Sibal's latest: Corp with Rs 10k cr purse to fund new universities
The Times of India, 19 Sep 2009

NEW DELHI: In a major step aimed at attracting serious players in higher education and ensuring that existing ones do not face financial constraints for expansion, HRD ministry has mooted the idea of a National Higher Education Finance Corporation (NHEFC). HRD minister Kapil Sibal told TOI on Friday that such a body is needed for higher education. He said the ministry is examining the proposal and an internal note has been circulated. ‘‘It is difficult to finance new higher educational institutes through plan expenditure alone,’’ he said, adding that a final decision is yet to be taken. But sources said NHEFC could be on top of the ministry’s next 100 days’ agenda. More [+]

Rating of colleges likely soon
Business Standard, 21 Sep 2009

Credit rating agencies like Crisil, Icra and Care could soon get to grade educational institutions. This will help aspirants to compare institutes across various parameters, and help companies in the education space to raise funds. The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development has put up a note to this effect in the Cabinet. A decision is expected in a month's time.A grading for maritime training institutions already exists. The new norm will allow medical, technical, law and agriculture institutions also to be rated. The prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management would be included. More [+]

Govt schools on fresh page: 81,000 new students on rolls
Indian Express, 21 Sep 2009

New Delhi: The Education Department is on a roll, literally. It has enrolled the highest number of students — 81,000 — this year. But the crumbling infrastructure — lack of classrooms, desks, toilets, drinking water facilities and sanitation — is threatening to cut short the dream run. According to figures released by Education department officials, the latest enrollment figure is the “highest in years”. But the lack of infrastructure has put the department under pressure. The challenges listed by the officials in the fifth annual meet of the heads of government schools, veered from lack of classrooms to inadequate number of toilets. “We need at least 2000 additional classrooms this year,” an official said. “If we want to run the schools in double shifts, we would still require at least 1,000 rooms. This is over and above the backlog of 1,500 rooms presently under construction.” More [+]

Village Teacher
Outlook, 28 Sep 2009

Chandigarh girl Monika Talwar knew what she wanted even in school—an MBA. So she “dropped the bomb” when, at 15, she told her father she was not interested in becoming a doctor. A bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA later, she’s with Educomp, an education services company based in Gurgaon. Nearly five years later, she feels she’s close to achieving what she had not accounted for in school—job satisfaction. She oversees Educomp’s school outreach, a public-private partnership that takes computer education to government schools. For four-odd years, this has taken the 26-year-old from one rural school in Haryana to another—there are 716 in the state—and scores of others in Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. More [+]

Cross-Cultural Exchange and Innovations in Education
Mint, 16 Sep 2009

I feel a bit like the American journalist Lincoln Steffens who, after a visit to the Soviet Union, declared, “I have seen the future, and it works.” I got a glimpse of the future of education when I became involved with the Carnegie Hall Global Cultural Exchange programme. In partnership with schools in New Delhi, the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall has set up a programme to connect high school students and teachers from India, Turkey and Mexico with their counterparts in the US.Using state-of-the-art technology, teaching methodology and an integrated curriculum that provides opportunities for guided interactions between Indian students and their peers abroad, Carnegie Hall Cultural Exchange places the musical traditions of each country at the centre of an international dialogue on history and culture. More [+]

Books Face Extinction as Schools go High-Tech
Teacher Magazine, 15 Sep 2009

Hitting the books is becoming a thing of the past, as more schools across the state implement virtual classrooms and equip students with laptops. “If you look at a textbook it’s very static. It’s very convoluted,” said Hopkinton High math teacher Carla Crisafulli, who will post homework assignments to moodle.org and use Jing to create lesson voice-overs. “We’re going to be able to reach out via the Internet and make geometry come alive.”Hopkinton High is piloting a physics course that will be conducted exclusively online, said Principal Alyson Geary. For freshman geometry and junior American literature, students will carry laptops instead of textbooks. The Lila G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester is piloting algebra and science courses that combine classroom and online work this year, said Principal Deb Socia. More [+]

No child left behind: Millennium Development Goal ‘at risk’
www.thecommonwealth.org, 15 Sep 2009

The principle that no child should be deprived of an education has been extolled as an essential development goal for decades. Yet, according to one new study launched this week, major hurdles remain to its fulfillment. Governments first formally committed to universal primary education (UPE) at the United Nations in 1960, setting a deadline of 1980 for its achievement. By 1999, the ambition proving ever elusive, leaders vowed to make it a Millennium Development Goal to be met by 2015. But, according to one of the authors of the new Commonwealth Secretariat study, ‘Maintaining Universal Primary Education: Lessons from Commonwealth Africa’ - launched this week at a major international conference on education and development - as many as “70 nations” remain likely to fall short. More [+]

Ambitious Project ‘Read Malawi’ launched
Reuters, 19 Sep 2009

SAN ANTONIO--(Business Wire)--For the second time in five years, The University of Texas at San Antonio`s College of Education and Human Development (COEHD) has been selected to provide educational materials and teacher training to improve literacy rates of children on the African continent. The three-year, $13 million cooperative agreement between COEHD and the Republic of Malawi is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and is the largest amount of funding COEHD has received to date. USAID provides economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide that supports long-term and equitable economic growth and advances U.S. foreign policy. More [+]

Growth in For-Profit Schools Slowing Down?
Education Week, 15 Sep 2009

A word to for-profit educational management organizations: Someone out there is watching you. Researchers from a small collection of academic groups—the Commercialism in Education and Education Policy Research Units at Arizona State University, the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Western Michigan University College of Education—yesterday published their 11th annual report profiling the profit-making organizations hired to manage charters and other types of public schools across the country. As you probably know, education-management organizations, or EMOs, emerged in the early 1990s as interest grew in market-based school reform proposals. Since the academic group's first report, in 1998, the number of for-profit EMOs profiled by the researchers has soared, growing from 14 to 95 last year. More [+]

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