Vol. teacher III - IDEB of the States

      The IDEB(Indice de desenvolvimento da educação Básica) is a indicator calculated in the student`s performance in the INEP assessment and in the students`s to pass rate, measured from two to two years in the scale of 0 to 10. Schools from all parts of Brazil are assessed, publics and privates.

     Nowadays with ENEM required to enter in the public universities, all Brazilians students having to take part in the unificated selection system using their ENEM`s grade, will be essential to have a good public school system giving the students from the states well assessed more chance to achieve the grade required to a place in the public university or to get a prouni schoolarship. Now the competition is national, doing the students from negleted schools to concern about their problems.

    The result of the IDEB 2009 is the following:

         Public State Schools.  

             1° to 4° série.            5° to 8° série.               3° série. Ensino médio.       

            1°  MG  5,8.               1°  SP  4,3.                   1° PR 3,9.                           
             2°  SP  5,4.                 2°  SC  4,2.                  2° SC 3,7.
             3°  DF  5,4.                3°  MT  4,2.                  3° RO 3,7.                         
             4°  PR  5,2.                4°  PR  4,1.                   4° SP 3,6.
             5°  SC  5,0.                5°  MG  4,1.                  5° RS 3,6                          
             6°  ES  5,0                 6°  AC  4,1.                   6° MG 3,6

                          OVERALL    RESULT.

                              1°  MG  13,5.                               For more information access:

                              2°  SP  13,3.                                 .sistemasideb.inep.gov.br

                              3°  PR  13,2.

Vol. teacher II - Comment. Educat. Articles - part V

       I felt that when I wrote about the benefits of the increase of tertiary enrollment rate, there was a concern about the excess of graduates, but I think this increase should be in certain professional fields where there is a shortage of graduates, to the government be up to identify these fields and make a effort to balance demand and supply in the labor market.  For example, everybody knows that there is a shortage of doctors in the countryside, another field that now there is a great demand, because lower prices in the air fares, is in the aviation system. Because of presalt and new discoveries of gas fields, there must be a higher demand in the petroleum and gas industry soon.
      Would be a huge injustice, if a country with a high unemployment/subemployment like our to let  having enough professional to meet the demand, would be a huge injustice with the youngters and the country as a whole. We can not let this happen.

Vol. teacher II - Comment. Educat. Articles - part IV

        I would like to inform that The British teacher Oenone Crossley-Holland from The Times report has written a book about her experience in the NGO Teach First, a British equivalent to Teach for America, the name of the book is ¨ Hands Up¨.
       The data of  the tertiary enrollment rate is from 2005, now in 2010, this rate should be increased, because there was a expansion in the public universities since the REUNI, and also the number of private universities, including with the online graduation, but I should think not to be much.
       This rate in the 1990`s years was around 10% and have been increasing since the end of the last decade when was created many private universities. Nowadays, differently from what happened in the past, there are more universitary students in the private sector than the public sector.

Vol. Teacher II - Commentary of Educational Articles - part III

       I would like to add more advantages from a higher investment in education, besides that already said in the previous reports. Actually there are not many persons studying in tertiary education in Brazil, like there are in other countries, mainly a country with a trend growth like our, after all, that is why they put us in the called ¨BRIC¨, the emerging countries with potential to become a superpower this century. A higher percentage of the population well educated will result in lower inequality, the improvement of the skilled labour broaden the possibilities of development through improvement of products and productivity with higher gains to workers, enterprises and societies in general, because with a higher net of incomes there will be more investment and growth, consequently there will be less unemployment, less crime, less poverty and also more dignity, citizenship and respect to the human rights and the constitution.  Now I will add the data from UNESCO, published in Atlas Collection at National Geographic, Brazilian Edition 2008.
  Tertiary education enrollment rate. From one of lowest to one of highest percentage of total.

  Brazil 17%                                               Argentina 48%
  Paraguai 17%                                           Italy 50%
  Mexico 21%                                            Portugal 51%
  Turkey 24%                                             Poland 55%
  Colombia 24%                                         Canada 59%
  Cuba 25%                                                U.K. 60%
  Panama 35%                                            Spain 60%
  Bolivia 35%                                              Russia 64%
  Chile 38%                                                 U.S.A. 72%
  Japan 48%                                                South Korea 78%

Vol. Teacher II - Commentary of Educational Articles - part II

          In this second part, I would like to tell a little about the history of education in Brazil.

  The first L.D.B.( lei de diretrizes e bases) of the national education sanctioned in 1961 became compulsory the elementary school indeed, because in 1937, was established this level as being free and compulsory but, omited the resources for its application.

         The second L.D.B., sanctioned in 1971 became compulsory the former 1º grau.

         The third L.D.B. the current law, sanctioned in 1996, structured this way the education system

  Basic education.               Infant education  -  no compulsory.

          Fundamental education  -  compulsory.

          Secondary education  -  no compulsory, but trending for compulsority. Nowadays is lacking to clarify this. Yetstill is no compulsory, but there is project of law requiring it.

        Higher education  -  no compulsory.

        The third L.D.B. put compulsory for both sides in Fundamental education, this is, the government has to create places when there are not enough places for all children and teenagers, and no one can stay out of school in this level, so all parents must enroll their children. This is their duty.

Vol. Teacher. II - Commentary of Educational Articles

      In this first series of educational reports. I would like to comment one thing, that is commom to each one, they emphasize the worries that many countries are having with the quality of education in order to have a more competitive economy in this globalised age.

      We can see that Brazilian educational background was neglected, only in 1990s decade when was created ¨Bolsa-educação¨ and the fundamental school became compulsory, was when the children enrollment in the basic education increased.

      Rich countries are worried also, the U.S.A. and U.K. are always trying to do something in order to have better students  or to attract them in order to become good professionals to keep  and to innovate its advanced technologies and in this way to maintain its higher gains in the world trade.

The Dark Side of Globalization.

    This report was published in Economist.com in May29th2008, this is a summary. The title is above.

       Jobs come, but they may soon go again.  A decade ago, Samorin, a small town in Slovakia, was one of many good places in which to watch the effect of globalisation. Workers, trade unions and politicians mourned factories moving east. But, as a European official explain, such shifts were fully expected: offshoring¨ was the whole idea of enlargement of the E.U.¨. The process, though wrenching to some, made the European Union as a whole more competitive and spread the benefits of global trade to every corner of Europe.  Like its neighbours, Slovakia has seen wages rising fast as new jobs arrived and many of its own people headed west, but rising labour costs are only part of a more complicated story.

      But, things have moved on in Samorin, this town has already lost a factory to offshoring. Samsonite, an American luggage-maker closed its plant in 2006, shedding all 350 staff and shifting production to China.

    The big test will come if or when growth rates slow and pay fall in real terms. Companies with strong trade unions, have already seen strike over pay.   Samorin is a witness to the way that globalisation is fragmenting as supply break into ever smaller parts, sending jobs in all directions. The E.U. restructuring monitor, an E.U. outfit that tracks globalisation, has analysed about dozen cases of offshoring from new members of the E.U.

    Gunter Verheugen, E.U. comissioner for enterprise and industry, has been touring some of the new member countries, urging governments to prepare for rising labour costs. The newcomers`success was based on three things, he says: "Cheap labour, skilled and motivated workers and existing industrial base".          Now costs are rising but productivity is growing very slowly, from a low base. The newcomers face the same problem as Spain and Portugal did on entry: Relying too heavy on foreign investors to bring technologies and jobs. In the long term, if they can not compete on costs, they have to compete on quality and innovation.

Correa`s Curriculum

        This report was published in the Economist.com, on August, 20th 2009.   This is a summary.   The title is above.

       The president seeks to improve ailing  schools and universities. Education reforms in Ecuador, promoted by President Rafael Correa, have led to protests and tear-gas on the streets. The teachers union and the students federation are furious at proposals to sack bad teachers and universities account better for the $2.3 billion the government spends on them.

      Ecuador`s schools are poor even by South America`s generally low standards. Although  almost all of its children enroll in primary education, fewer  than two-thirds make it to secondary school.  He has, since coming to office in January 2007, spend around $280m repairing school and building new ones. But it is not just about spending more money. Mr. Correa wants to supervise more closely how the education budget is spent, and to improve  the quality and consistency of teaching.

       Early in his first term, applications for teaching jobs were set a voluntary test of reading proficiency and logic. Just 4%  of those taking the logic test passed it. The government is now making  tests compulsory.Those who flunk them will be offered a year`s training. Those who fail a second time face the sack. The reforms seem highly popular except, among the teachers. A teacher in quito complain that coercion is the wrong way to go about reforming. Others grumble at their meagre pay.The government is promising   pay rises but, it intend to link  them to performance.

       Ecuador`s  universities are also having to shape-up. Low-quality ones will be shut, while state-funded  ones will have to account  publicy for the $490m a year they receive.                                                    

Teach First, Cry Later

   Article published in the Timesonline.co.uk, on August 25,2009 and was written by Damian Whitworth. This is a summary and the title comes above.

      During her second year as a teacher in an inner secondary school, Oenone crossley sat to a man at a dinner party who had quit as a teacher after less than a year to join the Army, he was sent to Iraq, an experience that he described as easier than teaching. The man was exaggeranting, she says now, but adds that in Iraq, ¨maybe you do not have that demoralisation and the personal attack that you have in the classroom.  She says that Teach First warned her and other recruits that they would experience extreme highs and lows in schools, but I had never experienced the hard where you feel just kind of utterly destroyed.

       She describes an enviroment where even those who behave find the odds against them in their chaotic home lives. This was bought home to her in the most sobering fashion, when one of her school student was stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend.

     One of her most depressing abservations is that students could not understand why she was a teacher, they thought I was capable of a better job, a better job, in their opinion, being almost everything bar emptying dustbins. They see teachers being battered by students day in, day out and not receiving any respect from them. It is a weird paradox that these teenagers are obsessed by the idea of being shown respect, but fail to show any to teachers.

      During her second year, struggling with exaustion and stress, Crossley started to see a therapist. She looked around at the other teachers and saw some who were¨visibly frazzled¨, others ¨had found a way of working within the system so they could function, I realised I did not want to do it¨.

     She was taken a job at another school in south London. One of the criticisms of her previous school is that the boundaries were not consistent when it came to behaviour and there were few sanctions for unruliness. A lot of forms were filled in, but there were not enough detentions or other follow-up actions once students were removed from classes.

      One of the biggest problem is that you can not teach 30 kids. Her new school is trying to combat this by giving the teachers more hours with the students. The idea is to find a middle way between primary school, where teachers get to know a class very well and secondary school, where they may get a pupil for two or three hours a week. ¨It is not impossible to give any student a good education. You just have to get the conditions right¨, she says.

Still a lot to learn.

      This report was published  in Economist.com in June 4th 2009. The title is above. This is a summary.

      Brazil`s woeful schools, more than perhaps anything else, are what hold it back.They are improving, but too slowly. When comes to the quality of schools, it falls far short even of many other developing countries  despite heavy spending on education.

      In the OECD`s worldwide tests of pupils`s abilities in reading, maths and science. Brazil is near the bottom. Until the 1970s, South Korea was about as prosperous as Brazil but, helped by its superior school system, it has leapt ahead and now has around four times the national income per head.

      Brazil began its education late. When the country was a Portuguese colony even the elite has little access to education at home. In 1930 just one in five children went to school.

     Cash transfer to poor families, conditional on their children attending school, became generous and were    enrolled together with other programmes. Thanks  to this programmes 97%  of children aged 7-14 now have access to schooling and attendance is good. The lack of improving schooling falls to state and municipal governments. They face many problems, but two standing out.

     First Brazil suffers from teacher`s truancy. Teachers enjoy a right to five days` absence a year, but some take many more. On a bad day in a bad school in bad states, teachers absenteeism can reach 30%.

      Second, too many  pupils repeat whole schools years over and over and after, lots os children drop out early. Just 42% complete high school. Improving the quality of all school so that more children pass would lead to a market increase in the amount of money available to each pupil. To acomplish this Brazil needs  qualified teachers who are in short supply. Many have two or three different jobs and complaint  that conditions are intimidating and the pay is low.

      Jonathan Hannay, who runs support for children at risk, a local charity, and has four children in Diadema area, says things have improved in the past year, if only because teachers and pupils now work from matching sets of teaching manuals and exercises books. Such small  changes can make a difference. But, if it is ever to live up to its potencial. Brazil needs to keeping reforming schools bearing down on the teachers union and spending more on basic education.

Lessons from Locke.

    This report was published in Newsweek at August 2008, and was written by Donna Foote, former Newsweek correspondent, author  of ¨Relentless Pursuit, a year in the trenches with Teach for America¨,    published by Knop in April 2008. This is a summary and the title is above.

     TFA is not only the postgrad destinations of choice for many of America`s top college seniors, it`s also a magnet for reform-minded  philanthropists. Despite a battered economy, TFA is on target to raise $110 million in 2008, a 40% hike over the previous year. The number of applicants has spiked to a record high, now 25,000 college senior compete for the privilege of taking one of the toughest jobs on earth.

    This summer 3,700 corps members who were carefully culled for their  leadership skills, underwent an intensive five-week crash course in teaching. In a few weeks, they will begin their two-year classroom commitments. They will be assigned to school like Locke high school in Watts, LA, where I spent my year as an embed. At Locke, a school  hemmed  in by competing gangs, 2% of ninth graders  are proficient in algebra, 11% read at grade level. Too many can`t read at all. I learned that when a friend  asked   me to visit the school  months earlier. As I sat in her classroom , she enunciated  the word ¨cat¨. Her embarrassed ninth graders reluctantly repeated the exercise. It was excruciating to watch. When I realized that Locke would be a training site  for TFA, I wondered: What could be learned about how we educate our most impoverished students. Lessons emerged on a daily basis. Some of the most important: The American  system of education  is broken. America has been wrestling with the problem of declining student achievement ever since 1983, when  the government issued the report ¨A nation at risk¨,  which warned  of a rising tide of mediocrity, that threatened our country`s future. Twenty-five years on, the tide is in. At Locke, 1,000 ninth graders were enrolled in 2001, only 30  were eligible to apply to a California state campus. The impact an uneducated populace has on the integrity of the country`s social fabric and the health of the economy can not be underestimated.

     We have not effective system to attract, train, retain and promote high-caliber candidates for our schools. Today`s teachers score in the lowest quartile of college grads. But the truth is, up to half of all the country`s teachers bail within five years. Low pay, low status, low satisfaction undoubtelly drive many out. The transformation of teaching into a financially  rewarding profession  with high standards of admission and accountability, would go a long way toward establishing staff stability.

Low marks

This report was published in the Economist.com at 12 April 2007. This is a summary and the title is:

                            

                                         LOW   MARKS.

       Education is still letting the country down.

       Brazil came dead last in maths and fourth from the bottom in reading tests administered in 40 countries by the OECD. Working-age brazilians  have  an average of 4.1 years of schooling, compared with six in China. This is the biggest obstacle to Brazilians ambitions.

       To be fair, herculean progress has already been made. Little more than a decade ago some 17% of children aged  7-14 did not go to school. That changed in the 1990s when the federal government started    distributing money to states and municipalities on the basis of enrollment in primary school.

       Brazil spends 4.3% of GDP on public education. Much of the money is wasted. Brazil is among the world champion in grade repetition. Undertrained, overstretched teachers know other way of controlling their classroom. Starting, salaries for teachers are low, which deters good candidates, encouragement  and incentives are both in short supply. In some places the school system is plagued by absences for medical reasons. And students spend an average of only three hours a day in class.

       Worry about Brazil`s lagging education system is becoming more widespread. A gaggle of enterprises and NGOs banded together last year to form ¨Everyone for education¨. a moviment to push for better results.Global competition is obliging enterprises to adopt international quality standards. Which  in turn demand a workforce more educated.

       Fundef, the federal fund that financed the expansion of primary education in poorer states, has been turn to Fundeb, which covers pre-school and high school as well.

       State and local initiatives also seem to be making a difference. Seven of the ten highest scoring  school    districts in the state of São Paulo had a private company  COC, to manage their classroom. In COC run schools teachers attend monthy training sessions, are constant evaluated and learn how to deal with problems children.

VOLUNTEER TEACHER - Why I Create this Blog

          In the last five years and half, I have written summaries of reports from some online newspapers and magazines, sometimes about education, sometimes about Brazil`s economy or other important subjects and when I wanted go deep in some issue I does a commentary as well, always doing this in my email, this is a good way that  I found to practice English, to learn more about those subjects and to advertise my private English classes. Usually I send these reports to few persons that I know have some interest  to improve their English and would like to know more about these issues. But I do not know how and neither why, but I felt that these reports and my commentaries turn out in some way publics and become famous, how if it were in a blog, so I thought why not to have my own blog to publicize the reports that have something to teach, something to inspire educators, students and all society to this important issues of this blog. It is a good way to democratize and spread the information and to strengthen the own democracy and citizenship. I will begin with a series of reports and after a series of commentaries or reports written by me.I hope you enjoy.