Blog 14
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Democratising D quality of education 4 all children in India
Our focus in terms of achieving the goal of providing an Education for All continues to be on the following:
enrollment - ensuring every single child goes to a school,
attendance - ensuring the child attends school everyday and time spent and completion - ensuring the child spends a certain number of hours per day at school and a certain number of years in school and is deemed to have completed schooling.
We haven't yet paid enough attention to the quality aspect of education. While Enrollment, Attendance and Completion are important, it is paramount that every child gets a high quality education. To determine if that is indeed happening, we need to focus on learning outcomes and constantly keep testing to see if children are learning and taking appropriate steps based on the results of the tests so that every child learns what it ought to have learnt by the time it leaves school.
The quality of education or learning outcomes is integrally linked to the quality of teachers, especially so for the large number of first generation learners who won’t be able to get any support from their own parents at home. Great teachers can make a huge difference to a child. A recent study by Eric Hanushek of Stanford University attempts to quantify the value of a great teacher and also the value lost in the case of poor teachers.
But not every school has great teachers. What can we do to ensure that every single child in India has access to great teachers, thereby democratising the quality of education for all children across the country?
There are many excellent teachers in India today and they have been doing a great job unsung and unnoticed for years. A few of these teachers are identified and recognized with “Best Teacher” awards at the state and national levels every year. For a start, we could pick these award-winning teachers and create video recordings of all these teachers teaching in their own classes in the various Indian languages. These video recordings could then be broadcast on television and also put up on YouTube and other web sites for children and other current and aspiring teachers to watch. We could also study these videos to try and understand the traits, methods and skill sets of good teachers to help create many more good teachers.
How do we identify teachers with great potential? How do we attract good teachers to the teaching profession?
Imagine a reality show for teachers on television to unearth teaching talent from across the country and showcase it to the national audience of children. Existing and aspiring teachers can be invited to come forward to teach on prime time television, in all the Indian languages. Imagine them teaching Algebra, Poetry, the History of the Indus Valley Civilization, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, The Structure of the Atom and more. Along with a panel of eminent teachers as judges in the studio, children and parents sitting at home and watching these teachers on television can also rate and vote for the best teachers. The best teachers could become national stars and celebrities.
Every child in the country will have access to these programmes either on television or on YouTube or other similar sites. Not only will children realize that the best teachers can make every subject interesting and fascinating, they will also begin to expect the same high standards of teaching from their own teachers in their schools. Teachers from all across the country will also be able to watch and learn from the best in their profession. While good teachers ought to be paid as well as other professions if not more, this kind of national recognition for good teachers can play a huge role in making teaching an attracive and fulfilling profession. -
THE RED PENCIL
Conversations around Teaching, The Future of Schooling, School Leadership, Adolescent Psychology, Technology in Education, Finding Careers (or Career guidance) and anything else that catches my fancy:
http://theredpencil.wordpress.com/2006/09/06/t...
***MUST READ -
SREBRENICA MASSACRE
SREBRENICA GENOCIDE IS NOT A MATTER OF ANYBODY'S OPINION; IT'S A JUDICIAL FACT RECOGNIZED FIRST BY THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA AND SUBSEQUENTLY BY THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE.
POSTED BY SREBRENICA GENOCIDE -
Naxal Conflict in 2006
During 2006, from the peripheries of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa,
Maharashtra, West Bengal etc, the Naxalite conflict came to be recognised as the “single biggest
internal security challenge ever faced” by India. The increased striking capacity of the Naxalites,
enormous loss of human lives in the Naxalite conflict, forcible displacement of at least 43,740
persons in the anti-Naxalite Salwa Judum campaign as of 31 December 2006 and serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws by the security forces, Salwa Judum cadres and the Naxalites mainstreamed the Naxalite conflict.
Throughout 2006, Asian Centre for Human Rights monitored the Naxalite conflict and published
quarterly Naxal Conflict Monitor. It undertook three field visits to the Salwa Judum relief camps in
Dantewada on 4-6 March 2006 following the Darbhaguda massacre and on 28-29 April 2006 following the Monikonta massacre by the Naxalites, and on 1-5 January 2007 to assess the situation of the internallydisplaced persons.
The Naxal Conflict in 2006 documents human rights violations, in particular, violations of the right
to life, analyses the main trends of the conflict and examines the attempts (or lack thereof) to
resolve the root causes of the Naxalite conflict during 2006
II From the periphery to mainstream: The Naxal conflict in 2006
According to the estimatesof Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), a total of 749 persons - 285
civilians, 135 security personnel and 329 alleged Naxalites - were killed in the Naxalite conflict in
various Naxalite affected States of India during 2006. The highest number of killing was reported
from Chhattisgarh (363), followed by Andhra Pradesh (135), Jharkhand (95), Maharashtra (60),
Bihar (45), Orissa (25), West Bengal (22), Uttar Pradesh (2), Karnataka (1) and Madhya Pradesh (1).
Chhattisgarh accounted for 48.5% of the total killings as a direct consequence of the anti-Naxalite
Salwa Judum campaign.
The killing of 749 persons in 2006 represents a decrease in the number of killings than in 2005
during which 892 persons were killed according to the 2005-2006 Annual Report of the Union
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The MHA report further stated that 653 persons were killed in
Naxal violence in 2004, 731 persons in 2003 and 623 in 2002.
Naxal Conflict in 2006 -
JUSTICE
To fight for the right, to abhor the imperfect, the unjust, or the mean, to swerve neither to the right hand nor the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuse it is so easy to have any of them in India never to let your enthusiasm be soured or your courage grow dim but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time and to feel that somewhere among those millions you have left, a little justice, or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment or a stirring of duty where it did not exist before that is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India.
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Hunger in America
It’s scary to read that the number of Americans who have gone hungry at some point has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000, and then to consider that we’re in a major economic meltdown — one that man of the perpetrators will walk away from with bonuses and golden parachutes worth millions of dollars.
From CNN:
Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.
Families with the highest rates of hunger were headed by single mothers, says the U.S. Agriculture Department.
The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.
Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn’t have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.
Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. -
THE TRUTH & THE BEAUTY
People love to see the beauty only, everywhere & anywhere don't care how real n true it is but i love to see the truth only no matter how it looks how ugly it is. the truth is not beautiful, rarely it is, but the truth is always a truth n we can't deny.
And so that i have two pictures on my main page, narrating the truth of life but not a word of beauty there.
THANK YOU!! -
function of an artist!
The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world.He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present, and points the way to its new birth.He is at once the product and the preceptor of his time.
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black n white
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree And climb BLACK branches up a snow-WHITE trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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negativity
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people whoare thought highly educated and who havebeen expressing their incredulityat the illiteracy of scientists.Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
Please wait...
