IAP NEWS UPDATEApril 2nd – April 15th 2011

Publication: TIMETitle: Finland's Educational Success? The Anti-Tiger Mother ApproachAuthor: Joshua LevineDate: April 11th, 2011Website: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062419,00.htmlStudy: PISA

Spring may be just around the corner in this poor part of Helsinki known as the Deep East, but the ground is still mostly snow-covered and the air has a dry, cold bite. In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back-to-back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are.

"It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. He can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the latest national core curriculum runs just under 10 pages (up from 3 1⁄2 pages for the previous core curriculum). (See "Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does It Work?")

The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science.

In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. The U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell.

Finland's only real rivals are the Asian education powerhouses South Korea and Singapore, whose drill-heavy teaching methods often recall those of the old Soviet-bloc Olympic-medal programs. Indeed, a recent manifesto by Chinese-American mother Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, chides American parents for shrinking from the pitiless discipline she argues is necessary to turn out great students. Her book has led many to wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease. (See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.)

Which is why delegations from the U.S. and the rest of the world are trooping to Helsinki, where world-class results are achieved to the strains of a reindeer lullaby. "In Asia, it's about long hours — long hours in school, long hours after school. In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S. It's a more appealing model," says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the PISA program at the OECD.

There's less homework too. "An hour a day is good enough to be a successful student," says Katja Tuori, who is in charge of student counseling at Kallahti Comprehensive, which educates kids up to age 16. "These kids have a life." (See pictures of summer school programs.)

There are rules, of course. No iPods or portable phones in class. No hats indoors. (They also tried a no-coat rule, but it was just too cold.) But not much else. Tuori spots a kid texting in class and shoots him a reproachful glance. He quickly puts the phone away. "You have to do something really bad, like hit somebody, to actually get punished," says Tuori.

Finland has a number of smart ideas about how to teach kids while letting them be kids. For instance, one teacher ideally stays with a class from first grade through sixth grade. That way the teacher has years to learn the quirks of a particular group and tailor the teaching approach accordingly.

But Finland's sweeping success is largely due to one big, not-so-secret weapon: its teachers. "It's the quality of the teaching that is driving Finland's results," says the OECD's Schleicher. "The U.S. has an industrial model where teachers are the means for conveying a prefabricated product. In Finland, the teachers are the standard." (See what makes a school great.)

That's one reason so many Finns want to become teachers, which provides a rich talent pool that Finland filters very selectively. In 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, 1,258 undergrads applied for training to become elementary-school teachers. Only 123, or 9.8%, were accepted into the five-year teaching program. That's typical. There's another thing: in Finland, every teacher is required to have a master's degree. (The Finns call this a master's in kasvatus, which is the same word they use for a mother bringing up her child.) Annual salaries range from about $40,000 to $60,000, and teachers work 190 days a year.

"It's very expensive to educate all of our teachers in five-year programs, but it helps make our teachers highly respected and appreciated," says Jari Lavonen, head of the department of teacher education at the University of Helsinki. Outsiders spot this quickly. "Their teachers are much better prepared to teach physics than we are, and then the Finns get out of the way. You don't buy a dog and bark for it," says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza." ("Read: "China Beats Out Finland for Top Marks in Education.")

The Finns haven't always had everything figured out. In the 1960s, Finland had two parallel education systems after primary school; brighter kids went one way, laggards went the other. Reforms began in 1968, scrapping two-tier education in favor of one national system. Things still weren't right. "In the beginning, we weren't happy at all," says Reijo Laukkanen, a counselor at the Finnish National Board of Education.

In the '80s, Finland stopped "streaming" pupils to different math and language tracks based on ability. "People in Finland cannot be divided by how smart they are," says Laukkanen. "It has been very beneficial." Next to go, in the '90s, were inspectors who oversaw annual school plans. Schools were so hostile that the inspectors became afraid to make on-site tours.

"Finland is a society based on equity," says Laukkanen. "Japan and Korea are highly competitive societies — if you're not better than your neighbor, your parents pay to send you to night school. In Finland, outperforming your neighbor isn't very important. Everybody is average, but you want that average to be very high." (See 20 back-to-school gadgets.)

This principle has gone far toward making Finland an educational overachiever. In the 2006 PISA science results, Finland's worst students did 80% better than the OECD average for the worst group; its brightest did only 50% better than the average for bright students. "Raising the average for the bottom rungs has had a profound effect on the overall result," says MacIsaac.

Some of Finland's educational policies could probably be exported, but it's questionable whether the all-for-one-and-one-for-all-ness that underlies them would travel easily. Thailand, for instance, is trying to adapt the Finnish model to its own school system. But as soon as a kid falls behind, parents send for a private tutor — something that would be unthinkable in Finland. Is Thailand's Finnish experiment working? "Not really," says Lavonen. Would that it could, in Thailand and elsewhere.

Publication: Education WeekTitle: Learning From AbroadAuthor: Robert B. Schwartz, Ben Levin, and Adam GamoranDate: April 6th, 2011Website: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/06/27levin_ep.h30.htmlSurvey: PISA, TIMSS

For the past two decades, the United States has been engaged in a sustained effort to improve academic achievement in our schools and to reduce persistent racial and socioeconomic gaps in achievement. While some states and large urban districts have made significant progress during this period, overall improvement in performance has been disappointingly modest.

Meanwhile, international assessments such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Program for International Student Assessment allow U.S. policymakers to compare the performance of our schools and students with those in other developed countries. These assessments leave no doubt that there are several nations (or in some cases, states or provinces) whose education systems manage to achieve both higher overall performance and more equitable outcomes than the U.S. system does.

The dominant reform movement in the United States, generally known as standards-based reform, was energized 20 years ago when the Kentucky Supreme Court found the entire state education system unconstitutional, wiped the slate clean, and invited the legislature to build a whole new system from the ground up. In 1990, the plan that emerged was embodied in law as the Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA. With its strong emphasis on rigorous academic standards, state assessments to measure progress against those standards, and strong accountability for results, KERA became the template that many other states followed over the ensuing decade to revise their education systems.

Imagine that in 2011 another state court were to strike down its education system and invite the legislature to begin anew. Imagine further that the legislative leaders, in their wisdom, decided to look for guidance at the education policies, practices, and financing and governance structures in consistently higher-performing systems like those of Finland; Singapore; Japan; and Ontario, Canada (in most of the world, education is organized nationally rather than at the state level as in the United States). What would a new state system in this country look like if it were redesigned based on the best international evidence and experience?

State-level designers of a new system would need to begin by focusing on the challenge of recruiting, preparing, and developing a high-quality teaching force. Successful education systems focus intensively on what happens in schools and classrooms between students and

teachers. Other strong systems understand that teachers need to be well prepared, and consequently that teacher-preparation programs need to be rigorous.

In Finland, for example, all prospective teachers must go through a five-year university-based program that culminates in a master’s degree. Finland, like most high-performing countries, recruits aspiring teachers from the top third of the talent pool, and its training programs now have 10 applicants for every available position.

Legislators and policymakers in high-performing countries understand that to attract top talent into teaching, the work must be seen as professional, and schools must be organized to support the continuous learning and development of teachers. In Japan, for example, this recognition takes the form of substantial time during the school day set aside for teachers to have collaborative planning opportunities and lesson study. Strong education systems give their highest priority to helping their teachers and principals get better at their work. This means more than professional-development workshops; it involves creating a school culture where the adults, just like the students, are encouraged and expected to think about their work and to continue improving their skills. Some high-performing systems also provide career opportunities for teachers so they can advance in the profession without having to leave the classroom entirely, unless they choose to. In Singapore, for example, teachers can choose among three pathways once they have established themselves as highly effective teachers. They can move onto an administrative track, heading toward the principalship. They can become specialists in areas like research, assessment, or technology. But they can also choose a pathway leading them to successive levels of responsibility as teachers. The pay scales in each pathway are comparable, so that at the end of the day a master teacher can make as much as a senior administrator.

School systems also require high-quality leadership from people who understand the core business of teaching and learning, and who focus their attention on teachers and classrooms. School leaders need access to resources such as innovative materials, time for teachers to collaborate, and infusions of new knowledge and ideas from outside the school.

After addressing the quality of teachers and leaders, designers of our new state education system might then consider the kind of instructional infrastructure and support good teachers and leaders need to do their work. Here again there are important lessons from other nations.

Most high-performing countries begin with some form of national curriculum, but typically their curriculum documents are much thinner and less structured than ours. They highlight a few key topics in each subject and grade level that are essential for students to master, and provide guidance to teachers on how these topics might be approached, but leave a substantial amount of discretion for teachers—at the local level—to fill in the blanks. Assessments are closely linked to the curriculum, including the attention to higher-order skills. The assessments are also designed to provide diagnostic and instructional information, in addition to, or even instead of, student or school accountability information.

High-performing systems invest significant attention and resources in prevention and early intervention rather than remediation. In Finland, for example, teachers are well trained to diagnose learning difficulties, and every school has a “special teacher” whose job it is to work closely with regular classroom teachers. The specialized teachers provide additional, individualized help to struggling students so they don’t fall behind.

Successful systems quickly mobilize support from family-service agencies for students and families in need of specialized help, and generally work hard to make sure that no student falls through the cracks. The special education system is less formal: Providing the right

supports for learning is more important than giving students a label. In Finland, as in other Scandinavian countries, all students are in a common untracked curriculum through lower secondary school (the U.S. equivalent of 9th or 10th grade), and there is a strong preference for inclusion rather than separate special education classes.

Similarly, high-performing systems respond to struggling schools early with intervention and support. In Ontario, low-performing schools receive intensive technical assistance and support. As a result, the number of struggling schools in the province has dropped from 110 to 18 in two years. Interestingly, Ontario and other high-performing states and nations do not close low-performing schools.

At the end of secondary school, most high-performing systems, especially those in northern Europe, provide students with a choice between a pathway leading to university and a pathway leading more directly to a career. The career-oriented pathways are very well developed, cover a very broad range of occupations (high-tech, low-tech; white-collar, blue-collar) and have strong employer involvement in shaping curriculum and setting qualification standards. These programs typically provide a mix of work-based and classroom-based learning, extend over three or four years, and culminate in a certificate with real currency in the labor market. Consequently, even in Finland—Europe’s highest-performing country and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country where social class is the least predictive of school achievement—43 percent of youngsters opt for the vocational rather than the university pathway, knowing that there are routes back to further education at any point in their careers.These are not the only important features of high-performing systems. Countries with strong education systems do not leave it to the vagaries of the wealth of local communities to fund education. In most other countries, the most money goes to the schools and districts serving children with the highest needs.

Also, these education systems have high alignment at the school, district, regional, and national levels, unlike the fractured system in the United States with its many small, independent districts and weak states.

High-performing systems provide a good balance of clear overall goals and standards but also significant school and district autonomy in which resources are directed to supporting better teaching and learning rather than to administrative processes.

As a consequence of these features, high-performing systems generally have a more collaborative and trust-based school culture than typically characterizes the U.S. system. Their administrative leaders are relentlessly positive and optimistic in their communications, stressing everyone’s capabilities and contributions, not their deficiencies. They focus on improvement, not blame. They try not to divide people, or to declare winners and losers, but to keep everyone—students, parents, teachers, and others—engaged in a positive way.

This requires a respectful policy dialogue that must happen in structured ways to allow all parties to contribute and to have their voices heard. Making this happen in the fractious environments that now characterize education politics in the United States will not be easy, but it is essential.

Publication: Institute of Education, University of LondonTitle: Why ethnic diversity does not always boost toleranceAuthor: Dr. Jan Germen JanmaatDate: April 13th, 2011Website: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/newsEvents/51649.html

Greater diversity in the classroom does not always lead to increased ethnic tolerance among pupils, according to a new study from the Institute of Education, University of London. The research suggests that young white people are less well-disposed towards immigrants when minority ethnic groups are doing well.

Dr Jan Germen Janmaat, of the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES), looked at the relationship between tolerance and classroom ethnic diversity in England, Germany and Sweden.

According to his analysis, the greater the "civic competence" of the ethnic minority children, the less tolerant their white classmates appear to be. Civic competences refer to the knowledge and skills that citizens need to participate effectively in a democratic society.

"As soon as minorities assert themselves and become as competent as the majority, the latter may well become defensive and intolerant. It seems that the ethnic minorities are only accepted by majority pupils if they stay in a subordinate position" says Janmaat.

"This may be down to competitive anxieties; ethnic groups may not be perceived as a threat when they are struggling to succeed but as they increase their status and become more adept at finding their way in society this seems to change."

The study, Classroom Diversity and its Relation to Tolerance, Trust and Participation in England, Sweden and Germany is a new analysis of data from the IEA Civic Education Study, a large scale survey conducted in April 1999 among a sample of 90,000 14-year-olds in 28 countries worldwide.

The figures showed a negative relationship between the tolerance levels of white British students and the average civic competence of ethnic minority students (controlling for other classroom and student characteristics). A 50 percent increase in competence matched a 20 percent drop in tolerance.

Janmaat says the findings may be even more relevant in today's climate of scarcity and tougher competition for jobs. "If even in times of great optimism and economic growth such as the late 1990s we see the phenomenon of 'competitive anxiety', it is likely to be even stronger in times of scarcity."

Overall, Sweden had the highest tolerance levels and Germany the lowest of the three countries. However, England -- where the minority ethnic population is bigger and longer-established -- was the only one of the three countries where classroom diversity had no effect on tolerance; in Germany and Sweden it boosted tolerance.

Janmaat says his study prompts the need to look again at the issue of tolerance "so that it is compatible with the principle that British people whatever their background are all full members of the nation and deserve equal treatment".

On a more positive note, the study also found a slight positive, though not significant, relationship between classroom diversity and the civic competence of white British students (again controlling for other conditions including the social composition of the classroom). In other words, the more diverse the classroom, the better the white students do. This contradicts the commonly held belief that diversity undermines the performance of white British students.

Publication: TechCrunchTitle: Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.Author: Sarah LacyDate: April 10th, 2011Website: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.

Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.

Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.

And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right.

So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Not surprisingly, another Internet bubble seemed the farthest thing from his mind. But, he argued, America is under the spell of a bubble of a very different kind. Is it an emerging markets bubble? You could argue that, Thiel says, but he also notes that with half of the world’s population surging to modernity, it’s hard to argue the emerging world is overvalued.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no

matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.

Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. Bush decree that student loan debt is the one thing you can’t wriggle away from by declaring personal bankruptcy, says Thiel. “It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage,” he says. “You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.”

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

And that ripples down to other private colleges and universities. At an event two weeks ago, I met Geoffrey Canada, one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” He talked about a college he advises that argued they couldn’t possible cut their fees for the simple reason that people would deem them to be less-prestigious.

Thiel is the first to admit some of this promised security is true. He himself grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class household and went to Stanford and Stanford Law School. He certainly reaped advantages, like friendships with frequent collaborators and co-investors Keith Rabois and Reid Hoffman. Today he ranks on Forbes billionaire list and has a huge house in San Francisco with a butler. How much of that was him and how much of that was Stanford? He doesn’t know. No one does.

But, he argues, that doesn’t mean it’s not an uncomfortable elitist dynamic that we should try to change. He compares it to a world in which everyone was buying guns to stay safe. Maybe they do need them. But maybe they should also examine some of the reasons life is so dangerous and try to solve those too.

Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

Two weeks ago, Thiel quietly invited 45 finalists to San Francisco for interviews. Everyone who was invited attended– no hysterical parents in sight. Thiel and crew have started to winnow the finalists down to the final 20. They’ll be announced in the next few weeks.

While a controversial program for many in the press, plenty of students, their parents and people in tech have been wildly supportive. Thiel received more than 400 applications and most were from very high-end schools, including about seventeen applicants from Stanford. And more than 100 people in his network have signed up to be mentors to them.

Thiel thinks there’s been a sea-change in the last three years, as debt has mounted and the economy has faltered. “This wouldn’t have been feasible in 2007,” he says. “Parents see kids moving back home after college and they’re thinking, ‘Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.’ We got surprisingly little pushback from parents.” Thiel notes a handful of students told him that whether they were selected or not, they were leaving school to start a company. Many more built tight relationships with competing applicants during the brief Silicon Valley retreat– a sort of support group of like-minded restless students.

Of course, if the problem Thiel sees with the higher education bubble is elitism, why were so many of the invitees Ivy League kids? Where were the smart inner-city kids let down by economic blight and a failing education system of a city like Detroit; the kids who need to be lifted up the most? Thiel notes it wasn’t all elites. Many of the applicants came from other countries, some from remote villages in emerging markets.

But the program has a clear bias towards talent, and like it or not, talent tends to be found in private universities. Besides, he’s not advocating that stopping out of school is for everyone any more than he’s arguing everyone should be an entrepreneur. But to start a new aspirational example– an alternative path– it makes sense to start with the people who have all the options. “Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else,” Thiel says. “We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top.”

That hints at another interesting distinction between the housing bubble and the education bubble: Class. The housing bubble was mostly a middle-class phenomenon. Even as much of the nation was wrapped up in it, there was a counter narrative on programs like CNBC and in papers like the Wall Street Journal pooh-poohing the dumb people buying all those condos in Florida. But with education, there’s barely any counter-narrative at all, because it is rooted in the most elite echelons of the upper class.

Thiel assumes this is why his relatively modest plan to get 20 kids to stop out of school for a few years is so threatening to a lot of the people who have the biggest megaphones to scream about it. “The people who are the most critical of this program are the ones who are most complacent with where the country is right now,” he says.

Country-Specific Education Articles

Publication: The Irish IndependentTitle: Religion 'a waste' of class timeDate: April 2nd, 2011Author: Katherine DonnellyWebsite: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/religion-a-waste-of-class-time-2606538.htmlSurvey: PISA

Education Minister wants pupils reading instead of preparing for sacraments

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn would prefer schools spent time improving reading and maths skills rather than preparing pupils for sacraments such as First Communion and Confirmation.

The minister said the faith formation carried out during the day took up time that could be used in other ways.

He referred to a severe decline in performance by Irish 15-year-olds in the international OECD/PISA league table on literacy published last year, dropping from 5th to 17th place. Maths also dipped.

Primary pupils spend 30 minutes a day on religion, which in Catholic schools includes preparation for the sacraments.

Other schools, such as the multi-denominational Educate Together sector, also spend 30 minutes daily on ethical issues, but it does not include formal religious instruction.

Mr Quinn said while no person should enter the world without clear knowledge and understanding of the history of religions, faith formation was a different thing.

"It takes up a lot of time, some people suggest it might be done by parents or parish, perhaps within the school building but outside school teaching hours.

"Quite frankly, we have overloaded the curriculum," Mr Quinn said while attending the annual conference of the Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools (ACCS).

But, he added, he wanted to maximise the potential for the system to educate children.

Mr Quinn was speaking in the context of the forum he has set up to decide on the transfer of some of the 92pc of Catholic primary schools to other patron bodies.

Rights

Schools may be handed over to existing patron bodies, such as Educate Together, or, in some cases, new arrangements could be put in place.

The Catholic bishops state that any new arrangements must respect the rights of parents, in particular in relation to the religious instruction of children, within the curriculum.

Mr Quinn said he respected the autonomy of the different school patron bodies, and their commitment to education.

"This is a dialogue, but Ireland has changed", he said.

Mr Quinn's stark message to the ACCS was that "we have to do more with less". ACCS general secretary Ciaran Flynn said while they did not like the minister's message, they applauded his honesty.

Meanwhile, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork Dr Paul Colton told the conference that their schools were facing a threat to their survival because of the raft of education cuts.

Dr Colton said there was a lot of apprehension about the impact of measures, such as the value-for-money review of small schools and changes in entitlement to school transport, on the Protestant sector.

Many Protestant schools, particularly at primary level, are small, rural-based and widely dispersed and, as a minority sector, it has enjoyed special protection from the State.

Publication: The Jerusalem PostTitle: Positive thinking on educationDate: April 12th, 2011Website: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=216351Survey: PISA, TIMSS

Let us continue to improve what needs improving in our schools without losing sight of all that has been accomplished.

It has become a national pastime to bash our educational system – often with good reason. In particular this happens when Israel scores disappointingly low marks in comparison to other countries on tests such as the Program for International Assessment (PISA) or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

But not all is gloom and doom.

Data presented this week by the Education Ministry gives reason for a glimmer of optimism. For the second year in a row, the proportion of students earning a high school matriculation (bagrut) certificate has risen. The certificate is earned by students who pass several written (and in some cases, oral) ministry-administered exams, and get a passing mark (55 or higher) in each exam. The certificate is key to pursuing higher education.

After eliminating haredim and Arabs from east Jerusalem, two groups who for ideological reasons do not pursue matriculation, 64.6 percent of high school-aged young men and women passed earned a certificate in 2010, up from 61.8% in 2009. Among Arabs, 38.3% matriculated in 2010 compared to 35% in 2009.

Before 1980, fewer than 20% of students, including haredim and Arabs from east Jerusalem, earned matriculation certificates. In 2010, 48.3% did so.

Moreover, past data indicate that an additional 4% who did not matriculate upon finishing high school will obtain the certificate within six years afterward, making Israel’s levels of matriculation quite high.

Thus, despite the tendency by teachers, parents and other naysayers to reminisce about the supposedly high level of learning in the previous generation and gripe about today’s drop in academic demands, to date, no scientific study has confirmed this impression. In fact, not only are more students finishing high school and matriculating, many more are also taking the psychometric examination to be accepted to university.

If it were true that high schools were less demanding academically than in the past, there would be a significant drop in average psychometric scores. But in fact, scores have actually risen over the years for both Jews and Arabs. Studies that detect “grade inflation” over the last few decades in high school have not proven that these higher grades are undeserved.

And more Israelis are getting advanced education. Central Bureau of Statistics data for 2008, the most updated available, show that for 25- to 34-year-olds the percentage of those with at least 13 years of education was 66% among Jewish Israelis and 30% among Arab Israelis, one of the highest rates in the West.

So how do we explain the discrepancy between higher matriculation rates and lower achievements on international tests?

According to Nachum Blass of the Taub Center, part of the answer lies in the unique challenges faced by Israel – from absorption of huge waves of immigration; to security threats such as mortar shells and Kassams in the South, and Katyushas in the North, that have over the years paralyzed schools; to the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

Also, unlike other countries, Israel has not specifically focused on excelling in the PISA, the TIMSS, or other international evaluations.

Additional factors that hurt Israel in international comparisons include the sharp growth in the Arab population, which tends to be less educated and poorer, and the fact that haredim, whose boys do not learn math or science after elementary school, are included in PISA and TIMSS evaluations.

More importantly, notes Blass, there are numerous factors that contribute to high school students’ success but cannot be gauged in a conventional pencil-and-paper test. Creativity, the level of trust and interaction between students and teachers, and students’ self-esteem and motivation to learn new things can never be measured in these tests. But these factors definitely have an impact on one’s ability to finish high school and to succeed in higher education.

What else can explain the fact that Israel is ranked fifth in the world by the World Economic Index in terms of the number of registered patents per capita? Or that of the 500 best universities in the world, seven are in Israel? Or that Israeli youth regularly meet expectations to volunteer in the IDF’s demanding combat units and in national service? Or that more books and movies in Hebrew are produced in such high quantities per capita? Or that more Israelis attend cultural events and read books than most

westerners? Or that proportionately more Israeli students are accepted at foreign universities and excel there?

While there is always room for improvement, our educational system has managed to produce men and women of excellence under difficult conditions. Hyper-criticism of our schools, teachers and students runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, while an appreciation of their many achievements is the type of positive thinking that encourages more of the same.

Let us continue to improve what needs improving in our schools without losing sight of all that has been accomplished.

Publication: The Copenhagen PostTitle: Low marks for educating kids with immigrant backgroundsDate: April 7th, 2011Author: Jennifer BuleyWebsite: http://www.cphpost.dk/news/national/88-national/51398-low-marks-for-educating-kids-with-immigrant-backgrounds.htmlSurvey: PISA

Students with Danish as a second language score lower than classmates with Danish heritage

Despite concerted efforts by the Education Ministry to improve its ‘Danish as a second language’ programme, the recently-released Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) Ethnic 2009 study shows that the academic gap between kids with immigrant backgrounds and kids with Danish heritage has remained roughly the same since the first Pisa Ethnic assessment in 2000.

“We were actually really surprised when we saw the results,” Niels Egelund, the chairman of the Pisa consortium and co-author of the Pisa Ethnic 2009 report told Politiken newspaper. “It is dreadful that there has not actually been any positive development when we look at averages in the three subject areas.”

In the decade since the first report, students with immigrant backgrounds made little headway in reading, lost ground in natural sciences, and stayed roughly in place in maths in comparison with native Danish-speaking classmates.

According to the 2009 report, some 38 percent of students with Danish as a second language finished 9th grade “lacking sufficient reading skills” compared to 13 percent of students with Danish as their mother tongue.

Students with immigrant backgrounds scored as though they were two years in school behind their native-speaking classmates.

Apart from the bad news for the students themselves, the results are an embarrassment for the current Liberal-Conservative government, because the assessed students began first grade when the current government came to power in 2001.

Using a phrase that requires no translation, the education editor of Politiken newspaper, Jacob Fuglsang, called the assessment “en stinker” for the government.

“The kids with immigrant backgrounds who were assessed began school at about the same time that the government came into power, so it is hard to duck the responsibility,” Fuglsang wrote.

Even more troubling, first- and second-generation Danes fared worse on the Pisa 2009 assessment than the same groups in other Nordic countries.

Compared to Sweden and Norway, Denmark had the highest share of second-generation students judged ‘weak readers’, and the lowest share of students with immigrant backgrounds who scored the highest marks.

The assessment’s writers attribute about one third of the reading score gap to students’ socio-economic backgrounds, and two thirds to “immigration factors” such as official integration policies, limited job opportunities and prejudice. Newly-appointed education minister Troels Lund Poulsen acknowledged that the results were troubling and disappointing overall, but underscored that there was at least one area of improvement.

“The number of students with immigrant backgrounds and insufficient reading ability to successfully complete primary school fell by eleven percent since 2000,” Poulsen said.

Other positive points from the report were that second-generation Danish students scored higher than first-generation Danes and students with ethnic backgrounds from Turkey, Pakistan and the former Yugoslav republics scored highest among all students with Danish as a second language.

At the end of the month the education minister is due to present a new national action plan for what should be done to improve the academic performance of children from immigrant communities.

Egelund already has a suggestion for the education minister: “I think that we ought to introduce compulsory pre-school from the age of three, with a focus on language stimulation. Because when kids start school with very limited vocabularies, they have no chance of keeping up.”

Publication: The Wall Street JournalTitle: India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to HireDate: April 5th, 2011Author: Geeta AnandWebsite: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.

Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.

"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

India's economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.India's Growth Battle

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.

At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

The challenge is especially pressing given the country's more youthful population than the U.S., Europe and China. More than half of India's population is under the age of 25, and one million people a month are expected to seek to join the labor force here over the next decade, the Indian government estimates. The fear is that if these young people aren't trained well enough to participate in the country's glittering new economy, they pose a potential threat to India's stability.

"Economic reforms are not about goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars," says Manish Sabharwal, managing director of Teamlease Services Ltd., an employee recruitment and training firm in Bangalore. "Twenty years of reforms are worth nothing if we can't get our kids into jobs."

Yet even as the government and business leaders acknowledge the labor shortage, educational reforms are a long way from becoming law. A bill that gives schools more

autonomy to design their own curriculum, for example, is expected to be introduced in the cabinet in the next few weeks, and in parliament later this year.

"I was not prepared at all to get a job," says Pradeep Singh, 23, who graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of Bhopal's oldest engineering schools. He has been on five job interviews—none of which led to work. To make himself more attractive to potential employers, he has enrolled in a five-month-long computer programming course run by NIIT.

Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn't bother to go to some classes. "The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they've all agreed not to be bothered too much," Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.

Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.

That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.

"I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn't pay the money, I would have failed the exam again," says Mr. Sharma.

BC Nakra, Pro Vice Chancellor of ITM University, where Mr. Sharma studied, said in an interview that there is no cheating at his school, and that if anyone were spotted cheating in this way, he would be "behind bars." He said he had read about a case or two in the newspaper, and in the "rarest of the rare cases, it might happen somewhere, and if you blow [it] out of all proportions, it effects the entire community." The examiner couldn't be located for comment.

Cheating aside, the Indian education system needs to change its entire orientation to focus on learning, says Saurabh Govil, senior vice president in human resources at Wipro Technologies. Wipro, India's third largest software exporter by sales, says it has struggled to find skilled workers. The problem, says Mr. Govil, is immense: "How are you able to change the mind-set that knowledge is more than a stamp?"

At 24/7 Customer's recruiting center on a recent afternoon, 40 people were filling out forms in an interior lobby filled with bucket seats. In a glass-walled conference room, a human-resources executive interviewed a group of seven applicants. Six were recent college graduates, and one said he was enrolled in a correspondence degree program.

One by one, they delivered biographical monologues in halting English. The interviewer interrupted one young man who spoke so fast, it was hard to tell what he was saying. The young man was

instructed to compose himself and start from the beginning. He tried again, speaking just as fast, and was rejected after the first round.

Another applicant, Rajan Kumar, said he earned a bachelor's degree in engineering a couple of years ago. His hobby is watching cricket, he said, and his strength is punctuality. The interviewer, noting his engineering degree, asked why he isn't trying to get a job in a technical field, to which he replied: "Right now, I'm here." This explanation was judged inadequate, and Mr. Kumar was eliminated, too.

A 22-year-old man named Chaudhury Laxmikant Dash, who graduated last year, also with a bachelor's in engineering, said he's a game-show winner whose hobby is international travel. But when probed by the interviewer, he conceded, "Until now I have not traveled." Still, he made it through the first-round interview, along with two others, a woman and a man who filled out his application with just one name, Robinson.

For their next challenge, they had to type 25 words a minute. The woman typed a page only to learn her pace was too slow at 18 words a minute. Mr. Dash, sweating and hunched over, couldn't get his score high enough, despite two attempts.

Only Mr. Robinson moved on to the third part of the test, featuring a single paragraph about nuclear war followed by three multiple-choice questions. Mr. Robinson stared at the screen, immobilized. With his failure to pass the comprehension section, the last of the original group of applicants was eliminated.

The average graduate's "ability to comprehend and converse is very low," says Satya Sai Sylada, 24/7 Customer's head of hiring for India. "That's the biggest challenge we face."

Indeed, demand for skilled labor continues to grow. Tata Consultancy Services, part of the Tata Group, expects to hire 65,000 people this year, up from 38,000 last year and 700 in 1986.

Trying to bridge the widening chasm between job requirements and the skills of graduates, Tata has extended its internal training program. It puts fresh graduates through 72 days of training, double the duration in 1986, says Tata chief executive N. Chandrasekaran. Tata has a special campus in south India where it trains 9,000 recruits at a time, and has plans to bump that up to 10,000.

Wipro runs an even longer, 90-day training program to address what Mr. Govil, the human-resources executive, calls the "inherent inadequacies" in Indian engineering education. The company can train 5,000 employees at once.

Both companies sent teams of employees to India's approximately 3,000 engineering colleges to assess the quality of each before they decided where to focus their campus recruiting efforts. Tata says 300 of the schools made the cut; for Wipro, only 100 did.

Tata has also begun recruiting and training liberal-arts students with no engineering background but who want secure jobs. And Wipro has set up a foundation that spends $4 million annually to train teachers. Participants attend week-long workshops and then get

follow-up online mentoring. Some say that where they used to spend a third of class time with their backs to students, drawing diagrams on the blackboard, they now engage students in discussion and use audiovisual props.

"Before, I didn't take the students into consideration," says Vishal Nitnaware, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at SVPM College of Engineering in rural Maharashtra state. Now, he says, he tries to engage them, so they're less nervous to speak up and participate in discussions.

This kind of teaching might have helped D.H. Shivanand, 25, the son of farmers from a village outside of Bangalore. He just finished a master's degree in business administration—in English—from one of Bangalore's top colleges. His father borrowed the $4,500 tuition from a small lending agency. Now, almost a year after graduating, Mr. Shivanand is still looking for an entry-level finance job.

Tata and IBM Corp., among dozens of other firms, turned him down, he says, after he repeatedly failed to answer questions correctly in the job interviews. He says he actually knew the answers but froze because he got nervous, so he's now taking a course to improve his confidence, interviewing skills and spoken English. His family is again pitching in, paying 6,000 rupees a month for his rent, or about $130, plus 1,500 rupees for the course, or $33.

"My family has invested so much money in my education, and they don't understand why I am still not finding a job," says Mr. Shivanand. "They are hoping very, very much that I get a job soon, so after all of their investment, I will finally support them."