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The Ghanaian village of Juaben is home to a huge number of fans of Aston Villa FC - and they cannot wait for the new Premier League season to begin.

By External Source
Sep 10 2020 (IPS-Partners)

His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s message for “Fair Share for Children – Laureates and Leaders Summit 2020”, held online September 9, 2020.

 

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The post Message for Laureates and Leaders for Children appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Entrée en fonctions d’un nouvel avocat général à la Cour de justice

Entrée en fonctions d’un nouvel avocat général à la Cour de justice

Entry into office of a new Advocate General at the Court of Justice

EU ambassadors agreed the Council's position on the 2021 EU draft budget.

Die EU ist bestrebt, den sicheren und effizienten Betrieb der Eisenbahnverbindung des Ärmelkanaltunnels nach Ablauf der Brexit-Übergangsphase zu gewährleisten.

The EU is working to mitigate the severe effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the rail sector by providing relief from certain infrastructure charges.

Media advisory - Press briefing ahead of the EU-China leaders' meeting via video conference

EU ambassadors agreed the Council's position on the 2021 EU draft budget.

Az EU azon dolgozik, hogy a Csatorna-alagúton áthaladó vasúti összeköttetés a brexit átmeneti időszakának lezárultával is biztonságosan és hatékonyan üzemelhessen.

Az EU igyekszik enyhíteni azokat a súlyos hatásokat, amelyeket a koronavírus-járvány gyakorol a vasúti ágazatra, ezért mentességet biztosít bizonyos infrastruktúra-használati díjak alól.

Media advisory - Press briefing ahead of the EU-China leaders' meeting via video conference

Le projet de révision constitutionnelle, adopté dimanche dernier par le Conseil des Ministres, sera soumis, ce jeudi 10 septembre, à un vote à l’Assemblée Populaire Nationale (APN), puis à un référendum populaire le 1er novembre prochain. La mouture finale du projet de la révision de la Constitution sera soumis aujourd’hui, jeudi 10 septembre, à un […]

L’article Révision de la Constitution : Le projet sera soumis au vote de l’APN aujourd’hui est apparu en premier sur .

Le suspect de génocide au Rwanda, Charles Ndereyehe, a été arrêté par la police, à son domicile, près de la capitale néerlandaise, Amsterdam, a annoncé son parti politique. Le gouvernement rwandais avait émis, en 2010, un mandat d’arrêt international contre M. Ndereyehe, pour avoir organisé des meurtres lors du génocide de 1994, dans le pays. […]

L’article Qui est ce suspect de génocide au Rwanda arrêté aux Pays-Bas est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

Le journaliste et écrivain kenyan Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina (1971-2019) avait des coiffures étonnantes, et un humour décapant. Sa nouvelle Discovering Home, périple autobiographique d'un jeune homme établi en Afrique du Sud et retournant dans son Kenya natal, est distinguée par le prix Caine en 2002. Au moment où Daniel Arap Moi quitte le pouvoir après 24 ans de présidence autocratique, il fonde Kwani ?, une revue littéraire qui diffuse les germes d'un renouvellement artistique en Afrique de l'Est. En (...)

- Contrebande / Culture, Kenya, Personnalités, Sexualité

Trade Commissioner nominee Valdis Dombrovskis faces a packed in-tray. The EU's trade policy needs a complete overhaul in order to be adapted to the EU’s new sustainability goals and to harness globalization, write Anna Cavazzini and Saskia Bricmont.  

Dauer des Videos : 69'

Haftungsausschluss : Die Verdolmetschung der Debatten soll die Kommunikation erleichtern, sie stellt jedoch keine authentische Aufzeichnung der Debatten dar. Authentisch sind nur die Originalfassungen der Reden bzw. ihre überprüften schriftlichen Übersetzungen.
Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2020 - EP

L’avocat et militant des droits de l’Homme, Me Mustapha Bouchachi a décliné, l’invitation du chef de l’État de participer au débat autour de la révision constitutionnelle. Dans une lettre datée du 5 juillet 2020, rendue public hier mercredi sur sa page Facebook, l’avocat a commencé par remercier le chef de l’État pour son invitation à participer […]

L’article Bouchachi décline l’invitation de participer au débat de la révision de la constitution est apparu en premier sur .

A girl in Bhubaneswar slums, India checks her e-learning assignments on a computer tablet. Courtesy: John Marshall/Aveti Learning

By Doug Johnson and Suvojit Chattopadhyay
Sep 10 2020 (IPS)

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) lays out a compelling, ambitious agenda for education reform in India. Yet, as others have noted, without concerted action the NEP’s promise will remain unfulfilled.

The new policy is a wide-ranging document and therefore priority-setting is key. To realise the NEP’s vision, the centre should prioritise certain critical elements of the policy: expanding access to early childhood care and education (ECCE), raising foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school, and creating a regular, national sample-based survey of learning outcomes.

An overarching point we also make is that as education is a concurrent subject, the centre should provide guidance and funding but leave details to the states.

In this article, we provide recommendations that can not only help governments prioritise, but also work together to tackle one of India’s most urgent priorities—helping its people realise their full potential.

 

Prioritise

Taking on too many recommendations could overload teachers, headmasters, and officials at a time when they have their hands full. Instead, the government should start with the most pressing and urgent objectives: expanding ECCE and raising foundational literacy.

Research shows that teacher qualifications and improved school infrastructure on their own have relatively little effect on student learning outcomes. By contrast, additional contract workers, who are more accountable to their supervisors and may deviate from the official curriculum, can have huge effects

A large body of research shows that improvements in early childhood education and primary school pay off far more, in terms of later life outcomes than improvements in secondary school or higher education. In addition, as the NEP itself points out, reforms to secondary school and higher education rest on getting these fundamentals right first.

According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), in 2018, nearly half of all rural students in Grade 5 couldn’t read a Grade 2 text and two thirds couldn’t perform simple division.

There is little point in having all students complete secondary school (as the NEP recommends) if many of them cannot even read a basic text. Further, hasty changes to secondary school or higher education would only make current secondary school students more stressed.

The government should also prioritise assessing learning outcomes as a means to measure the efficacy of its education system. Measuring progress on ECCE and foundational learning will require high-quality data.

The ASER survey, cited above, is an invaluable data source but is only available for rural areas. The central government’s National Achievement Survey (NAS) covers urban areas but does not include private school students and, as recent research by one of the authors and Andres Parrado shows, is likely inaccurate.

The NEP recommends implementing census-based exams (tests administered on every child in school) in Grades 3, 5, and 8. If implemented well, these exams may be a great source of data. But because they are administratively cumbersome to implement, it may be several years before data from these exams can be fully trusted.

To fill the gap, the central government should implement a sample-based survey—where a random sample of students is selected—of learning outcomes which includes urban areas and private school students. In implementing this survey, the central government should learn from the experience of the NAS to ensure that the data is of sufficiently high quality to track progress at the state level.

 

Use evidence to guide decision-making

Whatever its faults, the NEP cannot be criticised for lack of ideas. The document is full of detailed guidance on everything from book clubs to classroom activities. As a source of inspiration, this level of detail is admirable but as policy guidance, it is overbearing.

State governments need to develop detailed implementation plans customised to the nature of gaps in their respective education systems, the resources available to them, and considering the latest knowledge and evidence in the sector.

In addition, many of the NEP’s detailed recommendations go against existing evidence. The NEP recommends a pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) of under 30:1. And in order to increase access to ECCE and improve foundational learning, it recommends hiring more teachers in primary schools, introducing a new cadre of ECCE teachers with rigorous qualifications, and investing in infrastructure in anganwadis and primary schools. Yet official figures show that in most states, the majority of government primary schools comply with these PTR guidelines already.

While in a few states such as Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh, a substantial share of government primary schools do not comply with PTR guidelines, the problem, for the most part, is one of teacher assignment rather than the overall number of teachers.

For example, the overall PTR in Jharkhand government primary schools is 25, which is better than the recommended guidelines. Yet 50 percent of Jharkhand’s primary schools do not comply with the PTR guideline. This tells us that we need to ensure a more even distribution of teachers across schools.

Research also shows that teacher qualifications and improved school infrastructure on their own have relatively little effect on student learning outcomes. By contrast, additional contract workers, who are more accountable to their supervisors and may deviate from the official curriculum, can have huge effects.

Pratham’s Read India program, which relies on relatively low-paid staff who undergo only a short training, has been shown to dramatically increase foundational literacy in a short timeframe. Similarly, a government programme in Tamil Nadu in which anganwadis were provided with an additional assistant who received only a short training resulted in large increases in both learning and nutrition.

Similarly, to implement the sample-based survey, the central government should seek outside help rather than do it on its own. For the past 15 years, the ASER Centre has collected regular, accurate data on basic literacy and numeracy on a shoestring budget.

In addition to the ASER Centre, organisations such as the Centre for Science of Student Learning and Educational Initiatives have deep experience in developing and carrying out student assessments. By contrast, the government’s own effort to collect learning outcomes data has been marred by errors. One of the authors of the article, along with Andres Parrado, recently showed how the 2017 NAS data contains little information on actual student learning.

We compared NAS to a variety of other datasets including ASER, India Human Development Survey (IHDS) learning outcomes data, and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data on state income and find little correlation between NAS state rankings and rankings based on these other datasets.

The fact that the NEP provides little guidance on assessments—only stating that NAS will continue until the National Assessment Centre is established—is worrying, particularly because assessment is an area where the centre ought to provide detailed guidance.

 

Turn crisis into opportunity

Bold experiments are the need of the hour to improve learning outcomes in India. In the past, efforts to improve foundational learning were often hampered by the requirement that teachers complete an over-ambitious curriculum which leaves most kids behind.

With so many students way behind the official curriculum, attempt to ‘catch up’ is nearly impossible. And since the NEP has recommended fundamental changes to board exams, the fear that deviating from the curriculum will leave students ill-prepared for the boards is muted.

States should seize this opportunity by suspending the requirement that teachers complete the official curriculum, and take bold steps to refocus teaching on foundational learning. One such step could be to integrate Pratham’s tried and tested ‘teaching at the right level’ approach into the syllabus.

We see NEP 2020 as a policy document that has several laudable goals. And while it has generated some political heat, much of the document is ambitious and forward-looking. However, to go beyond nice-sounding policy prescriptions and achieve tangible gains on the ground, it will require the centre and states to work together.

 

Doug Johnson is an independent researcher based in Bangkok, Thailand.

Suvojit Chattopadhyay works on issues of governance and development in East Africa and South Asia.

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

The post Getting the Basics Right – India’s National Education Policy 2020 appeared first on Inter Press Service.