September 2011
16 posts
1 tag
A look inside Vietnam's school system
We hear a lot about how students in countries like China and Vietnam spend long hours in school and devote all their free time to studying for high stakes tests. The Houston Chronicle posted a guest blog yesterday that offers more perspective - and details - on this through the eyes of a former Vietnamese student.
Tuong Hoang, now a senior in the Houston Independent School District, attended...
4 tags
Singaporean education to tackle character and...
Singapore, a country that consistently ranks among the best in the world on international assessments, is embarking on a new phase of education - one that emphasizes character and values, according to Education Minister Heng Swee Keat.
“We need personal values to enable each of us to have the confidence, self awareness, grit and determination to succeed,” he said, as reported by...
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Foundation to train 10,000 principals
Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative unveiled a new plan today to provide leadership training for principals in developing countries. Over the next four years, 10,000 principals in Kenya, Ghana and India will work with the Varkey GEMS Foundation and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
For the first year, 50 to 60 trainers will work with 500...
“South Africa’s education system is underperforming, especially in terms of...”
– Ann Bernstein, founding director of the Center of Development and Enterprise. A recent CDE report found, among other things, that South Africa needed to increase its output from teacher training programs by 15,000 individuals per year.
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Brazil plans to increase number studying in U.S.
The Brazilian government has plans to pay for 75,000 of its college students to study at the best universities in the world, according to Time. The effort, named “Science Without Borders,” comes at a time when Brazil, and all of Latin America, is sorely underrepresented in research and development.
The ambitious plan requires money from the federal Agency for Support and Evaluation...
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Twenty-six African countries are projected to fail the African Union’s 2015 goal of “Education for All,” according to AU education head Beatrice Khamati, speaking at a conference this week. “Inadequate political will, financing and deficiencies in coordination, monitoring and advocacy are some of the challenges that have contributed to this negative status quo,” she...
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Finland's immigration influx
It’s tempting for people to dimiss Finland’s success on international education assessments with an argument that you can’t compare a small, relatively homogeneous country to the United States. That’s not to say Finland void of all diversity though; a story by YLE, Finland’s national broadcasting company, details how the schools are continuing to be confronted with...
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“Our demands still stand and we will show in the streets that this is a historic...”
– Sebastián Farfán, President of Valparaíso University’s student federation - and one of the thousands of students who have been protesting in Chile for three months over the state of education in the country.
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Spanish teachers strike; Swaziland's principals...
Back to school season isn’t exactly going smoothly around the country. Student protests continue in Latin America, and university students from Greece to Egypt have spoken out against their governments’ handling of higher education. The trend, it seems, is continuing at the k-12 level.
Teachers at vocational and high schools in Spain are planning on striking next week, according to...
United States slips in global college completion...
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released it’s 2011 Education at a Glance Report on Tuesday, ranking everything from how much is spent per student, to how much time teachers spent teaching, to how many students graduate from college.
The report, which used data from 2008 and 2009, brought with it bad news for the United States and, in particular, for...
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Tweeting from France
An article in Le Monde takes a look at a new trend spreading throughout rural, middle-class areas in France: so-called twittclasses. (You can read the entire article translated into English here.)
The first elementary school twittclass was launched in 2010 when teacher Amandine Terrier took her students on a trip to Paris. But what began as a way for students to connect to parents back home has...
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China to start assessing teachers
As countries around the world start to pay more and more attention to teacher evaluation systems - updating them, improving them - China is jumping on board with one small difference. They’re just starting them.
Beginning with a pilot program in two provinces and expanding throughout the country over the next three years, the Ministry of Education will evaluate newly appointed teachers...
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QS World University Rankings released
Earlier this week Quacquarelli Symonds, an international higher education company, revealed its 2011 list of the top 300 universities in the world. With a survey methodology that draws 50 percent of a school’s score from its reputation, QS awarded University of Cambridge in England a perfect score of 100, putting it as number one for the second year in a row.
The United States took up six...
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“Education and skills training is probably the most important source of...”
– Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, presidential candidate for Ghana’s New Patriotic Party
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The protest tally continues
Directly inspired by student protesters in Chile, students in Brazil have taken to the streets demanding education reform in their own country. Specifically, they want 10 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to be spent on education, reports the China Post.
According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2007, Brazil spent 5.1 percent of it’s...
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Taking a cue from Chile?
As students in Chile continue to protest (most recently storming the country’s Ministry of Education), university students in Egypt threaten to do the same. Starting Sept. 13, Egypt’s Student Coalition plans to have an open-ended sit-in, reports Ahram Online.
Students are demanding that the “decision to replace all university presidents linked to the former regime [of overthrown...
August 2011
18 posts
2 tags
Sweden hopes to reverse decline in math skills
The United States isn’t the only country worried with its lackluster performance on international assessments. Sweden, for one, concerned about its standing in math is planning on pumping between $200 and $318 million to improve teaching in the subject in the next five years, The Local reports.
In the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, Sweden scored 18th out of 35...
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Online university courses grow in Australia
An article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald offers a bold prediction: within 25 years, more than 80 percent of students worldwide will earn their degrees online. At least, that’s according to Andrew Burrell, director of the Center for Open Education at Australia’s Macquarie University, where enrollment in a fully online Bachelor of the Arts program has risen from 2,000 people in...
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Russia works on new education legislation
With the start of the school year just days a way in Russia, many teachers in the country are focused on giving feedback for a new law, On Education in the Russian Federation. The law, in draft form, has received thousands of comments online and proposals from over 40 regions in the country.
Last week, President Dmitry Medvedev spoke with education professionals in Southwestern Adygea,...
