students
Bill Gates on his concern for education
In 1948, the United Nations proclaimed education to be a fundamental human right. According to Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that right includes free and compulsory elementary education, and access to technical, professional, and higher education.
Our View: Use of technology in education is indeed catching up as it should, since it has an important role in meeting the objectives education systems aspire to achieve. Two issues that one would like to see improve in the coming years – one, availability of far more valuable and useful content for students at affordable cost (it will perhaps never be free though, but it can tremendously reduce the gap between students brought up in different environments), and two, creative use of technology to actually benefit student learning, not just digitize what is already available in books and would be done on the blackboard anyway. For example, there are programmes today that can actually help students ascertain their current level of understanding in a subject, and based on that, guide him/her to the areas where effective and enduring learning can happen.
In the 60 years since, great strides have been made. Today, more children attend school than at any other point in human history. Around the world, literacy rates continue to climb.
In emerging nations such as China and India, where a college education was a rarity just a generation ago, tens of thousands of students graduate each year from universities that are on par with the best in the world.
But while we have made progress, we are far from reaching the goal of universal education. According to UNESCO and the World Bank, nearly 400 million elementary- and secondary-age children are not attending school. Hundreds of millions more who do attend-including many in the U.S.-don”t receive an education that prepares them adequately for life beyond school.
Solving these problems has never been more important than it is in today”s knowledge-driven world. For individuals, education is the prerequisite for opportunity and success. For communities and nations, educated citizens provide the foundation for sustainable social and economic progress.
My concern for education comes from a number of perspectives. I look at education through the eyes of a business leader, and I see the critical importance of a skilled and highly trained workforce. In my philanthropic work, I look at education and see it as a powerful way to promote economic and social equity. As a parent, I see how important quality education is in inspiring children to have a passion for learning and to have the foundation they need to lead fulfilling and productive lives.
Transforming education so that it meets the needs of all children is a complex and difficult task that spans issues ranging from the global shortage of trained, qualified teachers-UNESCO estimates that we need 18 million new teachers to meet current demand-to the problems of overcrowded schools, aging infrastructure, obsolete equipment and textbooks, and outdated teaching methods and curricula.
At the heart of almost all of these issues is the problem of scale: of finding ways to make high-quality educational resources-whether it”s brilliant teachers, innovative lesson plans or inspiring new teaching methods-reach not just a handful of students in a single classroom but hundreds of millions of students around the globe. It is imperative that we act quickly to solve the problem of scale before another generation of young people misses out on the opportunities that a quality education provides.
Fortunately, technology can provide many of the tools needed to begin to tackle the challenge of scale. The combination of software, broadband networks and powerful, affordable devices is making it possible to put high-quality educational resources into the hands of any teacher or student who has access to basic technology infrastructure and tools.
The unique ability of technology to enable today”s limited educational resources to scale quickly and affordably across great distances to a great many people makes it an essential ingredient in our efforts to transform education.
MIT”s OpenCourseware Initiative is an exciting example of how technology can help make great educational materials scale. Through the OpenCourseware Web site, lecture notes, exams and other resources for more than 1,800 MIT classes are available online for free. Developed by professors at one of the world”s great universities, these materials used to be available to only a small handful of students. Now, anyone, anywhere in the world, can access them, and on average more than 1 million people visit the site every month.
Online communities that enable teachers to share ideas, lesson plans and content are another example of how technology can bring greater scale to education.
Through Unlimited Potential, Microsoft”s program to remove the barriers that prevent underserved communities from utilizing the benefits of information technology, we have worked with governments, nonprofits and other companies to establish online portals called Innovative Teachers Networks. Today, more than half a million teachers in nearly 50 countries use Innovative Teachers Networks to share thousands of lesson plans and innovative digital-classroom resources.
Web portals can also connect teachers to students and parents. At Shirelands Language College, an inner-city school in Birmingham, England, a portal called the Shirelands Learning Gateway makes it easier for parents to follow their children”s progress, and it helps teachers and students keep track of schoolwork and take advantage of individualized instruction.
The impact of the Shirelands Learning Gateway on academic performance has been so positive that school officials are quickly expanding it to reach several hundred additional schools. Because it is software-based and delivered over the Internet, scaling it to reach tens of thousands of additional students, teachers and parents is a relatively simple matter.
There are many other ways that technology can help educational resources scale. Web-based instruction for teachers is one of the most important because it can be an extremely cost-effective way to train new teachers, and it may be the only way we can possibly fill the huge demand for qualified teachers.
Of course, technology by itself is not the answer to all the issues we face in our efforts to live up to Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are significant social, cultural and institutional challenges that must be overcome as well.
Technology must be implemented as part of a thoughtful, holistic approach to education transformation that includes teacher training, relevant curricula, parental involvement and programs for children that fill unmet needs for basics like nutrition and health care.
Working together, governments, the private sector and nongovernmental organizations must commit to addressing these issues. Only then can we harness the universal desire of teachers and parents to ensure that all children can access the high-quality educational experiences they need to lead productive lives filled with unlimited opportunities for success, discovery and learning.
What works in education: the lessons according to McKinsey
Every country tries to put down the best plans and policies to improve the standard of education. But we find that there are big variations in the education standards between countries. The findings of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have shown that the best performing countries in education continue to perform better: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.
Our View:Though the findings seem “obvious” when one reads the report, clearly most countries around the world are failing to get the best people into the teaching profession (the 1st step in creating better school systems). As the report points out, teaching is not really a high paying profession even in the countries where the top 33% percentile of the population is choosing teaching careers. What these countries seem to be doing is to provide social recognition and a good working environment for teachers, while maintaining reasonable salaries. Thus it is a matter of pride to be a primary school teacher in Korea and not easy to become one.
We believe similar steps in India, which lead to teaching becoming a “profession of choice” can have a huge impact. Certainly, salaries should be improved where necessary, but equally or more importantly, the stature of the profession needs to get the respect due to it. There are a few things which might help to achieve this (many of these ideas have been discussed in different forums before)-
1) Establish premier “Indian Institutes of Education” like the IITs/ IIMs, with stringent entrance requirements.
2) Launch a public awareness campaign about teachers and the teaching profession
3) Like the “Teach for America” corps in the US, create a system where top graduates can spend 2 years teaching in government schools, at the government salaries. A few might choose to continue- and the many who go on to corporate jobs would at least be sensitized to issues in education.
We are sure there would be more ideas on how to get the best people into teaching, if we were to discuss this.
The leading consulting organization, McKinsey, has given policy recommendations based on the findings of PISA. They tried to find out the common factors between the successful countries. According to McKinsey, schools need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of the teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. These don’t sound like the most ‘innovative’ ideas but if taken seriously they would change education radically.
Hiring the best teachers is the first step. One South Korean official says, “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” Studies have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to the best teachers, they end up in the top 10% of student performers. In Finland, all new teachers must have a master’s degree. South Korea recruits teachers from the top 5% of the graduates. Primary school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities, and getting admission requires top grades.
Teacher training is also a crucial factor determining the quality of education. Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around.
The other common thing between top performing countries is the intervention they provide for students who lag behind or start failing. Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else-as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behind-often for hours-after school to help students. .
None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an administrator (or a parent), and you often hear that it is impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries. But McKinsey’s conclusions seem more optimistic and are based on research findings: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind..
To read the full article you can visit the below link. http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9989914
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9989914
Our View
Though the findings seem “obvious” when one reads the report, clearly most countries around the world are failing to get the best people into the teaching profession (the 1st step in creating better school systems). As the report points out, teaching is not really a high paying profession even in the countries where the top 33% percentile of the population is choosing teaching careers. What these countries seem to be doing is to provide social recognition and a good working environment for teachers, while maintaining reasonable salaries. Thus it is a matter of pride to be a primary school teacher in Korea and not easy to become one.
We believe similar steps in India, which lead to teaching becoming a “profession of choice” can have a huge impact. Certainly, salaries should be improved where necessary, but equally or more importantly, the stature of the profession needs to get the respect due to it. There are a few things which might help to achieve this (many of these ideas have been discussed in different forums before)-
1) Establish premier “Indian Institutes of Education” like the IITs/ IIMs, with stringent entrance requirements.
2) Launch a public awareness campaign about teachers and the teaching profession
3) Like the “Teach for America” corps in the US, create a system where top graduates can spend 2 years teaching in government schools, at the government salaries. A few might choose to continue- and the many who go on to corporate jobs would at least be sensitized to issues in education.
We are sure there would be more ideas on how to get the best people into teaching, if we were to discuss this.
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