Teaching Max

The have been a lot of moves in Canada, the USA, and the UK within recent governments to privatise education systems, and while many teachers have been known to be very negative towards these changes, the pros and cons of such a move are far from being clear cut. Often times these changes are generally a mixed bag, which often seems to lead to improvements in average results, higher levels of teacher accountability, more community involvement and greater school choice for parents. Clearly, all of this is very attractive to parents but on the flip side, they will also have to contend with higher levels of corruption, a greater spread of investment into education; usually meaning better results for the wealthy and worse for the poor and unengaged. (more…)

A study was recently conducted by MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into the effects devices like Ipads and Laptops and access to the internet, have on the results students get in the classroom, which shows the general trend of worse results among students who use them in the classroom.

In the study, 726 undergraduates were split into three different groups randomly; one acting as the control with no access to devices, another one where they were allowed unrestricted access to them, and finally one where there was restricted access. The study took place in the West Point naval academy in the USA, where student ranking is determined mostly by exam results and competition is purposely kept at a very high level, so people were very motivated to succeed and ignore distractions. (more…)

Eton, the famous independent boarding school for boys in Berkshire, England, has just recently announced that they will begin to provide online tuition to students from China. This will be done through a partnership with a number of schools in China, with the aim being to teach them a “modern leadership programme”, which will teach the students a number of skills they won’t get through the standard Chinese education programme.

They have said that the cost will be £700, and the programme will be supplementing their existing education, like after school tutoring – but online and with some of the best educators in the world. The funds raised from this will in turn be used to pay for bursaries for student’s education.

One of the reasons why Eton has decided to do this was apparently to avoid needing to set up an overseas franchise, which in the view of a director at Eton could end up damaging their brand (and cost a lot of money).

Their choice to do this is on the back of a number of universities and colleges, some of the best in the world, announcing that they would also be setting up franchises and/or online courses so that people from around the world could benefit. While many other educational institutes have announced similar schemes as Eton, they are the first well-known school to do so, i.e not a university of college.

The OECD is an international economic think tank which regularly publishes a list rankings countries by how effective their schooling is at achieving results for their students. Just recently they’ve come out with a new list containing their findings (based upon achievements solely in maths and sciences), with the top twelve as follows:

Singapore
Hong Kong
South Korea
Japan
Taiwan
Kinland
Estonia
Switzerland
Netherlands
Canada
Poland
Vietnam

They study the quality of education and its links to economic growth, and have also constructed another interesting list for countries of how much economic growth could be expected by achieving basic levels of education for all 15 year olds. The list is as follows:

Ghana – 3881%
South Africa – 2624%
Honduras – 2016%
Morocco – 1951%
Oman – 1427%
Botswana – 1303%
Macedonia – 1137%
Peru – 1076%
Qatar – 1029%
Saudi Arabia – 975%
Albania – 929%
Colombia – 910%

Other notable countries who didn’t make the top 12 include the UK at rank 20 and the USA at rank 28.

News

The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Privatised Education System

Study from MIT Shows us that Allowing Digital Devices into the Classroom Harms Results

Now Eton is Providing Online Tuition

Recent OECD Publication on Rankings of Education Systems