and start fresh."
  • The school opening is part of attempts by the National Transitional Council, once the leadership of the rebellion and now closest thing to a government in the North African nation, to restore a sense of normalcy despite continued fighting in three southern and central areas that remain loyal to Gadhafi.
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  • Bahoula Salam Ergei, a 37-year-old teacher, recalled how her lesson plan — including teaching the Green Book and the "mind of Gadhafi" — was always dictated by orders handed down from the regime and she was afraid to change it. Others said authorities often ordered sudden, random changes that they had to follow.
Teachers Without Borders

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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