Education

With the easing of international sanctions, UK universities are re-engaging with Burma at a time when the country’s higher education sector finds itself caught between two reviews. It’s lunchtime, but in the offices of the National League for Democracy (NLD), no one is stopping work. As we go up a tight staircase into an office hung with portraits of leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her father General Aung San, activists work energetically around tables strewn with documents and maps. Student volunteers flick between drafting policy papers on antiquated PCs and checking Facebook on their iPhones. The NLD, Burma’s main...

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania September 14, 2010 As Prepared for Delivery— Hello Philadelphia! It’s wonderful to be here. Today is about welcoming all of you and all of America’s students back to school – and I can’t think of a better place to do it than Masterman. You’re one of the best schools in Philadelphia – a leader in helping students succeed in the classroom. And just last week, you were recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School for your record of achievement. That’s a testament to everyone here – students and parents, teachers and school leaders. And it’s an example of...

It is now almost four years since I first walked through a series of winding by-lanes in a Mumbai slum toward my new job as a teacher at a low-income school. I was forced to confront India’s educational inequities squarely in the eye. Students filed into a dilapidated old school building, and my own musty classroom, crammed with cupboards, barely left any room to move. What was more jarring than my physical surroundings, however, was the magnitude of my students’ achievement gap. Only a handful of my third-grade students could read first-grade books, and almost all struggled with elementary arithmetic....

As delivered Distinguished guests, graduates and families, alumni and alumnae, colleagues and friends – and Secretary Chu, welcome. It is customary on this occasion for the president to talk about the year that has passed, to report on the University’s achievements and directions to gathered alumni/ae and friends. This June, I have quite a year on which to reflect — a year of unanticipated and dramatic change. Perhaps I should have realized that something unusual was afoot when the freshmen were greeted their first night at Harvard in September with a blackout in the Yard. Within weeks, financial markets were...

Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year. The pattern contributes to widening economic inequality and low levels of mobility in this country, economists say, because college graduates earn so much more on average than nongraduates do. Low-income students who excel in high school often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they attend. Continue reading   By DAVID LEONHARDT   (The New York Times , March 16, 2013)  

James Tooley is professor of education policy at the University of Newcastle, director of the E. G.West Centre, and coauthor of “Private Education Is Good for the Poor: A Study of Private Schools Serving the Poor in Low-Income Countries” (Cato Institute). Last fall the High-Level Plenary Meet­ing of the UN General Assembly brought together more than 170 heads of state—“the largest gathering of world leaders in his­tory”—to review progress toward the Millennium Devel­opment Goals. It was, we were told, “a once-in-a-gen­eration opportunity to take bold decisions,” a “defining moment in history” when “we must be ambitious.” One of the internation­ally...