Lest history repeat itself, Ontario has laid the educational groundwork for a new generation of students who appreciate the perils of interest rates and debt, and know the real cost of borrowing money.The province’s Ministry of Education has released comprehensive teacher guidelines that identify places in the Grade 4 through 12 curriculum where financial literacy can be inserted into classes as varied as mathematics, computer science and native studies.
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Ontario forges stimulus plan to boost financial literacy in teens - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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Lest history repeat itself, Ontario has laid the educational groundwork for a new generation of students who appreciate the perils of interest rates and debt, and know the real cost of borrowing money. The province's Ministry of Education has released comprehensive teacher guidelines that identify places in the Grade 4 through 12 curriculum where financial literacy can be inserted into classes as varied as mathematics, computer science and native studies.
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CBC News - Money - Teach financial literacy in schools: report - 0 views
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The Education Cluster in Haiti - Two Years On - 0 views
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The Education Cluster in Haiti - Two Years On January 2012 Introduction Throughout 2011, the Haiti Education Cluster led by UNICEF and Save the Children, established shortly after the January 2010 earthquake, continued to leverage resources (technical, material and financial) to enhance cholera prevention and the recovery of the education system from the impact of the earthquake, while supporting the Government of Haiti to strengthen the capacity of the education system, including developing mechanisms to prevent, prepare for and respond to future emergencies.
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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Oct 11
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Mandarin has the edge in Europe's classrooms - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
www.theglobeandmail.com/...article2203207
classrooms mandarin europe Chinese China languages education curriculum
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Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.
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China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.
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From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.
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More often than not, it is a perception that knowledge of Chinese will be a vital asset in tomorrow’s job market that is driving demand, he says.
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In July, Swedish education minister Jan Björklund floated the idea of every school offering Chinese classes to their students. “Chinese will be much more important, from an economic perspective, than French or Spanish,” he told the Dagens Industri newspaper.
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Another important factor is the financial support from Beijing, which has stepped up the activities of the Confucius Institutes, a network of cultural diplomacy bodies tasked with increasing china’s “soft power” around the globe.
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hese institutes are often likened to Germany’s Goethe Institute or the Alliance Française but are considerably more aggressive in pushing Beijing’s worldview and shutting down discussion of any topics regarded as politically sensitive such as tibet or China’s human rights record.
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BBC News - Schools should be fined for illiteracy, says riot panel - 0 views
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Schools in England should be fined if pupils leave school with poor literacy skills, an independent report into last year's riots says. It adds they should demonstrate how they are building pupils' characters, and give careers advice to each child.
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The key to avoiding future riots, the report claims, is communities "where parents and schools ensure children develop the values, skills and characters to make the right choices at crucial moments". It says: "We propose that there should be a new requirement for schools to develop and publish their policies on building character. "We also recommend that Ofsted undertake a thematic review of character building in schools.
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The final report by the panel says a lack of support and opportunities for young people contributed to the outbreak of riots across England last summer.
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The report also highlights poor literacy skills among young people, saying schools should be fined if they fail to deliver. "We recommend that schools failing to raise the literacy rate of a child to an age appropriate standard should cover the financial cost of raising their attainment," it says.
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The panel also expresses concern that many young people leave school not ready for work. "We recommend schools develop and publish a careers support guarantee, setting out what a child can expect in terms of advice, guidance, contact with businesses and work experience options."
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"We are very disappointed that the panel has come up with such an unrealistic set of recommendations," he said. "Schools have always seen building character as a major priority - the requirement to publish policies on this would be an additional bureaucratic requirement which would distract schools from their front line duties. "And the recommendation to assess strength of character raises all sorts of questions about how that should be done."
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Education International - Spain: Public sector financial crisis pushes schools to the b... - 1 views
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Last week, 450 charter schools in the Valencia region of Spain threatened to close their doors, leaving 250,000 pupils on the streets. The reason: they can no longer pay their bills for basic, essential services such as electricity and water because they have not received any funding from the local authority for the last six months.
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In historic move, UN creates single entity to promote women's empowerment - 1 views
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In a bid to accelerate the empowerment of women, the General Assembly today voted unanimously to create a dynamic new entity merging four United Nations offices focusing on gender equality, a move hailed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other senior officials. “The newest member of the UN family has been born today,” Mr. Ban told the Assembly after it passed the resolution setting up the new UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, to be known as UN Women.
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“By bringing together four parts of the UN system dedicated to women’s issues, Member States have created a much stronger voice for women and for gender equality at the global level,” said the Secretary-General. “It will now be much more difficult for the world to ignore the challenges facing women and girls – or to fail to take the necessary action,” he added.
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One of the main goals of UN Women will be to support the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and other inter-governmental bodies in devising policies. The new body will also aim to help Member States implement standards, provide technical and financial support to countries which request it, and forge partnerships with civil society.
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“UN Women will give women and girls the strong, unified voice they deserve on the world stage,” Ms. Migiro said, calling today a “positive and exciting moment” for the entire UN family. Set to be based in New York, UN Women will be headed by an Under-Secretary-General, to be appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 10
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allAfrica.com: Africa: Abolishing Fees Boosts African Schooling (Page 2 of 2) - 0 views
allafrica.com/...201002181133.html
Kenya Malawi Africa developing nations schools tuition girls girls' education
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Malawi struggles to cope GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); GA_googleCreateDomIframe('google_ads_div_AllAfrica_Story_InsetB' ,'AllAfrica_Story_InsetB'); Other countries have been less successful. Malawi eliminated its school fees in 1994. But with less than half of Kenya's gross domestic product per person and fewer financial and human resources to draw on, it still faces difficult challenges in providing universal primary education.
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As in many other African countries, notes the UN study, "the adoption of universal primary education was triggered by political demands rather than by rational planning processes." Although Malawi had lifted some fees for Standards 1 and 2 and waived primary education fees for girls prior to 1994, the decision to eliminate all fees coincided with the return of multiparty elections that year. The focus, the researchers found, was on increasing enrolment. "Very little attention was paid to quality issues."
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One immediate response was to hire 20,000 new teachers, almost all of whom were secondary school graduates who were given only two weeks of training. Plans to provide on-the-job training failed to materialize. Instructional quality declined sharply as the pupil-teacher ratio climbed to 70 to 1.
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The lack of facilities meant that many classes met under trees, and books and teaching materials arrived months late, if at all. Despite increases in the education budget, spending per student, already low, declined by about 25 per cent and contributed to the decline in quality. As a result nearly 300,000 students dropped out during the first year, and high dropout rates continue to this day.
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Overall, reports the UN study, only about 20 per cent of boys and girls successfully complete eight years of primary education in Malawi. This is largely a function of the country's deep poverty, the researchers say, and the lack of resources, such as nutrition programmes, to help poor children remain in school.
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The abolition of school fees is a precondition for getting large numbers of poor children into school, but it must be accompanied by strong public and political support, sound planning and reform, and increased financing.
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fter systems adjust to the surge in enrolment, they argue, resources must be directed at improving quality and meeting the needs of the very poor, those in distant rural areas and children with disabilities. The analysts say that a particular focus should be girls, who face a range of obstacles to attending and staying in school, including cultural attitudes that devalue education for women. Improved sanitation and facilities and better safety and security conditions can make it easier to keep girls in school.
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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Dec 09
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How do you evaluate a plan like Ceibal? | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 0 views
blogs.worldbank.org/...evaluating-ceibal
ICT ICT4D UNESCO TWB OLPC laptops technology education children teacher development teachers
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Notably, and tellingly, Plan Ceibal rolled out first in rural and poor communities, with schools in the capital city of Montevideo reached only in the final stage of deployment. This stands in stark contrast to the way educational technologies make their way into schools and communities pretty much everywhere else in the world, where urban population centers and wealthy communities are typically first in line (and in many places, the line may end with them!)
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Standing amidst the computer-enabled hubbub of activity that now characterizes the standard learning environments in Uruguayan schools, there can be no denying that something new and different is happening in a big way. Every student in every classroom in every school (and, just as importantly, in every home) is different by multiple orders of magnitude
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What might the consequences be if young people in Uruguay have what is essentially an 'extra' ten years of technology literacy -- what might happen during those ten years (and beyond) as a result? No one knows, but it will be quite interesting to watch.
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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Dec 09
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A Talking Book for Africa | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 1 views
blogs.worldbank.org/...talking-book
TWB Africa Ghana literacy ICT4D Education4All education talking_book
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The 'Talking Book' is a low-cost audio device device with recording capabilities -- imagine a rubbery MP3 player about the size of a grapefuit -- rather ingeniously engineered (and re-engineered) to meet specific needs and usage scenarios in very poor communities in Africa. It is designed for use in local languages, using locally produced content, as tool to promote literacy among primary school children (to cite just one goal and target group). One way to think of the device, Cliff said, is as a 'small portable computer without a display'. While the project is still in its pilot stages, it is notable for its express interest in investigating solutions that are low cost and scalable from the beginning, and in rigorously monitoring and evaluating the impact of its interventions.
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Literacy Bridge began, he said, with the idea that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge, and that those in greatest need are impeded by illiteracy, disability, and inadequate infrastructure. (Here's video from a talk Cliff gave at Google about the project's goals and approach to development.) The project is operationally very lean, supported financially by hundreds of individual donations and by thousands of volunteer hours.
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I have never heard a presentation from a project proponent about the development of an ICT device (of whatever sort) meant to be used by poor people that contained so many comments like what I heard from Cliff: "our users told us"; "we learned from our users that ..."; "what we found out when speaking with and observing our users caused us to radically change how we were thinking, and so we re-designed ..." etc. The iterative, user-centric design process the Literacy Bridge has been engaged in to develop the Talking Book stands in stark contrast to that demonstrated by most (almost all?) of the 'ICT for development' initiatives in the education sector that come through our offices here at the World Bank.
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Survey: Supportive leadership helps retain top teachers - washingtonpost.com - 0 views
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A national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers suggests that while higher salaries are far more likely than performance pay to help keep top talent in the classroom, supportive leadership trumps financial incentives.
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To retain good teachers, 68 percent called supportive leadership "absolutely essential," 45 percent said the same of higher salaries and 8 percent listed performance pay.
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Fifty-nine percent said establishing common standards across states would have a strong or very strong impact on achievement, and 73 percent said clearer academic standards would produce such benefits. But 69 percent said the rigor of their own state's standards was "about right," and teachers were nearly evenly split on whether their own state has "too many standards" or "the right amount."
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The Hindu: Help implement right to education: Manmohan - 0 views
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Addressing the nation to mark the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 that makes elementary education an entitlement for children in the age group of 6-14 years, Dr. Singh said the States should join in this national effort with full resolve and determination. “Our government, in partnership with the State governments will ensure that financial constraints do not hamper the implementation of the Right to Education Act. “Today, our government comes before you to redeem the pledge of giving all our children the right to education.
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“I call upon all our teachers across the country to become partners in this effort. It is also incumbent upon all of us to work together to improve the working conditions of our teachers and enable them to teach with dignity, giving full expression to their talent and creativity.'' He said parents and guardians, too, had a critical role to play having been assigned school management responsibilities under the Act. The needs of every disadvantaged section of our society, particularly girls, Dalits, Adivasis and minorities must be of particular focus as the Act is implemented.
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Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said the biggest challenge to the implementation of the Act would be lack of infrastructure and teachers. Bringing children from the disadvantaged sections into the net would also be challenging, he said.
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allAfrica.com: Uganda: A Successful Year in Education - 0 views
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The increased funding has enabled the education ministry to implement a number of projects. The ministry distributed over sh8.8b to the Universal Secondary Education programme to purchase laboratory equipment.
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The construction and renovation of 217 secondary schools countrywide started this year. The 217 schools are part of the 1,400 schools which will be repaired under a World Bank funded project. About 4,297 classrooms, 41 administration blocks, 144 libraries, 405 science rooms and 71 staff quarters are to be constructed.
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In a bid to improve quality, the P6 and P7 curriculum was reviewed. The new upper primary curriculum is to focus on "what a child can gain from a lesson, other than what a teacher can complete in a syllabus". Illustrations like graphs and tables have been simplified.
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For close to 15 years, national examinations in Uganda were synonymous with late deliveries and leaking of question papers, missing papers, and cheating. However, this year's examinations have arguably been the best organised. The examinations body hired over 7,000 scouts on top of thousands of invigilators and supervisers, who ensured the exercise's success. However, cases of candidates sitting using candles at night and late deliveries of examination material were reported in some examination centres.
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New pledges for 2011 The Government has issued several pledges that it says will be implemented come next year. The pledges include the following: The number of government sponsored students in public universities to increase from 4,000 to 6,000. Free A' level education, which is to cost over sh85b next financial year Rolling out the long-waited tuition loan scheme for privately sponsored university students Construct and renovate more teachers houses, classrooms, science laboratories and latrines About 20,000 teachers will get jobs in the Government over the next five years Government to offer housing loans to teachers who have taught for about 20 years.
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Poor quality in UPE schools UPE has led school enrollment to soar from two million pupils in 1997 to almost 8 million today. However, it came with other challenges which include lack of lunch for pupils, low pay for teachers, inadequate accommodation, laxity in school inspections and teacher absenteeism.
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e National Council for Higher Education closed Lugazi University over alleged failure to meet the minimum standards in the last four years of its operation.
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For over two weeks, lectures were suspended at Kampala International University this year when students rioted, protesting a new rule subjecting them to fines if they delay to pay tuition fees.
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allAfrica.com: Uganda: Education Minister Warns Against Hiking School Fees - 0 views
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Kampala — The government has warned school head teachers against hiking school fees as the new term opens. Closing a two-day Senior One selection exercise at Mandela Stadium-Namboole on Friday, Education Minister Namirembe Bitamazire said the habit of increasing fees by top schools deny hundreds of students a chance to join their dream schools.
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"We don't say that they shouldn't increase but let the increment be reasonable, justifiable and they must seek our permission. Our target is to see that all Ugandan children acquire quality education regardless of their parents' financial predicaments," she said.
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This means that at least 155,716 students will not be admitted despite having garnered the required aggregate for admission. But the Commissioner for Secondary Education, Mr Francis Agula, said the number of admission could be raised to 350,000 due to expansion of existing education facilities in some schools and establishment of new ones.
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Ms Bitamazire also urged head teachers to supplement the theoretical teaching with vocational knowledge to enable students attain survival skills. "It doesn't really help to speak good English when you cannot practically do anything .These (vocational skills) many despise are the ones that change people's lives," She said
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UNGEI - News and Events - Partnering with the philanthropic community to promote educat... - 0 views
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“Most countries in the very poor world cannot afford to provide free access to secondary education,” Prof. Sachs told UNICEF Radio. “Even the Millennium Development Goals fall short of what they need to be, because they only talk about primary education.”
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In addition to financial support, schools need to provide young people with a quality education, including Internet access, to help develop a globally connected curriculum that meets students’ needs.
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NEW YORK, USA, 1 March 2011 - The United Nations Economic and Social Council is meeting at UN Headquarters in New York this week on partnering with the philanthropic community to promote education for all children. AUDIO: Listen now Participants hope to accelerate progress in achieving universal education by engaging supporters from the private sector and philanthropic community to help fund and promote global education initiatives.
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allAfrica.com: Uganda: Doom Looms As Govt Admits Failures in Teaching Profession - 0 views
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Education experts are warning that the absorption of poor academic performers for training as teachers is a recipe for disaster for Uganda's future.
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Our analysis of scores of prospective new entrants at Primary Teachers' Colleges across the country reveals that most of those admitted obtained low grades in the 2010 O-level examinations, raising questions about their academic competence.
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"It is a challenge. I would think that teaching should take the cream of the students but people don't want to join because the profession is looked at as an area for low [academic] performers," said Ms Margaret Rwabushaija, the Uganda National Teachers' Union (UNATU) chairperson.
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Concerns about low remuneration and declining social status of teachers in the country, contrasting their privileged and high esteem in the past, has forced bright students to shun the profession, observers say.
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Until this financial year, a primary teacher earned a monthly salary of Shs200,000 - without allowance - although that gross pay has now marginally increased to Shs260,000.
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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11
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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
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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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shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Jun 11
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In Somalia, UNICEF constructs classrooms and trains teachers for children dis... - 0 views
www.educationandtransition.org/...children-displaced-by-conflict
somalia children education teacher development teachers UNICEF classrooms
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“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.
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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.”
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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.