For rural youth in India’s impoverished Vidharba region, the Saoner Industrial Training Institute is supposed to offer a route from local village life to coveted industrial jobs. But with an outdated curriculum, unmotivated teachers, limited equipment and lack of job placement services, the state-run vocational education centre has long struggled to fulfil that role. Students are not the only losers. Fast-growing industries in the city of Nagpur, 60km away, have struggled to find trained workers to meet the manpower needs of their expanding operations.

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Lok Sabha on Friday passed the education tribunal bill after HRD minister Kapil Sibal lobbied his case strenuously with BJP leaders to explain that the bill did not lack legislative competence. The minister told Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj that previous amendments when the NDA launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan enabled the Centre to legislate on tribunals. “In light of Supreme Court rulings, it would seem that the Centre has the right to set up tribunals,” said Swaraj.

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Asserting that education cannot be allowed to become a “money-spinning enterprise”, home minister P Chidambaram today said the Centre would bring forward bills in Parliament to regulate the private sector in the field of education. Chidambaram said as education for children is uppermost in the minds of every Indian family, it had led to mushrooming of institutions, “which cannot be avoided in this transition.”

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How Effective Are Los Angeles Elementary Teachers and Schools?

In the past several years, new research has emerged that more effectively measures student achievement from year to year and creates the potential to tie student progress with individual teachers and other school inputs. NCLB and a series of other reforms have led states to develop annual testing of students in most grades (at least in reading and mathematics). Several states and some districts maintain individual student identifiers that allow researchers to track student progress from year to year and link that progress with changes in school resources or teachers or school practices. This type of data collection offers researchers improved tools for measuring how individual school inputs affect student outcomes.

The new measures rely on so-called “value-added” methods that isolate the contribution of a teacher or school to student learning conditional on individual student background and preparation. Teachers or schools are characterized as “high quality” if their students make above average improvements in student achievement relative to other teachers or schools with comparable students.

The new methods are contrasted with traditional metrics that focus on the average achievement level of students at a school. In the traditional approach, “high-performing” schools have students with higher achievement or proficiency levels than the average school. The problem with this approach is that student achievement is strongly influenced by student background and preparation. As a result, the “high-performing” schools are inevitably schools with few disadvantaged or low-income students. Traditional methods are ill suited for separating a school’s success in improving student outcomes from their success in attracting students with strong preparation. By design, value-added measures isolate whether some schools (or teachers) do a better job of improving student achievement than do others.

This study focuses on value-added measures of elementary school student achievement in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). LAUSD is the second largest school district in the United States (behind New York City Public Schools) with about 700,000 students and 35,000 teachers. LAUSD, like many large urban districts, has large shares of low-income and minority students. About 84 percent of students are eligible for free/reduced school lunch, and almost 40 percent come from families where neither parent completed high school. About 76 percent of students are Hispanic and another 9 percent are black. Nearly half of elementary students are English language learners (ELLs) and receive special instruction to improve their English proficiency. Many at-risk students are concentrated in some schools and neighborhoods, so this isolation means these students have little interaction with more affluent peers.

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The Centre plans to open over 1,000 residential schools for girls in backward and remote areas as part of its plan to universalise education. The National Sample Survey has found out that over 81 lakh children aged 6 to 13 years remain out of school and that most of them are girls. The human resource development ministry has told the finance ministry it wants to set up 1,073 new Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas. These are residential upper primary schools meant mainly for tribal, Dalit, backward-class and minority girls in blocks where the rural female literacy rate is below the national average and the gender gap in literacy wider than the national average.

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Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal on Friday said foreign funds makes up for six per cent of total allocation for the ambitious Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme, adding that fund utilisation under it has been satisfactory. ”In 2009-10, Rs 12,781.07 crore were released by the Centre to States, up from Rs 12,604.81 crore in 2008-09 and Rs 11,426.26 crore in 2007-08. The allocation as percentage of GDP, however, declined from 0.25 per cent in 2007-08 to 0.24 per cent in 2008-09 and 0.22 per cent in 2009-10,” said Sibal.

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The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world — the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs. Many are the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what’s best. The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book. Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents.

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D.C. schools open their doors Monday morning for the start of a new year, and charter parents and advocates say a new problem is compounding an old one. This school year, the D.C. Healthy Schools Act mandating new feeding and physical-education policies takes effect. But charter schools are scrambling to meet some requirements of the new law, which says schools must feed students locally produced fruits and vegetables and offer students overall healthier meals. The act also raises the bar on physical fitness.

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