India Education Fact of the Day

World Bank asks 'Did you know that 98% of children in India now have a school within 1 km walking distance?

You call this education? A government school in Lucknow

Bribery for Grade in Eastern Europe

a recent survey of university students in several ECA countries found that more than 60 percent of respondents knew other students who had purchased either entrance to the university or a specific grade

Source: Skills, Not Just Diplomas-Managing Education for Results in Eastern Europe and Central Asia [October 2011]

The Singapore Way

Source:McKinsey report: How the world's best performing school systems come out on top

Related:

If Singapore has one thing to teach America, it is about taking governing seriously, relentlessly asking: What world are we living in and how do we adapt to thrive. “We’re like someone living in a hut without any insulation,” explained Tan Kong Yam, an economist. “We feel every change in the wind or the temperature and have to adapt. You Americans are still living in a brick house with central heating and don’t have to be so responsive.” And we have not been

Improving Government Performance- You do whatever it takes

When it comes to failing schools, Sir Michael expresses impatience. When a public school is failing — not just going through a rough patch, but also systematically failing to educate its students — he says there is only one question the authorities should consider: “How do I get these children a good education as fast as possible?”

“Once you have the answer to that question, you just do it,” he said. “If it’s close the school, you close it and move the children into a better one. If there are no better schools nearby, close it and replace it with another on the same site. But you do whatever it takes.”

-Imported From Britain: Ideas to Improve Schools

Related;
Education Reform Lessons from England

'Deliverology' is the way forward, says Barber

US Education Delivery Unit

Tony Blair on Deliverology

Blair talks about the Delivery Unit as one of his successes in his memoir and gives credit to Sir Machael Barber.

'It was relatively a small organizatiion, staffed by civil servants but also outsiders from McKinsey, Bain and other private sector companies, whose job was to track the delivery of key government priorities. It would focus like a laser on an issue, draw up a plan to resolve it working with the department concerned, and then performance-manage it to a solution. It would get first-class data which it would use for stocktakes that I took personally with the minister, his key staff and mine, every month or so. The unit would present a progress report and any necessary action would be authorised....

We also created the Strategy Unit, to look ahead at the way policy would devlop, the fresh challenges and new ideas to meet them. That also was higly successful. It allowed us to take a medium- and even long-term view of certain issues that were looming but not imminent. Whereas the Policy Unit handled the day-to-day and focused on managing the departments to produce the policies and their implementation that derived from the manifesto or the departmental plans, the Strategy Unit was trying to trying to construct the next policy platform...

In summary, extra money plus system change delivered results...'

Related:
Imported From Britain: Ideas to Improve Schools

“What have all the great school systems of the world got in common?” he said, ticking off four systems that he said deserved to be called great, in Finland, Singapore, South Korea and Alberta, Canada. “Four systems, three continents — what do they have in common?

“They all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the U.S. selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates. This is one of the big challenges for the U.S. education system: What are you going to do over the next 15 to 20 years to recruit ever better people into teaching?”

Random Course

Public Economics- from MIT OpenCourseWare

Assorted Public Policy programs

Public Policy at Duke

Public Policy at Rand

GMU, and Maryland

Assorted on Value Added by Teachers

the value-added debate in education policy

What Makes a Great Teacher Great?

How the teachers were evaluated

Putting Teachers to the Test

Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores

The newspaper takes on the two L.A. sacred cows—teachers and unions—and lives to print again

Using Test Scores To Out Ineffective Teachers

Assorted on Sectoral MTEFs- Education

Education Sector MTEF- Vietnam

Education Financial Planning in Asia
A series of case studies on Implementing Medium-Term Expenditure Frameworks in 6 countries -- the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Thailand and Viet Nam

MTEF for Developing a New Education Strategy- Lesotho

MTEF Portal - UNESCO

Performance, the Upper Level in Management as Part of an MTEF

Assorted on Teaching and Education

Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha Are Revolutionizing Education

Building a Better Teacher ;

He called a wedding videographer he knew through a friend and asked him if he’d like to tag along on some school visits. Their first trip to North Star Academy, a charter school in Newark, turned into a five-year project to record teachers across the country. At first, Lemov financed the trip out of his consulting budget; later, Uncommon Schools paid for it. The odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

Andrew Gelman on the above article

Teaching: What I Learned Last Semester

Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College - Doug Lemov

Uncommon Schools

Podcasts:

The national curriculum
The first draft of a national curriculum in maths, English, science and history is now online for public consultation.It covers kindergarten to year 10, with the planned changes for years 11 and 12 to be added in April.

National curriculum: the English experience
A three-year review of primary education in England says that the national curriculum and national testing has narrowed schooling and placed too much emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy.

'Workforce Futures'
Skills Australia has handed over a report titled 'Australian Workforce Futures' to the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Skills Australia is an independent statutory body established to provide advice to the government on future skills.

Assorted

Landsburg's Heroes of All Time

66 percent of the time

And it also occurred me that while students see the professor while he or she is teaching, they only witness about 66% of what goes into teaching.

Medical Statistics Don't Always Mean What They Seem to Mean

Paul Romer's Errors

Experiments in industrial policy

As much as fixed costs matter, the real barrier to firm growth in poor countries could be management. A good manager is partly one with training, experience, and a sense of best practice. A lot of a factory’s success comes down to management as a technology, though. Organizing a production floor, ensuring quality and efficient production: these are less a product of a single manager’s talent and more the product of decades of trial and error in manufacturing plants around the world. The problem: if you are running a firm in India or Mexico or elsewhere, the best practices probably haven’t filtered through.

2009 Quality of Life Index

Balance of Payments

The use and misuse of computers in education

The use and misuse of computers in education : evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia

Summary: This paper presents the evaluation of the program Computers for Education. The program aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students' test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.

Political institutions and human development

Political institutions and human development - does democracy fulfil its 'constructive' and 'instrumental' role ?

Summary: Institutions are a major field of interest in the study of development processes. The authors contribute to this discussion concentrating our research on political institutions and their effect on the non-income dimensions of human development. First, they elaborate a theoretical argument why and under what conditions democracies compared to autocratic political systems might perform better with regards to the provision of public goods. Due to higher redistributive concerns matched to the needs of the population democracies should show a higher level of human development. In the following they analyze whether our theoretical expectations are supported by empirical facts. The authors perform a static panel analysis over the period of 1970 to 2003. The model confirms that living in a democratic system positively affects human development measured by life expectancy and literacy rates even controlling for GDP. By analyzing interaction effects they find that the performance of democracy is rather independent of the circumstances. However, democracy leads to more redistribution in favor of health provision in more unequal societies.

Exam question of the Day

Peter Boettke writes;

Joseph Schumpeter claimed that capitalism would give way to socialism largely for ideological reasons. This does not seem to have happened, at least directly. But might it be happening indirectly? Consider, for instance, a significant change that has occurred in the economic organization of debtor-creditor contracts. Not too long ago, lenders held their loans in their portfolios. They would lose if the borrower defaulted, which gave the lender a strong incentive to monitor the borrower, particularly for large loans. Now, lenders split their loans into numerous small pieces and disperse them throughout the economy. (For instance, many people who hold mutual funds and retirement accounts will find that they are holding small pieces of large loans made by commercial banks.) The burden of non-performing loans is thus dispersed throughout the economy rather than residing with the original lender. Does this development weaken the incentive offenders to monitor borrowers and thereby weaken overall economic performance? That is, can market transactions generate institutional arrangements that impair the market economy? However you address this topic, do so clearly and cogently.

Related;
A Remarkable Question
Information Transformation
Capitalist Fools

The Hayek Fallacy

Economic Concepts in Art

Sarah Sliwinski - 4th Grade
Economic Concepts Posters

Creative solutions for education in poor countries

Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?

A Marshall Plan for American Education?

Ed Gleaser writes;

But in this hopeful season of presidential change, even economists need to be for something. Some of my colleagues labor to improve healthcare; others fight for tax reform. My dream is that one, or both, candidates will make human capital the centerpiece of their campaign...

A national human capital agenda requires investing in all children, not just those who might be left behind, and it requires much more than $50 billion a year.

Such spending needs to be justified by more than just a desire to reduce inequality. The case for governmental investment in education reflects the fact all of us become more productive when our neighbors know more. The success of cities like Boston reflects the magic that occurs when knowledgeable people work and live around each other. As the share of adults in a metropolitan area with college degrees increases by 10 percent, the wages of a worker with a fixed education level increases by 8 percent. Area level education also seems to increase the production of innovations and speed economic growth.

American education is not just another arrow in a quiver of policy proposals, but it is the primary weapon, the great claymore, to fight a host of public ills. One can make a plausible case that improving American education would do as much to improve health outcomes as either candidate's health plans. People with more years of schooling are less obese, smoke less, and live longer. Better-educated people are also more likely to vote and to build social capital by investing in civic organizations.

Improving America's human capital requires more than just writing a large check. My next columns will outline the details of a Marshall Plan for American Education. Because education is both important and difficult, it should be at the center of the presidential political debates.

Do qualifications of a finance minister matter?

Maybe not. The following is the qualification of Trevor Andrew Manuel, South Africa's Finance Minister.

* Matriculated from Harold Cressy High School, Cape Town
* National Diploma in Civil and Structural Engineering, from the Peninsula Technikon
* Executive Management Programme from Stanford National University, Singapore