India made impressive progress in

providing primary education: UN Report

India has made impressive progress in providing
primary education to its children but it is still struggling to
achieve similar results in lower secondary education and
has the largest number of out-of-school adolescents, a UN
study said today.
According to the study by the UN Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Education
for All Global Monitoring Report (EFR GMR), 124 million
children and adolescents are now out of school while
international aid to education continues to remain below
2010 levels.
India has made impressive progress in the provision of
primary education but is struggling to do the same for
lower
secondary education, the report said.
In 2011, the latest year with data, more than 16 million
young adolescents of lower secondary school age were
not
enrolled in school in India. In addition, Bangladesh,
Mexico, Indonesia, Niger, Pakistan and the Syrian Arab
Republic each had more than 1 million out-of-school
adolescents.
The report noted that India is providing financial
resources to help children with disabilities attend
mainstream

schools and adapt school infrastructure. In addition,

teachers are being trained on inclusive education, with
resource
centres established to support clusters of schools.
India, which has the largest number of out-of-school
adolescents, has seen a reorientation of external support
from
basic to secondary education between 2012 and 2013:
aid to basic education in India fell from USD 100 million to
USD 27 million and aid to secondary education rose from
USD 21 million to USD 232 million between 2012 and
2013.
According to the latest UNESCO Institute for Statistics
data, there were more than 0.5 million out-of-school
children
of primary school age in at least 19 countries.
At least one million children were denied the right to
education in India, Indonesia, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria,
Pakistan, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan and
Tanzania.
India had 1.7 million out of school children of primary
school age in 2012.
The latest numbers show that some 24 million children
will never enter a classroom with girls remaining the most
disadvantaged cohort figuring in the study.
In South and West Asia alone, 80 per cent of out-of-school
girls are unlikely to start school compared to just 16 per
cent for their male counterparts.

UNESCOs Director General Irina Bokova pointed to

warnings that unless countries make serious
commitments
towards increasing education aid, the ambitious targets
made by the international community promising 12 years
of free and equitable access to quality education could
remain elusive for millions of children and youth.
Despite a six per cent increase in aid to education,
investment levels are four per cent lower today than in
2010
and risk stagnating for the next few years.
Aid needs to be shooting upwards, not creeping up by a
few percentage points, declared Aaron Benavot, Director
of
the EFA GMR.
Estimates suggest that it will cost an extra USD 39 billion
to provide the 12 years of education to everyone in low
and lower-middle income countries.
12 New Yorker education articles to read while the
archives are free
The New Yorker has made its archives since 2007 (and a
few articles from before that) free for the next three
months. That includes some great journalism on
education a tour of the biggest debates in K-12 and
higher education.

If you need something to read on your next flight, want a

break from beach reading, or are aiming for a better
grasp of the American education system before the kids
go back to school this fall here's your summer reading
syllabus.
The best profiles of key players
"[Arne] Duncan has the potential to be a uniquely
influential Secretary of Education," Rotella writes, a year
into President Obama's first term. The dtente Rotella
describes between the unions and Duncan has erupted
into warfare since the article was published, but the
profile is a good place to start to understand the man
who, as Rotella predicted, has been very influential.
Diane Ravitch, a former supporter of No Child Left Behind
who has since turned against the education reform
movement, might be Arne Duncan's archnemesis. Since
Ravitch has been present, one way or another,
throughout the education reform movements of the past
30 years, Denby's profile is also a thorough explanation of
the central issues involved, from the debates about
charter schools and education standards to the role of
standardized testing and measuring teachers'
performance based on students' scores.

Green Dot Charter Schools are something of an outlier in

the charter school sector teachers are unionized, and
the charter company started out focusing on turning
around troubled high schools rather than starting from
scratch with younger kids. The schools have been very
successful. Even if they weren't a big player in the charter
school movement, though, this profile of Steve Barr,
Green Dot's founder, is great fun to read: "When the
scores come out, I have to call Shalvey" Barr's charterschool mentor "and ask him, Are they good?' " Barr
said. " 'Cause I don't fucking know. I don't know how to
read test scores."
The best stories about education reform
Chris Christie, Cory Booker and Mark Zuckerberg
announce a $100 million donation to the Newark public
schools.
Much of the best writing about education is about adults
teachers, administrators, parents, politicians and
this narrative is a refreshing change. It's the story of not
just of a crusading Denver superintendent (now a US
Senator, Michael Bennet) but of the teenagers at Manual
High School, a failing school targeted for closure.
Katharine Boo encapsulates the debate over school
closings in a single telling detail: Some of the students,
she writes, "were so attached to Manual that, upon
enrolling, they'd carved its initials into their skin."

The "rubber room" is the nickname for the purgatory

where New York teachers deemed too incompetent for
the classroom waited out the long due process they're
entitled to as members of the teachers' union. (The room
has since been abolished.) Brill uses it as a stand-in for
teacher tenure, which he argues stands in the way of
removing teachers who are mediocre, or worse, and who
stand in the way of narrowing gaps between low-income
and minority students and their wealthier white peers. A
judge recently agreed with that argument in a case that
struck down California's teacher tenure laws. Similar
lawsuits are now underway in other states.
A middle school in a poor neighborhood in Atlanta got
national attention for the improvement in its test scores.
Then it emerged that teachers were cheating, changing
students' answers on standardized tests. Aviv tells the
story not as a whodunit but as a tragedy, as seemingly
well-meaning teachers were caught up in an obsession
with test scores that set goals they felt they could not
achieve honestly. It's a story that's awfully generous to
the cheaters involved many schools in Atlanta
managed to resist the incentives to cheat but that's a
cautionary tale as standardized tests become ever more
important.
Russakoff looks at what went astray in Newark Public
Schools after a star-studded agreement between Mayor
Cory Booker, Gov. Chris Christie and Facebook founder

Mark Zuckerberg to spend five years and $100 million

reforming the system. It's a rigorous look at what
happens to the ideals of reform once they have to
translate on the ground, and spares neither side for the
missteps that made a once-lauded effort go astray.
Also visit: www.toppr.com
The best stories about higher education.The campus of
Stanford University.
You could read this one essay, and nothing else, and walk
away with a pretty good grasp of the debate about higher
education in America. The central question is "What is
college supposed to do?" Menard doesn't answer it,
really, but his overview should be required reading for
anyone who wants to debate student debt or whether
everyone should go to college.
A better headline for this article is "Why the US News
college rankings are bullshit." Gladwell attacks the
perception that the US News rankings are at all unbiased
or objective: "The Yales of the world," he writes, "will
always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the
U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness." The
article is more timely than ever as the US Education
Department works on a system to rate colleges, and
confronts the same central question how do you
compare institutions that differ on many different
dimensions? that Gladwell writes about here.

"Disruption" has become the buzzword du jour in higher

education lately, amid dire warnings that free online
classes and new forms of credentials will upend the
university as we know it. Lepore's critique of the work of
Clay Christiansen, the Harvard Business School professor
who coined "disruptive innovation," doesn't focus on
colleges specifically, but her skeptical analysis of
disruptive innovation is definitely important to them. (Not
everyone found Lepore's thesis persuasive, including
some people here at Vox.)
The question of whether Stanford is too tightly tied to
Silicon Valley doesn't mean much for the colleges that
educate the majority of American students. But Silicon
Valley has been influential in the gospel of success
without college, and Auletta's article grapples with
questions at the heart of higher education about the
value of the liberal arts.
Rosin's feature on Patrick Henry College doesn't really
make a broad point about higher education. But it's a tour
of a corner of the college universe that many people don't
know much about and is a good window into how diverse
American higher education is. (I've really included this
piece because it's my personal favorite. The article later
grew into a book, God's Harvard, which sort of changed
my life it made me realize that writing about colleges
could be as fascinating and important as writing about

crime or Congress, and was fresh in my mind when I

applied for my first higher ed reporting job.)