Tag: Education

Educational opportunities for children in Khayelitsha and townships like it are vanishingly slim. According to official figures, only about 40 percent of young South Africans nationwide obtain any qualification beyond grade nine.

Concerns over the unintended consequences of teacher evaluations are neither new nor news.

Mumbai is India’s most populous city and the fourth most populous city in the world. Improving the school system and reliably measuring and increasing student achievement will be – to put it mildly — no small tasks.

Are we seeing a third wave in data-driven education? I believe we are. As it momentum, those of us helping to shape it— educators, entrepreneurs, foundations, technologists, and others — should all work to ensure commitment to a process that gives teachers’ voices equal billing.

What keeps me awake at night is excitement—the knowledge that I’m part of a dream that’s bigger than my own: To design new South African education models and build a vibrant network of high-impact schools that serve the nations’ most vulnerable as a matter of course.

Dell Scholars, on average, have an ACT score of 19 and an SAT of 1400. (The maximum scores for these tests are 36 and 2400, respectively.) Judging from those test scores alone, you might not have much hope that these students could be successful in college.

Starting next year, more than 1,300 additional students in DC will have access to Tier 1 public schools. The method of ranking that enabled this is not rocket science. The authorizing board determines if the school is performing academically and if parents want to send their children there. If the answer is yes to both questions, then the board will likely vote to increase enrollment.

In the long term, the entire South African education system will require substantial overhaul. But in the near term, universities have the opportunity to implement simple solutions to act as a stopgap to three key challenges that lead many current students to drop out early.

I hear the argument that there’s a problem with tying funding to students all the time, and all I can think is, “How odd.” Why? Because the implicit counter-argument is that adults working in the school district are the ones who should be funded.

My mom cut grape vines. The summer before my freshmen year, she was diagnosed with cancer. I could have given up and focused entirely on what was happening at home, or I could have given up and blamed my defeat on cancer, but I didn't. I still did all of my work.