Budget bounty for education
DNA, 7 July 2009

In keeping with its emphasis on higher education, the government has increased the overall plan expenditure for the sector by Rs 2, 000 crore compared to last time. In the Union budget 2009-10, the human resource development ministry has been provided Rs 36, 400 crore, of which Rs 26, 800 crore is for school education and Rs 9, 600 crore for higher education. More [+]

Closing the Student Information Gap
The Teacher Magazine, 8 July 2009

The health care reform struggle is as contentious as it gets in Washington. But one proposal enjoying overwhelming consensus is the need for electronic health records. Our nation’s antiquated system of medical paperwork is responsible for vast amounts of lost or unshared information, a profound waste of resources, and much ill-informed decision-making by practitioners and patients. The same logic that drives the campaign for electronic health records dictates a need for electronic student records. More [+]

Ways to govern education
The Hindu Businessline, 6 July 2009

The demands of the education market vary a lot. Some like to have the standards of the IITs; there are others who are quite happy with the sub-standard of poor colleges. How a central body can bring them all under a single roof, asks P. V. INDIRESAN. More [+]

Chairs, desks for MCD schools after 6-yr wait
The Times of India, 9 July 2009

NEW DELHI: For the past six years, nearly one lakh students in the primary schools run by Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) have been attending classes sitting on the floor. Reason samples of desks-cum-chairs sent for a quality check were rejected by Shri Ram Institute for Industrial Research for not meeting standards. More [+]

Private control plan for government model schools
The Telegraph, 6 July 2009

The Centre plans to hand over the management reins of 2,500 planned public-private partnership “model” schools to the private parties involved, allowing them to set their fees in a project aimed at aiding India’s universalisation of schooling. The government will contribute a one-time amount of Rs 50 lakh for each school before withdrawing from all subsequent management under finalised plans for the project, top Planning Commission officials told The Telegraph. More [+]

Education providers must assure quality across borders: Shri Kapil Sibal
Press Information Bureau, 12 July 2009

The higher education providers delivering cross border education should ensure that the programmes that are delivered across the borders and in their home country are of comparable quality and they also must take into account the cultural and linguistic sensitivities of the receiving countries. Giving the Keynote Address at the Plenary Session of the World Conference on Higher Education, yesterday, at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Shri Kapil Sibal said that while we recognise the tremendous potential of cross border education, we have to be mindful of the risks involved regarding the entry of ‘diploma mills’ and unscrupulous for – profit providers. More [+]

Staying on board - Private schools in the recession
The Economist, 2 July 2009

“COMPARED with last year, applications are up 14%,” says Mark Stanek, the principal of Ethical Culture Fieldston, a private school in New York. All through the application season he and his board of governors had been on tenterhooks, waiting to see if financial turmoil would cut the number of parents prepared to pay $32,000-34,000 a year to educate a child. Requests for financial help from families already at Fieldston had been rising fast, and the school had scraped together $3m—on top of the $8m it spends on financial aid in a normal year—in the hope of tiding as many over as possible. Nothing is certain until pupils turn up in the autumn. Some parents could get cold feet and sacrifice their deposits. Yet so far the school is more popular than ever. More [+]

Efficacy and validity of NET: Stem the rot
The Organiser , 12 July 2009

As reported in the newspapers the University Grants Commission (UGC) has decided to revive the National Eligibility Test (NET) as the essential eligibility criterion for recruitment and appointment of lecturers in colleges and universities with a view to address the issue of decline in quality in higher education. Whereas this new-found concern for improving the teaching standards in colleges and universities on the part of the hitherto slumberous UGC authorities must have pleased their new boss, the Union HRD Minister, for their active and urgent interest in the state of affairs as it obtain today, it also sets an important task for Kapil Sibal, the lawyer, to seriously engage in this new field of education under his charge and the time will only tell how he uses his legal experience and obligations to stem the rot and improve things vis-à-vis quality of teaching in education in general and in the field of higher education in particular. More [+]

The seed of learning
The Times of India, 6 July 2009

There has been a lot of emphasis on teacher training in India particularly in recent years. “But teacher training has to be supplemented with teaching aid for it to be truly effective in the classroom scenario,” opines Nitin Chaudhary, senior vice president, iDiscoveri — an organisation committed to the cause of improving teaching and learning methodologies. Explaining further, he says, “Every classroom situation is unique and has a specific set of challenges both in terms of learning and teaching.” More [+]

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