Education: Year In Review 2008Article Free Pass
The Global Monitoring Report issued by UNESCO in 2008 reported progress toward the worldwide goal, adopted in 2000, of universal free and compulsory primary education by 2015. The agency found that more children were starting primary school than ever before and that the number of out-of-school children dropped sharply from 96 million in 1999 to 72 million in 2005. “At this midway point, our assessment leans towards the positive but much more remains to be done if the goals are to be met by their target date,” said Nicholas Burnett, UNESCO assistant director general for education.
Even regions that had the smallest proportions of their children in school—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and West Asia—made progress. From 1999 to 2005 countries in sub-Saharan Africa increased their primary-school enrollment by 36%, and countries in South and West Asia enrolled an additional 22% of their children in school. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan enrollment declined when in October 2008 the government of Zimbabwe announced that it had closed its schools to 4.5 million students.
Achieving gender parity in education was another of the goals of UNESCO. The 2008 report established that 63% of the world’s countries enrolled equal numbers of boys and girls at the primary level, including Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Mauritania, and Uganda. At the secondary level, 37% of the countries enrolled equal numbers of boys and girls; Bolivia, Peru, and Vietnam made the list for the first time. Although UNESCO projected that roughly half of countries would miss the target of gender parity by 2015, the agency noted that in parts of the Americas and Western Europe, fewer boys than girls were enrolled in secondary schools.
The education of girls remained problematic in parts of the Islamic world. According to the UNESCO report, girls made up 60% of the out-of-school group in the Arab states, and they accounted for 66% of those who were not enrolled in South and West Asia. Coincidentally, after the report was issued, attacks were mounted against schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly those in which girls were enrolled; the aggression appeared to be the work of radical Islamists who vehemently opposed the education of girls. In the same region, support for the education of girls was demonstrated in several efforts that were publicized during 2008. The much-translated worldwide best-selling book Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Relin, told the story of Mortenson, a mountaineer whose life was saved by impoverished Pakistani tribesmen. In gratitude he began building schools, eventually establishing dozens. Another effort to educate poor Pakistani boys and girls in a number of schools was reported in a New York Times story about a Turkish foundation that aimed to demonstrate that schooling could preserve Islamic values while embracing Western science.
Questions of how to expand access to education and to what extent to accommodate cultural differences in government schools continued to challenge a number of countries. In southern Wales in July, for example, the British High Court ruled in favour of a Sikh teenager who had been suspended from school for wearing a kara, an arm bangle required of adherents to the faith, in violation of the school’s policy against jewelry.
In May the Slovak legislature passed a law expressly prohibiting discrimination and segregation in education. Shortly thereafter, however, Amnesty International (AI) reported that Roma (Gypsy) children continued to be separated from other children, primarily by being placed in schools that offered a simplified curriculum for children with cognitive disabilities. (An estimated 80% of the country’s special-school population was Roma, although the group made up only about 10% of the entire population.) AI, in reporting that many of the Roma students were not assessed for disabilities nor had their parents given informed consent for the school placement, called on the Slovak government to end its discrimination against Roma children. Other European countries had smaller Roma minorities than Slovakia, but they also discriminated against the Roma in schools.
In February the Australian government apologized to its Aboriginal population for having continued the practice through much of the 20th century of taking children from their own families and sending them to live with white families. Taking a cue from Australia, the Canadian government formally apologized in June for having segregated—in the interest of assimilation—about 150,000 native children in church-operated residential schools far from their homes; the policy was perpetuated from the late 19th century until, in a few cases, the 1990s. Canada began financial reparations and instituted a formal truth and reconciliation commission to evaluate past abusive treatment of the children.
In India the issue of access to schooling was hotly debated as the legislature considered a right to education bill that would, among other measures, require all private and independent schools to reserve 25% of their seats for poor children from their neighbourhoods. That mandate was opposed by the private school lobby. Another issue addressed by the Indian bill was the quality of teaching, particularly as it related to the use of low-paid and often unqualified contract teachers who made up a large part of the teaching force. The bill required that all teachers be qualified and salaried. The bill appeared set for passage after gaining the approval of a group of ministers charged with reviewing it and after being cleared in late October by the Indian cabinet.
The UNESCO report (see above) found that upwards of 50% of the teaching force in sub-Saharan Africa consisted of such contract teachers. UNESCO also reported that 18 million new primary-school teachers would be needed by 2015. Governments around the world were paying more attention to the quality of instruction—not only teaching but also curriculum, materials, and governance.
In December 2007 the results of the 2006 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), given to 400,000 15-year-olds in 57 jurisdictions, were released. The literacy tests for reading, mathematics, and science, as well as more general competencies, were administered every three years beginning in 2000 by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As in earlier administrations, students in Finland ranked first in 2006 in using information to solve problems. As a result, delegations from 50 countries headed to Finnish schools to study their methods. According to one principal interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, “We don’t have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have.”
PISA’s report also described the ways in which participating countries’ education systems differed. Educators worldwide debated whether Finland’s success was derived from applying national standards to all students, from maintaining a high-quality corps of teachers, or from granting principals autonomous control of school budgets. In addition, the PISA report noted that countries that separated students into different academic tracks before age 15 tended to have greater disparities of achievement between students from different socioeconomic groups while faring no better overall on the exams. Prompted by that finding, which had been noted in earlier PISA reports as well, Poland raised by a year (between the 2000 and 2003 PISA test administrations) the age at which academic segregation took place. National average test scores rose, and much of the improvement came among lower-performing students.
Because of the improvement, Poland outperformed the United States for the first time. The relative position of the United States was one of the concerns Americans expressed in the national debate on how to improve schools. The matter became more urgent as the federal government began requiring high schools to report graduation data in a new way—i.e., based on how many of the students who began high school finished four years later. According to the new calculations, U.S. schools graduated only 70% of their students in the standard number of years; by previous methods, estimates had been greater than 85%. Because graduation rates in other countries increased, the new figures meant that the United States had dropped in yet another international ranking: percentage of population completing secondary education.
U.S. federal education policy continued to spark controversy—particularly the effort to hold primary and secondary schools accountable for their results on achievement tests, as called for in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which was first passed in 1965 and was revised and reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act [NCLB] of 2001). The nonpartisan Center for Educational Progress reported that since the passage of NCLB, aggregate reading and mathematics achievement scores had increased modestly and the enduring difference in scores between middle-class white students and low-income and African American students had narrowed somewhat. Although the act’s Democratic cosponsors, Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, had vowed to renew the bill in 2008, the likelihood of further action diminished as the U.S. presidential campaign took the stage and as it was discovered that Senator Kennedy had a brain tumour. A group that called itself Ed in ’08 (funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation) paid for public-service announcements to publicize the country’s loss of position internationally, hoping to keep education in the forefront as an issue in the election season, but other matters captured voters’ attention.
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