(An item from the ISHN Member information service) With the global community now debating the purposes and aspects of quality education as part of the 2015-30 Social Development Goals development, an article in Issue #3, 2015 of Comparative Education Review makes a timely point about the lack of a connection between increased student testing and subsequent economic growth. "This article considers the growth of the international testing regime. It discusses sources of growth and empirically examines two related sets of issues: (1) the stability of countries’ achievement scores, and (2) the influence of those national scores on subsequent economic development over different time lags. The article suggests that stability over time and across tests has historically been weak but is increasing in the post-1990 era. In addition, the analysis finds little evidence of macro-level effects of test score performance on subsequent economic growth. Read more>>
0 Comments
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) We have been discussing the value of integrating various health, social and other services to support students in this blog. This week we identified three aspects of the approach recommended by the UCLA school mental health program which focuses on removing barriers to student learning. These include: a policy-oriented overview (Transforming Student and Learning Supports: Developing a Unified, Comprehensive, and Equitable System) an analysis of implementation issues (Processes/Lessons Learned in Facilitating Systemic Transformation towards integrated student services) and a model school board policy (Board Policy for a Unified and Comprehensive System of Learning Supports/Integrated Services) Go to the weekly report for all three items at: http://www.schoolhealthinsider.org/page/Aug+3-9%2C+2015
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #7, 2015 of The Lancet Global Health, written by the Assistant Director of PAHO, the regional office for WHO in the Americas agrees witb the assertion made in the May 2015 issue of that Journal. (ISHN highlighted that earlier article in our weekly report for May 25-31, 2015. We have reposted that item into this blog here) The earlier article " reports on an interdisciplinary analytical review of the SDG process, in which experts in different SDG areas identified potential interactions through a series of interdisciplinary workshops. This process generated a framework that reveals potential conflicts and synergies between goals, and how their interactions might be governed. We noted that this call for integrated system-based responses underlines the need for the global dialogue that ASCD, Education International and ISHN have stimulated in regards to integrating health and social programs within the education systems. The PAHO article notes that "Greater synergies between health and other sectors could be achieved by framing the SDGs in such a way that their attainment requires policy coherence and shared solutions across multiple sectors; that is a Health-in-All-Policies approach" In essence, the educator led dialogue on school health promotion might be summarized with this slogan; a Health in All Policies approach will require that Health is in (actively, with personnel and funding) in all sectors (HiAS). Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in May 2015 Issue of The Lancet Global Health underlines the need and huge challenges in aligning the work on the 17 SD Goals recently adopted by the UN. The article also underlines the need for the global dialogue that ASCD, Education International and ISHN have stimulated in regards to integrating health and social programs within the education systems. The article " reports on an interdisciplinary analytical review of the SDG process, in which experts in different SDG areas identified potential interactions through a series of interdisciplinary workshops. This process generated a framework that reveals potential conflicts and synergies between goals, and how their interactions might be governed. The 17 SDGs are represented in three concentric layers. In the inner layer we find the people-centred goals that aim to deliver individual and collective wellbeing. The wellbeing goals are supported by second-level goals that relate to the production, distribution, and delivery of goods and services including food, energy, clean water, and waste and sanitation services in cities and human settlements (ISHN suggests that equitable and inclusive education systems is better placed here). We call these infrastructure goals to deliver the wellbeing goals and provide a platform for delivering the wellbeing goals. The figure's outer layer contains three natural environment goals; natural resources and public goods in land, ocean, and air, including biodiversity and climate change.In our framework, the middle layer, infrastructure goals, represent a domain for global development goal setting with particularly strong effects on inner-level and outer-level goals. A crucial lack of potential synergies at the level of infrastructure goals is compounded by governance issues at this level. Here decisions are typically taken by powerful elites and technical experts. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) We do not often pay attention to the various companies that supply goods and services to educational systems but one item caught our eye this week. Education Week reported that Pearson, a multi-national education company, had sold the business newspaper Financial Times to a Japanese company so that it could focus solely on its global education strategy. The story noted that "To many in the world of K-12, it might seem that Pearson is already just that focused on education. The Wall Street Journal reported that Pearson generates about 60 percent of its sales in North America, and three-quarters of its revenue from education". ISHN has been hearing more and more about the influence that Pearson has been exerting on the UN discussions on education targets in the revised millennium development goals. We obviously need to listen even more. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Volume 197, 2015 of Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences reports on a small qualitative study of teacher beliefs about school and classroom discipline. Although the study is small, the implications are significant, particularly, if, as we suspect, the views and beliefs of the teachers in this study do not differ greatly from teachers around the world. In the study, 20 teachers from primary and secondary schools were interviewed. Numerous concepts that teachers used to define the meaning of discipline were weighted according to the interviews. Among these concepts, the notions of "order" and "rules" were believed to be far more important to these teachers than other concepts such as ethics, compassion, determination, ability and an interactive process. In the middle ranking, but still far below the importance of order and rules, the concepts of volunteering, self-control, respect and adaptation to life were found. In other words, the traditional teacher beliefs and professional norms about student discipline appear to be well-reflected in this Turkish sample. Order and rules are paramount, the rest is much less important. Our only question is whether these views are consistemt with other teachers around the world. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) A July 15, 2015 news release from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) in England has announced that it will monitor the joint delivery of support services to children and youth. "Joint Targeted Area Inspections (JTAI) are to be introduced from autumn this year by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation. They will specifically examine how well local authorities, health, police and probation services work together in a particular area to safeguard children. The new inspections aim to shine a light on both good and poor practice, identifying examples from which others can learn and helping local agencies to improve. The proposals, set out in a consultation launched today (Wednesday 15 July), will give inspectorates more flexibility and the ability to be responsive to certain areas of interest or concern. Each inspection is to include a ‘deep dive’ element, with the first 6 set to focus on children at risk of sexual exploitation and those missing from home, school or care. Further inspections will look at other issues by theme. The experiences of children and young people are at the heart of the proposed model. Inspectors from across all 4 inspectorates will work in small multi-disciplinary teams jointly tracking and sampling cases to assess the progress and outcomes for children and young people at risk of harm. This will complement the single agency inspections and provide a joined up evaluation of how well the agencies work together to protect children. Under the proposals the final report will include a narrative judgement that clearly sets out how the local partnership and the agencies who are part of it are performing and what they need to do to improve.". Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) With debates about the purposes of schooling now underway in several countries such as England, the US and others, we note that several blogs are adding useful commentaries suggesting that a holistic education, aimed at developing the whole child, are also adding to those debates. Watch these pages for ongoing reporting of the education reform paper in England and the renewal of the Education Act in the US. Both countries are deciding whether health education will be part of their core subjects. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) A number of experts were asked to refine the concept of integrated public health policy in order to move towards better ways of measuring and monitoring this idea that is central to the recent health sector attempts to promote health in all policies and the ISHN-ASCD-EI initiative on integrating health and social programs within education systems. The authors note "While expectations of integrated public health policy (IPHP) are high, assessment is hampered by the concept's ambiguity. This paper aims to clarify IPHP as first step in further measurement development. We invited 237 Dutch experts, 62 of whom generated statements on characteristics of IPHP. Next, 100 experts were invited, 24 of whom sorted the statements into piles according to their perceived similarity and rated the statements on relevance and measurability. The concept map consisted of 97 statements, grouped into 11 clusters and five themes. Core themes were ‘integration’, concerning ‘policy coherence’ and ‘organizing connections’, and ‘health’, concerning ‘positioning health’ and ‘addressing determinants’. Peripheral themes were ‘generic aspects’, ‘capacities’, and ‘goals and setting’, which respectively addressed general notions of integrated policy making, conditions for IPHP, and the variety in manifestations of IPHP. Measurability ratings were low compared to relevance." While this article is an important first step and knowing that it is always risky to comment based only on an abstract, this article raised a flag in that the issues of capacity and setting were relegated to a peripheral status. This dismissal of the real world capacities and powerful conditions based on context seems to run counter other complexity literature suggesting that working within complex environments will always require both capacity and a firm understanding of the circumstances. Read more>>
(An item from the ISHN Member information service) An article in Issue #2, 2015 of Journal of Development Effectiveness examines the uphill struggle of aid effectiveness caused by the proliferation and fragmentation of aid projects. The authors suggest that " Aid fragmentation is one of the hindrances to aid effectiveness. As a main contributing factor, proliferated aids from the donor side have been pointed out. In this regard, we first examine the main factors for the donors’ proliferation and its links with the recipients’ fragmentation, which have been asked in several studies, but are revisited again with a comprehensive up-to-date data set. We also examine whether a recipient country is indeed going to get worse off through fragmented aid or, more directly, by proliferated aid. The main findings are (1) donors tend to proliferate their aid disbursement as their aid budget increases; (2) the recipients’ fragmentation is mainly due to the donors’ proliferation, and this has been prevalent since the early stage of aid history; (3) non-monotonicity is shown between aid fragmentation and growth, given that economies of scale is dominant in the incipient stage of a recipient country’s growth, but turns out to affect negatively in the long run; (4) therefore, the donors’ proliferation will eventually harm the recipients’ growth. Read more>>
|
Welcome to our
|