The promise that all children globally would have primary education by 2015 – pledged by world leaders in the millennium year – has officially not been achieved. Unesco says there are 58 million children without access to primary school and 100 million who do not complete a primary education. Only a quarter of countries achieved the goal of halving adult illiteracy.
Read the full article here: BBC News: World Fails to Reach Millennium Education Targets
The man in charge of the Pisa tests, Andreas Schleicher, says the evidence from around the world reveals some big myths about what makes for a successful education system.
Read the full article here: BBC News: Seven Big Myths about Top-Performing School Systems
photo credit: Anyone can claim to be an expert these days. Flickr/Alan Cleaver, CC BY
Disregard for experts who have spent years studying critical issues is a dangerous default position. The ability of our society to make decisions in the public interest is handicapped when evidence and thoughtfully presented arguments are ignored.
Read the full article here: Why We Need To Listen To The Real Experts In Science | IFLScience
A study from the Institute of Education has examined why these children of Chinese migrants are so high-achieving. It examined Australian schools, where 15-year olds from Chinese families are the equivalent of two years ahead of their Australian classmates. The study pointed to factors such as hard work and parental engagement.
via BBC News: Why do Chinese pupils do so well in school tests?
What these sorts of analyses show is that those countries do well on PISA tests, but their schools have a big advantage in that they operate in a different learning culture; the usual explanation for East Asian academic success is parental attitudes to learning.
There is a shortage of some 300,000 primary school teachers. At the other end of the education journey there is space for less than 20% of all students in Brazil’s highly regarded public universities – the rest pay fees for qualifications of variable quality. In the protests that have swept through Brazilian cities, education is a recurrent theme on placards and in social media.
