Education

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Teachers vote to stage largest-ever strike as negotiations with ministry stall

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Oceania/ New Zealand/ 20.05.2019/ Source: www.stuff.co.nz.

School teachers and principals across the country have agreed to stage New Zealand’s largest-ever strike as negotiations with the Ministry of Education continue to stall.

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) and New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Rui Roa announced the move on Sunday, and said rolling strike action was also possible.

Ths strike, on May 29, will involve almost 50,000 primary and secondary teachers and primary principals, and will affect hundreds of thousands of students in more than 2000 schools.

PPTA members had also given authority for a five-week rolling strike across the country if the impasse was not resolved, although they hoped that would not eventuate.

The announcement came after teachers and principals voted in secret ballots over the past week, with both unions having each rejected four pay offers to date from the ministry.

The latest offer from the Government is for a $698 million pay improvement package for primary teachers and principals, and a $500m package for secondary teachers.

NZEI president Lynda Stuart said the teaching profession was not going to give up on achieving fair pay and sustainable working conditions.

«What do we want? It’s quite simple really. We want the time to teach, we want a significant pay jolt, and we want better support for those children who have additional learning needs.

«Giving teachers the time to teach and lead, and ensuring that teaching is a viable long-term career, is absolutely essential if our children in this nation are to get the future that they deserve and need.»

It will be the third time primary teachers and principals had staged a strike during the standoff, but the first time secondary teachers had done so.

Secondary school principals were in separate negotiations.

PPTA president Jack Boyle said he hoped the strike would make the Government sit up and take notice.

«Unfortunately, we have got to a point where our bargaining team has said. ‘We do not believe that a settlement is possible through negotiation at this point’.»

Wellington Girls’ College teacher Cameron Stewart said the current school system was failing students. «We have students who will go through school without a specialist maths teacher.

«It is important that all students throughout the country get the benefit of someone who is a subject expert and is passionate about their subject.

«We don’t want people who are teaching their third or fourth [specialist] subject who have no particular experience and no training in it.»

Teaching needed to be seen as a desirable profession, with a salary which kept up with professions requiring similar qualifications, Stewart said.

Wainuiomata Primary School deputy principal Tute Porter-Samuels said many staff could not afford to strike, but neither could they afford «propping up an undervalued, underfunded system at the cost of our own health and wellbeing».

Teachers did not have enough time outside of the classroom to plan programmes for children with extra needs, call or meet parents, or collaborate on school programmes, she said.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said the $1.2 billion pay offer was one of the largest on offer across the public sector.

It would result in an extra $10,000 for most primary school teachers, and almost as much for secondary teachers, he said.

«I certainly don’t think a strike is justified.»

Hipkins also acknowledged teachers were not just after more pay, and noted the Government had invested $95m in teacher recruitment and $217m in employing more learning support coordinators.

He wanted the unions to enter facilitated bargaining, and hoped they would take up the offer.

«We’re getting serious about the issues that they’re raising, but we’re never going to be able to solve every problem overnight. These problems have been over a decade in the making.»

Source of the notice: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/112655087/teachers-have-voted-to-strike-on-may-29

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Homeschooling is on the rise in Australia. Who is doing it and why?

Rebecca English

By: Rebecca English.

 

This is the first article in our four-part series on homeschooling in Australia. The series will answer common questions including whether homeschooled children have enough opportunities for socialisation, and how their outcomes compare with children who attend formal schooling.

Home education is a legally recognised alternative to enrolling a child in school in all Australian states and territories. Children need to be enrolled in either a school or home education from around the age of 6 until completion age (around 17 years-old). If the parent chooses home education, they must apply to the state or territory authority for permission.

In most states and territories, the parent or a hired registered teacher is responsible for the education of the child, usually at the child’s home. Any parent, regardless of their educational background, is legally able to apply for, and homeschool their child.

Parents must submit a plan for their home education, which, in most cases, should show an alignment between their child’s learning and the national curriculum. Parents can buy a program, but in most cases, they develop their own, in line with their philosophies of education.

 

How many Australian children are being homeschooled?

Across Australia, there are around 20,000 homeschooled students and the numbers are growing. Around 1,100 students were being homeschooled in Queensland in 2013. By 2018, this had increased to 3,232 students.

This means there are around the same number of homeschooled students in Queensland as the population of Brisbane State High School.

The numbers are rising in other states too. In New South Wales an estimated 4,700 students were enrolled in homeschool in 2017 compared to around 3,300 in 2013. Around 5,300 children were being homeschooled in Victoria in 2018, compared to 3,545 children in 2013.

These numbers may not tell the whole story as they only represent families who have registered to homeschool their child. Research suggests there may be thousands who haven’t registered, and so are homeschooling their children “illegally”.

Why do families choose to homeschool?

There are many reasons parents choose to educate their children at home. For some families it will be because of religious beliefs. Geography or financial reasons might stop these families from accessing a suitable private school.

Other families might be ideologically opposed to mainstream schooling and see it as an unnecessary or inappropriate intrusion into family life.

Some of the biggest growth in home education is in the “accidental” home education group. These are families for whom school was a first choice, but it did not work. There are many reasons school may not have worked, but often it’s down to special educational need. These families would traditionally have moved their children around between schools but are now homeschooling instead.

Studies suggest families who take their children out of school, when they have a special need, and homeschool are more satisfied with their child’s education than when they were in traditional school.

 

The rise in homeschooling also appears to have links to worldwide changes in education. Many parents see schools as failing their childrenincluding for cultural reasons, and believe homeschooling is a suitable alternative. Some families feel schools are not meeting their primary objectives of education and (healthy) socialisation for their children.

What about assessments?

After a period of time (in Queensland, for instance, it’s ten months) parents report to their state or territory’s education department on their homeschooled child’s progress. The reporting requirements differ across states and territories.

For some states, such as NSW and WA, the report is delivered to a person who visits the family. For others, such as Queensland, the parent writesthe report and sends it to the department.

Unlike traditional schools, parents don’t usually “assess” their child’s learning through exams or assignments. The reports must show progress in key areas. Some homeschooled students might choose to participate in NAPLAN testing while others won’t do any testing at all.

Homeschooled students can choose to go for an ATAR and do a school-based apprenticeship or traineeship, even though they don’t do assessment.

Is it the same as distance education?

Some parents may like the idea of home education but feel they want a more school-like experience. They may choose to enrol their children in distance education.

Distance education is different to homeschooling. Dan Peled/AAP

While it’s also conducted at home, distance education is not home education and the enrolment counts as a “school”. Because it’s technically a school, distance education students are not counted among home education numbers.

The differences are many. Home education is conducted by the parent, but distance education is a school program delivered by teachers at home frequently using the internet. It is also usually delivered to a group of children, rather than a family.

There are private and public distance education schools. Some states, such as New South Wales, limit the enrolment to students who are geographically isolated or may be experiencing a special need that stops them from going to school. In others, such as Queensland, any child can enrol in a distance education school.

What about outcomes?

The volume and quality of the research on outcomes for children in home schooling is limited. In Australia, studies have focused on NAPLAN results. These suggest home-educated students score higher than state averages across every measure. The effect continues even if the child returns to school.

These children may be doing well because they receive one-on-one attention. Or it could be because the child’s learning is personalised and the child has agency over their learning.

 

Studies from the US, where there is far more data, suggest home-educated students enjoy benefits in reading, language, maths, science and social studies. And many families there cite dissatisfaction with schools’ achievements as a reason to home educate. There is no difference between home education in the USA and Australia.

The rise in numbers poses issues for education departments and government authorities charged with managing the practise. They may not be set up to deal with large, and increasing, numbers of registrations. For most departments of education, the numbers of families choosing home education has traditionally been low.

In addition, authorities may be unable to police those families who choose not to register.

The increasing choice of home education is an issue that should be on the radar of every state and territory education authority.

 

Source of the article:

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Education as an instrument for China’s soft power

Alfred Marleku

By: Alfred Marleku.

 

China is lavishing scholarships on foreign students and opening up institutions around the world as it looks to exert influence and serve the national interest in a different way.

Alongside its rapid economic development and increasing political impact in the world, China is making significant progress in building up soft power capacities by using education as the key instrument to boost its influence abroad.

The concept of soft power in the field of international relations started to be used by the well-known scholar Joseph Nye. He argues that soft power involves culture, values, and ways to disperse impact and build an image. All this, according to him, aims to facilitate state cooperation, administration and a race to distribute influence, values and ideology to other states.

In recent years, China has significantly increased its influence abroad by using education as a source and instrument of soft power. This has been done by using two main approaches.

Firstly, by establishing Chinese educational institutions in different countries of the world. Second, by offering attractive programmes and support through scholarships for students from around the world to study at Chinese universities.

For this reason, in 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a formal document stating that the purpose of their education reform initiative at international level is to make it possible for Chinese soft power to serve the national interest.

One of the main Chinese educational instruments, which is estimated to have an annual value of around $10 billion, is the establishment and operation of the Confucius Institutes, which operate in around 120 countries around the world through about 500 centres.

These institutes are established by the state and their main purpose is to familiarise foreigners with the Chinese ideological approach and its culture by offering them various services such as Mandarin language courses or training in cooking Chinese food, calligraphy etc.

However, the impact for China’s soft power has not remained only at the institutional or individual student level, but has also extended to influential politicians. In 2013, after a visit to China, former British prime minister, David Cameron stated that Britain should look beyond traditional principles where students are offered only German and French as a foreign languages and should focus on learning Mandarin.

It does not seem casual that, a few years later, Cameron was engaged to lead an investment fund in UK, worth about $1 billion, which aimed at backing China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

On the other hand, China has invested steadily in increasing its universities’ capacities in order to compete globally with world-class institutions through two initiatives, known as Project 211 and Project 985. These educational platforms aim to create opportunities for foreign students to study Chinese language and culture and, at the same time, encourage Chinese students to study abroad.

It is estimated that nearly half a million foreign students are studying in China. According to official statistics, in 2017, these students attended 935 higher education institutions. As far as the Asian continent is concerned, China is considered to be the most popular and attractive destination for international students. Most of them come from South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, the US, Russia, and Japan.

To attract as many foreign students as possible, the Chinese government allocates more than 10,000 scholarships to students from countries interested in pursuing studies in China through the Silk Road Scholarship programme. The largest number of these scholarships are dedicated to countries impacted by the Belt Road, making up about 65 percent. But Europe is not left behind in this regard. The Chinese government has recently launched the Chinese Ambassador Scholarship programme dedicated to students from Romania.

In fact, it is considered normal practice and is very common for powerful states, as part of their strategy to extend their impact in the international arena, to apply soft power by launching various scholarship programmes. Around a century ago, the United Kingdom implemented the Rhodes Scholarship programme, which aimed at promoting British imperialist values in the world.

On the other hand, in 1946, the United States launched the Fulbright Programwhich aims to disseminate American values abroad. Whereas, the former Soviet Union in 1961 created Patrice Lumumba University in order to teach the principles of socialism to students coming from the so-called third world countries.

Similarly, China uses higher education to increase its impact of soft power in the world, especially in countries stretching along the One Belt One Road initiative.

Education for some countries is considered an industry, while for others it is seen more as a political tool. While in developed countries such as the UK, US or Australia, foreign students are welcomed because universities, by offering them study opportunities, charge them with tuition fees that usually are much higher than payments of domestic students, in China foreign students enjoy generous financial support through scholarships and advanced study conditions. For this reason, in 2018, the Chinese Foreign Ministry increased the budget by 16 percent compared to 2017.

This is a well-planned strategic move. As the British weekly The Economistpoints out, rich countries sell their education and China is using it to buy influence.

 

Source of the article: https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/education-as-an-instrument-for-china-s-soft-power-25699

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Can we explain the pay inequality in South Africa?

Reseñas

By: Vuyelwa Dantjie.

 

South Africa’s gender pay gap represents one of today’s many social injustices as shown by the ILO Global Wage report’s 2018/19 interesting statistics.

Covering 70 countries and 80% of wage employees worldwide, the report shows that on average women continue to be paid 28% less than men.

This is an alarming percentage, what is more alarming is that South Africa has the world’s highest wage inequality overall – the distribution of wealth between the rich and the poor.

Using the survey data, the ILO Global Wage report has calculated inequality in wages and represents the information using the Gini Coefficient as shown in graph 1.

The Gini Coefficient is used as a gauge of economic inequality; it measures income distribution and wealth distribution among a population – values closer to zero indicate lower levels of wage inequality and values closer to 100 indicate higher levels of wage inequality.

Graph 1: Inequality as measured by the Gini Coefficient around the World

graph

Source: Global Wage Report 2018/19

According to the graph above South Africa, Namibia, the United Republic of Tanzania and Malawi are the African countries with the highest values of wage inequality among the countries considered.

Here South Africa has been classified in the upper-middle income sector and scored a Gini Coefficient of 63.9.

Although high, this statistic might be explained given our context and history. It could for example be attributed to the legacy of South Africa’s history, which resulted in exclusionary policies.

This played a role in establishing inequalities in wage distribution through the practice of unfair discrimination.

The Constitution sought to address inequality through section 9 in Chapter 2 of the Bill of Rights, which provides for equality and equal protection of the law to everyone.

The Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998 was since introduced to protect and advance persons, or categories of persons who were disadvantaged by unfair discrimination.

The act places responsibility onto the employer for reducing inequality in wage distribution and the South African government endorses equal pay for equal work and proposes it as a principle to reduce inequality.

The labour department is currently legislating the mandatory reporting of various equal pay reports to try to arrest the inequality of pay.

21st Century, the largest remuneration consultancy in South Africa, provides organisations with equal pay reports, which contains a number of statistical analyses, which include:

• Wage gap;

• 10-10 Ratio;

• Palma Ratio;

• Gini Coefficient and Lorenz curve;

• Pay differentials by gender and race; and

• Inequity within jobs.

Reports such as these are the first step in attempting to manage pay equity within organisations.

Gender pay gap statistics in South Africa

The Global Wage Report 2018/19 gives a break down into full time and part-time work and illustrates how women are prejudiced in the employment market as shown in graph 2 and graph 3.

Graph 2: Full-time workers pay disparity between women and men

graph

Source: Global Wage Report 2018/19

South African women who are permanently employed earn 22.7% less than men do.

Graph 3: Part-time workers pay disparity between women and men

graph

Source: Global Wage Report 2018/19

South African women who work part-time earn 39% less than men do. South Africa came in as the second worst country surveyed for part-time wage inequality; Pakistan came in at 77.4%.

Can we come up with any explanations?

Do men earn more because they are more educated?

There is no real evidence that the level of education alters the gender pay gap. Looking at the score in education figure below we can see that females are as educated as males and in some cases are in fact more educated than males such as in the technical occupations.

The following can be deduced from the three graphs in figure 1 as one example: There are more educated women in the technical field (score in education figure).

There are also more women in quantity within the technical field (degree of feminisation figure), yet we still see a pay gap of just under 10% in the gender pay gap figure within the same field.

Therefore, it can be stated that women get lower financial returns from education than males, once they enter the world of work, post-education.

In South Africa, like most countries, we see less females occupying the higher occupation sectors (professional and management in degree of feminisation figure) but the difference comes in where females are mainly saturated in the middle whereas in other countries you would find a large amount of them in the unskilled occupations (A Band employees).

This still does not provide us with any rationale as to why a gender pay gap exists.

Figure 1: Occupation, feminization, education and the gender pay gap

graph

Source: Global Wage Report 2018/19

When looking at education (which is one of the factors that influence wages) as a reason for the disparity, the rationale for the gender pay gap is not supported and we cannot form any legitimate reasoning by looking at the differences and characteristics between males and females.

In addressing this issue in South Africa, focus needs to be placed on legislation.

Organisations need to prioritise equal pay for work of equal value and be held accountable where differentiations in pay are unjustifiable.

There is a long way to go for South Africa but small steps in the right direction will move us closer to equality.

Source of the review: https://city-press.news24.com/Voices/can-we-explain-the-pay-inequality-in-south-africa-20190430

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Nigeria Has 10 Million Out-of-school Children, Says Education Minister

Noticias

Africa/ Nigeria/ 06.05.2019/ Fuente: saharareporters.com.

Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education, said the audit was part of the 2018/2019 Annual School Census, which was carried out by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), National Population Commission (NPC), National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other stakeholders.

Nigeria’s Minister of Education says it has conducted a National Personnel Audit of both public and private schools in Nigeria, which shows that the country has 10,193,918 out-of-school children.

Speaking at a conference in Abuja on Friday, Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education, said the audit was part of the 2018/2019 Annual School Census, which was carried out by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), National Population Commission (NPC), National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other stakeholders.

Adamu, who was represented by Sonny Echono, Permanent Secretary of the ministry, said the census showed that the most endemic states affected by the out-of-school children were Kano, Akwa Ibom, Katsina,

Kaduna, Taraba, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara, Oyo, Benue, Jigawa and Ebonyi states.

The minister added that the Nigerian government had developed four strategic interventions on the out-of-school children, which are Special Education, Boy-Child Education, Girl-Child Education and Almajiri Sensitisation.

He said: “In 2015, conflicting figures of out-of-school children were being given, ranging from 10 to 13 million. We must acknowledge that the issue of data has constituted a stumbling block in terms of planning for the out-of-school children nationwide.

“However, UBEC, the NPC and the NBS worked together towards this common goal of determining the number of children of school age who are not in school. Based on the conducted National Personnel Audit of both public and private schools, Nigeria has out-of-school children population of 10,193,918.

“In the next four years, therefore, we shall concentrate efforts at increasing advocacy and sensitization of stakeholders at all levels, and improving synergy between stakeholders at all levels of basic education delivery»
Source of the notice: http://saharareporters.com/2019/04/13/nigeria-has-10-million-out-school-children-says-education-minister

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The Guardian view on higher education: humans need the humanities

The Guardian

By: The Guardian.

The subjects of least obvious use may prove to be of ultimate value

 

The authoritarian and populist government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is guilty of many crimes. Some, like the assault on the rainforest, will damage the whole world. Others will only damage Brazil: the latest example is the announcement that the government is considering withdrawing funding from university teaching of philosophy and sociology. Higher education may not seem a top priority in a country where a third of the adult population is functionally illiterate. The government’s education policy is already eccentric. The most recently sacked education minister, a former philosophy professor, had demanded that schools film their pupils singing the national anthem and listening to Mr Bolsonaro’s election slogan. But this is serious.

Sociology and philosophy are subjects which seem to their enemies to produce nothing but querulous unemployables fluent in sophistry and subversion. (Mr Bolsonaro has thundered about the need to “combat Marxist rubbish” in educational institutions.) Authoritarians promote a rigid society in which there is room for only a few guides and philosophers at the top. They need to know what there is to know about humanity and society, but everyone else need only know their place. This was certainly the model against which the great 19th- and 20th-century movements for workers’ emancipation rebelled. There is a strong democratic tradition of self-improvement for moral purposes running through socialism and some forms of Christianity before it. All these people understood philosophy and clear thought more generally as a threat to the pretensions of authority and a tool for a more just and better society.

Sociology is a special case of such an instrument of self-improvement. By helping people to think about their own societies, and to engage with what has been thought before, it can make for better citizens as well as better people. To understand the motives of others is to some extent to understand our own. Sociology and philosophy are not vocational subjects. They are the subjects that inform our understanding of any vocation. What happens when powerful people think that common sense can substitute for the disciplines of the humanities is obvious in the horrible consequences of social networks built by young men who understand computer code profoundly but everything else superficially if at all. The philosopher Karl Popper taught that subjects of inquiry could be divided into clouds and clocks: those whose boundaries and workings, however complicated, worked according to clear and explicit rules, and those where this couldn’t be done. Thinking about problems which are by their nature cloudy and cannot be reduced to clockworks is an essential skill in today’s world, as it has always been.

It is not, however, one which is always demanded by employers. Political authoritarians are not the only enemies of humanities. There is also the crude view that higher education is merely the servant of the markets, although any educated person can see that this is precisely the wrong way round. When Mr Bolsonaro praises subjects that generate “immediate return” for the taxpayer, it is a convenient justification for his ideological drive. Others actually mean it.

The principles of liberal democracy are threatened by thuggery, but also by some forms of intellectual assault. If they are to be defended, and their practice improved, we need more philosophers and sociologists. It is the subjects of least obvious use that may prove of ultimate value.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/30/the-guardian-view-on-higher-education-humans-need-the-humanities

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España: International Conference of Psychology, Sociology, Education and Social Sciences

Noticias

Europa/ España/ 29.04.2019/ Fuente: opiics2019.unizar.es.

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Fuente de la noticia: http://opiics2019.unizar.es/

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