AKF Protem President, Mr. Okon Isong, was in Nigeria in October to work towards the incorporation of AKF Nigeria, the Nigerian branch of the organization.

Mr. Isong used the opportunity of the visit to meet with officials of the Federal Ministry of Education and those of some of its parastatals, including the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), the Education Tax Fund (ETF) and the Nigerian Educational Research & Development Council (NERDC). He also visited some primary and secondary schools at Abuja for needs assessment.

Mr. Isong identified and decried the prevalence of poor quality education and the attendant lack of capacity to plan and implement development programmes in most developing countries as the greatest crisis and threat to humanity's survival, now and in the future.

It was obvious, he added, that poor quality education and its primary off-shoot, lack of capacity, constituted the primary obstacle to combating problems such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, terrorism, corruption, environmental degradation, excruciating poverty and misrule worldwide.

While acknowledging the contributions so far made by national and world bodies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, USAID, to promote and expand access to purpose-driven quality education worldwide, Mr. Isong regretted that sufficient attention was yet to be paid to the education sector at local, national, regional and international levels. He urged for an urgent review of the situation, stressing the need to make the provision of purpose-education quality education the number one priority everywhere.

AKF, he said, was established to help in this regard, particularly at the primary and secondary education levels in Africa. Mr. Isong said the programs of the Foundation included the promotion of reading culture via the collection and widespread free distribution of books, general literature and educational texts, in needy countries; helping to build and equip standard science and computer laboratories in schools and communities; helping update the professional skills of all categories of educational staff; advocacy on and review of education policies to uphold the provision of and access to purpose-driven quality education to all.

In their response, the Nigerian officials welcomed the AKF initiative and expressed their willingness to work with the Foundation. They presented to Mr. Isong some official publications on Nigeria's education policies, including recommendations made by the Joint Consultative Committee on Education (JCCE) from 1995 till date and a copy of a document entitled, "Crisis: The State of the Nigerian Educational System and the Agenda for Reform" being a presentation made, on 17 August 2006, by Education Minister, Ms. Oby Ezekwesili, to the National Council on Education.

The document, among other things, recalls that UNICEF, in its 1999 report on " State of the World's Children" stated that 4 million Nigerian children, at that time, had no access to basic education, and that majority of those that were "lucky" to enter schools were given sub-standard education. The document adds that when UNICEF made this assertion, there were about 48, 242 primary schools (with 16,796, 078 students in public schools and 1, 965, 517 in private schools) in Nigeria. The country also had 7,104 secondary schools with 4,448,981 students.

The presentation by the Education Minister also states that between 1999 and 2004, the average success rate for students who enrolled for the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board Examinations (JAMB) was 10.42%. It further informs that in 2005, 1.5 million students took the examination, only 200,000 passed, a success rate of just 13.3%. This means that 6 out of every 7 students that wrote the examination failed.

The document continues that in the same 2005, universities in Nigeria had the capacity to admit only 147,000 students, an indication that even if all the students had passed the examination, the universities could have accommodated only 9.8%.

AKF to Visit Liberia, Sierra Leone, Others

Pending funds availability, AKF is planning to visit Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and other countries of Africa just emerging from conflict for on-the-spot needs assessment in the education sector. The AKF team plans to meet with national and local officials and civil society to explore what assistance/interventions could be made, particularly at primary and high school levels, to facilitate the affected countries transition from crises to sustainable development.

Upcoming Events

By JENNIFER MEDINA

New York Times

January 21, 2008

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests.

The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Other school systems, including those in Dallas and Houston as well as in the whole state of Tennessee, are also using student performance and improvement as factors in evaluating teachers.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has known about the experiment for months, but has not been told which schools are involved, because the Education Department has promised those principals confidentiality.

Randi Weingarten, the union president, said she had grave reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even publicized it. She and the city disagree over whether such moves would be allowed under the contract.

“There is no way that any of this current data could actually, fairly, honestly or with any integrity be used to isolate the contributions of an individual teacher,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If one permitted this, it would be one of the worst decisions of my professional life.”

New York invited principals from hundreds of elementary and middle schools with sufficient annual testing data to participate in the program, which will produce an elaborate stream of data on 2,500 teachers.

In 140 schools — a tenth of the roughly 1,400 in the system — teachers are being measured on how many students in their classes meet basic progress goals, how much student performance grows each year, and how that improvement compares with the performance of similar students with other teachers.

In another 140 schools, principals are being asked to make subjective evaluations of roughly the same number of teachers so officials can see if the two systems produce widely disparate results. New York City schools employ roughly 77,000 teachers. In all 280 schools, the principals agreed to participate in the program.

Deputy Chancellor Cerf said that how students performed on tests would not be the only factor considered in any system to rate teachers. All decisions will include personal circumstances and experiences, he said, but the point will be to put a focus on whether or not students are improving.

“This isn’t about how hard we try,” Mr. Cerf said. “This is about however you got here, are your students learning?”

Ms. Weingarten said the system was not needed. “Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective,” she said. “These tests were never intended and have never been validated for the use of evaluating teachers.”

The experiment is in line with the city’s increasing use of standardized test scores to measure whether students are improving, and to judge school quality. A new bonus program for teachers and principals, as well as the letter grading system for schools unveiled last fall, are all linked to improvement in scores. Nationally, too, school systems are increasingly relying on these measures to judge schools.

Virtually all education experts agree that finding high-quality teachers is critical to improving student learning, particularly in high-poverty urban areas, where good teachers are usually more difficult to find. Recent research has found that the best teachers can help struggling students catch up to more advanced students within three years.

But experts are grappling with how to determine what makes a good teacher. Neither graduate programs in education schools nor previous academic records are reliable predictors, they say. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that districts place a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom, which typically means one who has completed a certification program, but this, too, is not necessarily a good indicator of quality.

“It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard, who is conducting several research projects on teacher quality in New York City, and who is involved in the new effort.

Mr. Kane said there was little evidence that teachers with the “right paper qualifications” were any more effective than those without them. “But most school districts spend very little time trying to assess how good teachers are in their first couple of years, when it is most important,” he said.

Nationwide, more than 95 percent of teachers receive tenure within their first three years of teaching, according to some studies. And once teachers receive tenure, it is extremely difficult to have them removed from classrooms.

In some sense, New York’s effort to judge teachers partly on their students’ improvement is a logical extension of the grading system for schools that was unveiled last fall, although officials adamantly say they have no plans to assign letter grades to individual teachers.

“I don’t think anyone here would embrace the formulaic use of even the most sophisticated instrument — you get tenure if this, you don’t get tenure if that,” Mr. Cerf said.

He added that the new effort was just one of several ways in which the city was exploring how to evaluate and improve teacher quality. In recent months, city officials have begun training new lawyers to help principals navigate the considerable red tape required to remove inadequate teachers.

They have increased recruiting efforts to attract talented teachers to hard-to-staff schools. And they are allowing schools to earn merit bonus pools to distribute to teachers based on test scores.

“This should simply be one more way to think about things,” said Frank A. Cimino, the principal of P.S. 193 in Brooklyn, who said he was participating in the experiment. “It is going to tell you some things you don’t know, but it will miss the other things that go on in a classroom.”

William Sanders, a researcher in North Carolina who was one of the first to begin evaluating teachers and schools based on student test score improvements, said that while such a system could be used to make broad judgments, it was difficult to use it with precision enough to find differences among teachers who are simply average.

“Can you distinguish the top teachers? Yes,” Mr. Sanders said. “Can you distinguish the bottom teachers? The answer is yes, too. But it would be risky to make decisions using information at the classroom level for teachers who are just in the middle. You might miss a lot that way.”

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors.

Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

The two-page report for each teacher examines information both from one year and over three years. The information also compares the teacher with all other teachers in the city, and with teachers who have similar classrooms and experience levels. The second part of the report measures how well a teacher does with students with different skill levels, showing, for example, whether the teacher seems to work well with struggling students.

Mr. Cerf said officials expected to decide by the “early summer” whether they would use the analysis to evaluate individual teachers for tenure or other decisions, and if so, how they would do so. Such a decision would undoubtedly open up a legal battle with the teacher’s union.

On top of the three R's, add biology and chemistry to what New Jersey's high school students will soon need to know to graduate.

In a move to raise the bar for science education throughout the state, high school tests for specific sciences, starting with biology, will be introduced in the spring of 2008, state officials said. These tests come on the heels of a general science test to be given for the first time to 11th graders next month as part of the High School Proficiency Assessment.

The new requirements represent the state's latest bid to improve math and science education in high school, part of a national push spurred by study after study showing American students lagging behind their international peers in those subjects.

 "This helps us move to a more rigorous curriculum for students, and focus on the disciplines of science and not just a general science curriculum," said Jay Doolan, the acting assistant education commissioner. "The tests will be much more in-depth, with more breadth of content, and certainly should raise the rigor."

Though applauded by many, the announcement this month from Education Commissioner Lucille Davy also raised a lot of questions among educators. Testing on specific sciences is a big departure from the state's current one-time high school exam given in the junior year.

 For one, it is likely to force every school to require students to take certain science courses. The state already requires at least three years of high school science, but a state survey of local requirements in 2005 found just two-thirds of high schools required biology, only a third demanded chemistry, and just one in seven high schools required physics.

And while a vast majority of college-bound students take a biology class, for example, that's not all kids in all schools, and some educators question whether it is even appropriate for the state to make specific subjects universal.

"This is a lot of testing, and with this we're really talking about a state curriculum," said Daniel Fishbein, superintendent of Glen Ridge schools. "To me, the community should have a say in what they feel is important."

This spring's introduction of science to the HSPA -- which high school students must pass to graduate -- had been in the works for several years and has been field tested for the last three years. The state already has a science section in its fourth- and eighth-grade tests, and under the federal No Child Left Behind act, science must be tested at least once in high school.

In recent years, more states, including Maryland, Kentucky and Virginia, have pushed to improve science education by mandating exams on specific sciences. New York uses such tests for its Regents diploma. In New Jersey, similar end-of-course exams also could be mandated in the math disciplines, starting with algebra. A test for Algebra II is expected to be piloted in several districts in 2008, education officials said.

Doolan conceded such tests are "new territory for us," and said the exams would be phased in over time. "We're obviously going to have to provide more information (to schools) on what the content will be," he said, adding any changes in standards will need the approval of the state Board of Education. It's unclear how big a challenge it will be for students and teachers. The current science tests in the lower grades are the least rigorous of the statewide assessments, with about 80 percent passing in both fourth and eighth grades.

But biology and chemistry are hardly staples. At Hackettstown High School, for instance, the classes are expected for the college-bound students, but not all take them. In an 11th-grade chemistry class yesterday, junior Cara Whitehead said she is very interested in the sciences as she looks to college and maybe a career in dentistry.

"I definitely think science is important; there are things you'll need to know in life to get by," said Cara, 16. "But I don't know if it should be required for every kid. I do think you should take the class, but not necessarily have to pass a (state) test on it."

Reaction to the new tests has been mixed among science educators. The 11th-grade test to be taken next month already has been criticized because it focuses mostly on earth and life sciences, with less emphasis on chemistry and physics.

"Instead of preparing our kids for college, we were going backwards, and just teaching them earth science over and over," said Robert Goodman, the science chair at Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro and last year's state Teacher of the Year.

There are higher hopes for the specific science tests to be introduced next year, with some saying they could bring a consistency to how courses are taught.

"Biology is a good place to start," said Letizia Pantoliano, the director of curriculum in Clifton schools. "It's a subject held in high esteem, and most students should take it. ... Something like this will help get high schools all on the same page."

The state's past introduction of new tests has not always been smooth, and local educators warned the true verdict will come as the exams are developed and the pencil hits the paper.