Archive for September 16, 2007 - September 22, 2007

Seven-year-old Assatou has been selling grilled plantains at a busy junction on the outskirts of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, for two years. “My family can't afford to send me to school,” she says with a sigh. “So I learned how to cook plantain instead.” Under a new education policy, parents or guardians of children like Assatou will soon face fines or even be arrested for allowing their children to sell in the streets during school hours. Parents say they would much rather put their children in school than to work, but they have no choice. “Children are not breadwinners,” said Hawa Gol Kotchi, deputy minister of education for information. “They should be in school, not working on the street.” Gol Kotchi said the move was part of a drive to meet a Millennium Development Goal to have all children enrolled in school by 2015.

Over six million children in the Arab world are currently not enrolled in primary education—one of the most fundamental rights of a child, according to Malak Zaalouk, UNICEF’s regional education adviser. The issue of primary education has come to the fore with the launch of Dubai Cares by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai. According to Unicef, of the more than 100 million children worldwide not in the primary education system, more than 55% are girls. “There are numerous economic and other reasons to make sure that children receive an education, but fundamentally it is a child’s right. It’s like breathing and eating—a basic right,“ Malak told Gulf News via telephone from Amman, also stressing the importance of providing quality education. Read the article at Gulfnews.com.

Where do young cows eat when they go to school? In the calf-eteria. Oscar Henderson, 9, serves up a big grin to go with the punchline from a new library book at Dovercourt Junior Public School in Ontario, Canada. “It’s really good to have new books,” said the Grade 4 student. “Joke books are my favorite.” His school was one of 10 across Canada that received a $150,000 grant last year to buy new books and beef up literacy support for their libraries. On September 19, Dovercourt pupils attended the launch of the documentary “Writing on the Wall” that says nearly half of Canadians have trouble with day-to-day reading while 80% of those who end up in jail are functionally illiterate. Even so, the film says, governments have slashed funding for school libraries. Read the article at TheStar.com.

In preparation for World Teachers Day on October 5, Education International has launched a new website featuring background information, resources, and more. This year, the World Teachers Day campaign revolves around the theme "Better working conditions for teachers mean better learning conditions for learners." In conjunction with that theme, Education International has identified six key demands on behalf of teachers: a decent working environment, a living wage, equal pay and equal rights for women, initial and ongoing professional development, involvement in policy making, and collective bargaining to defend and enhance teachers' rights.

For further information, visit the World Teachers Day website.

  IRA has entered the world of podcasts. The association’s first podcast, IRA Author Insights: Afflerbach on Reading and Assessment, is now available as a free download on the IRA website. In this podcast, author Peter Afflerbach discusses how classroom assessment, not NCLB accountability testing, influences reading achievement. He highlights the need to support teachers so that they provide excellent instruction to all students. Download the podcast, and look for more in the near future.

The average school library today is a well-connected facility with significant numbers of computers for students and staff to do research, according to a major survey of school library media centers. But the survey, conducted by the American Association of School Librarians, also suggests that school district leaders need to pay more attention to their elementary school libraries and that larger schools should be spending more per pupil on their libraries than they do now. Read more of this article from the website eschoolnews.com.

Class sizes in primary schools in the United Kingdom (UK) are still far higher than in most other developed countries despite millions of pounds of government cash being pumped into the sector, an international study revealed yesterday. Figures show the UK—with an average of 25.8 pupils per class in state schools—comes 23rd out of 30 Western countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD) for class sizes. Only Korea, Chile, Japan, Turkey, Israel, Brazil and Ireland have larger class sizes. The smallest primary school classes are in the Russian Federation, where there is an average of just 15.6 pupils per class. Read the article at The Independent website.

With only 19% of children in school after Sierra Leone’s decade–long civil war, the former government began an ambitious project to renovate and build more schools. But while brightly painted blue and white classrooms have already popped up in towns and villages around the country they come at a time when fewer teachers than before are willing to work in them. “Graduates from teacher training colleges are abandoning the classroom looking for greener pastures elsewhere,” deputy director of junior and secondary schools at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Simon Labour, told IRIN. Before the war, Sierra Leone had about 20,000 qualified teachers, Labour said, but that number has dropped to 15,000. Read the article at IRIN News.

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes—a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis—as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message. To mark the anniversary, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize. Read more of this article from CNN.com.

  State education organizations vowed earlier this week to continue using debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act to remind federal legislators of some chronic concerns related to special education services—and to bring up some new ones. At a press briefing in Washington, representatives speaking on behalf of state lawmakers, special education directors, school administrators, and local school boards warned that the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act remains perennially underfunded, and that there is a continuing tension between the precepts of the federal special education law and the requirements of NCLB. Read more of this article from Education Week.

  For many schools, the most serious penalty for failing to meet federal guidelines under the No Child Left Behind Act is usually negative publicity. But for Title I schools, which receive federal money based on their poverty rates, penalties are imposed when the schools fail to make what the federal government considers adequate yearly progress (AYP) on standardized tests. Schools that fail to make such progress for two consecutive years in the same subject must offer parents the option of transferring their children to other schools. The more years a school fails to meet the targets, the more stringent the penalties. Read about a school in northern Virginia that has missed its targets for five consecutive years in this article from The Washington Post.

Often times, children are not identified at birth as having a disability, but rather exhibit more subtle issues between the ages of 3 and 5. With that in mind, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has scheduled an online discussion, "Services Under IDEA for Your Preschool-age Child," for Monday, September 24, from noon to 1:00 p.m. Eastern time.

NCLD notes that the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) was created for children from birth to age 21. Luzanne Pierce, the author of NCLD's Parent Advocacy Brief Preschool Services Under IDEA, will share information and answer questions.

For further information or to submit an advance question, visit the following page on the NCLD website. No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to participate in this text-based discussion. A transcript will be posted shortly after the discussion.

Oklahoma has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the five worst “language-loss hotspots” in the world—places where native languages are going extinct the fastest—according to an analysis released yesterday. But Oklahoma isn’t alone. Researchers in Northern Australia have recorded the last known speaker of Amurdag—a man who remembers about 100 words that he last heard spoken by his now-deceased father. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

First-year students whose roommates brought a video game player to college studied 40 minutes less each day on average, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those 40 minutes of lost study time translated into first-semester grades that were 0.241 points lower on the 4.0 grade scale. Read more about this study, one of the first to link study time to academic performance, in this article from USA Today.

The United Kingdom is being overtaken by other countries in the drive for more graduates of higher education, according to an article on the BBC News website. According to the Education at a Glance report released this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the UK slipped from the third highest proportion of graduates to 10th.

Although the UK has increased its number of graduates, other countries have moved forward at much more rapid rates. While countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the Scandinavian nations have three quarters of their young people entering a university, the UK figure, using the OECD's definition, is 52%. For further information, visit the BBC News website.

 Applicants for selected IRA research grants will now be able to complete their applications electronically via our new online application system. Eligible programs include the Elva Knight Research Grant, Helen M. Robinson Grant, Jeanne S. Chall Research Fellowship, Nila Banton Smith Research Dissemination Support Grant, Reading/Literacy Research Fellowship, Steven A. Stahl Research Grant, and Teacher as Researcher Grant.

Applicants for other research awards and grants should see individual award descriptions. For more information, please send e-mail to research@reading.org.

More widespread university education means more prosperous economies and provides rich rewards in the labor market for those who graduate, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Furthermore, the job prospects for the less well qualified do not appear to be damaged by the expansion of higher education and may even be improved, according to the latest edition of the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance.

In all countries with comparative data, university graduates earn more money and find jobs more easily than people who have not had a university education, and these advantages have grown over recent years in many countries. However, fears of a crowding-out effect, whereby more graduates would mean more unemployment at the lower end of the scale, appear not to be justified.

A compendium of international education indicators providing measures of quality, quantity, equity, and efficiency of education systems, Education at a Glance provides a wealth of information about education in OECD-member countries. For further information, visit the OECD website.

An international consortium of groups interested in teaching English to young learners (TEYL) is organizing an international conference titled “The Way Forward: Learning From International Experience of TEYL.” The conference will be held at the Regional Institute of English, Bangalore, South India, January 3–6, 2008. It is aimed at decision makers in ministries, planners, academics, teacher trainers, and others concerned with state programs for teaching English to children. The registration deadline is November 30, 2007.

Details are available from the conference website, www.primaryeltconference.org, or from the organizers, Janet Enever (j.enever@londonmet.ac.uk) or Jaynee Moon (jayne.moon@virgin.net).

The New York City Department of Education won the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, the largest education prize in the United States, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced today. New York City has been a finalist for the Broad Prize for the past two years.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings joined philanthropist Eli Broad at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to announce the winner. The $1 million Broad (rhymes with "road") Prize is an annual award that honors large urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps among poor and minority students. The money goes directly to graduating high school seniors for college scholarships.

As the winner of the Broad Prize, the New York City Department of Education will receive $500,000 in college scholarships. The four finalists--Bridgeport Public Schools in Connecticut, Long Beach Unified School District in California, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, and the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas--will each receive $125,000 in college scholarships.

For further information, visit the Broad Foundation's website.

 In a message posted on The Huffington Post website on September 10, noted author and activist Jonathan Kozol reported that he was entering the 67th day of a partial fast as an act of protest against the “vicious damage being done to inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind.” Kozol, who was the opening general session speaker at IRA’s Annual Convention in Chicago, said he is subsisting on a largely liquid diet.

For decades a leading proponent for children in poverty, Kozol said he has talked with a number of senators in hopes of changing the testing requirements in NCLB as well as other aspects of the law. He sees his fast as “a tiny price to pay compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through every single day.” To read Kozol’s full report, visit The Huffington Post website and do a search for Jonathan Kozol.

Francie Markham’s heart lies somewhere in Zimbabwe, amid African schoolchildren whose hope for education is as fierce as Markham’s resolve to provide it. So Markham, a 55–year–old retired English teacher, has been sorting, stacking and labeling items bound for Hartzell High School, a mission of the United Methodist Church in Old Mutare, Zimbabwe. Soon, Markham and her volunteer army of United Methodist friends, family and colleagues will begin packing a 40-foot-long cargo container with everything from blackboards to books and computers for October shipment. Closest to her heart are 1,200 washable sanitary pads she hopes will make the lives of African girls easier. Read Markham's story at TheState.com

  After white parents in the racially mixed city of Tuscaloosa complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black—and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools. Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

  The two national teachers’ unions have mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign to rewrite language linking teacher bonuses to student test scores and other incentive-pay provisions contained in a draft bill for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Thousands of school children have been forced to stay at home as schools remain closed because of flooding in eastern Uganda. More than 150 educational institutions failed to open at the beginning of the new term today (September 17) after the floods washed away roads, homes, buildings and crops in the region. Education minister, Namirember Bitamazire, told reporters the Ugandan government was trying to find alternative strategies to allow the schools to reopen, especially in the districts of Amuria, Katakwi, Manafwa and Bukedea. The floods have affected tens of thousands of people. Many of those are families that had just returned to their villages after years of displacement in camps because of civil war between the government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Read the article at IRIN News.

In an attempt to curb deteriorating standards of education in the Gaza Strip over the past year the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), has announced a plan to reverse the high failure rates of students. UNRWA is working to hire an additional 1,558 remedial teachers, said John Ging, UNRWA's Gaza director, with one teacher to be placed in every classroom in grades two, three and four to help improve learning. “School attendance has been seriously disrupted due to inter–factional fighting, repeated military raids and unprecedented poverty, where children come to school hungry and unable to concentrate,” said Ging. Read the article at IRIN News.

Judy Blume is back. One of the most popular children’s book writers of all time, Blume was a powerhouse of the 1970s and ’80s. She secured her place in the pantheon of greats with such books as Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Superfudge and Forever, a young-adult novel that broke new ground in sexual frankness (and secured Blume’s place as a perennial target of censors). Resting on one’s laurels might seem a good plan at this point. Instead, five months before her 70th birthday, Blume has a new chapter-book series starring her old pals, the Pain and the Great One, and she has embarked on her first national tour in 10 years. Read more about Blume’s career, and her new book, in this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.