United States
Private tutoring boom
The usual quiet of summer on US university campuses has been replaced by the hum of lectures, games, conversations in a Babel of languages, the sound of model rockets taking off and the tapping of computer keys. Schools that previously lay fallow for three months of the year are now filling their coffers as well as their buildings with money-generating sports camps, study programmes, corporate training weekends and anything else that pays.
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| US summer school students: hot activity |
Many schools rent their campuses to private companies also. The cosmetics firm Estee Lauder for example, invites employees to a personal and professional development programme at Vassar College, taught in part by professors from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Schools are hesitant to specify the revenues they receive from summer programmes. But at least one, New York University, disclosed that its summer programme for international students generated more than $ 1 million (Rs.4.5 crore) per year.
The hottest activities on campuses this summer are privately run programmes to help students improve their chances of university admission. Several companies lease dormitory, dining hall and classroom space from universities to run the programmes for 16 and 17-year-olds. At the universities of California, Los Angeles and Tufts, students practise the SAT admission test, meet university admissions officials and undergo mock interviews.
Students pay up to $5,970 (Rs.2.7 lakh) depending on the duration of the programme. Anxiety about passing an ever-growing number of assessment tests has created an enormous personal tutoring business, estimated at $4 billion (Rs.18,000 crore) per year, even for children as young as two. The private tutoring industry is expected to grow by 12-15 percent per year, according to Eduventures, a Boston research firm that tracks the economics of private education. Private tutoring companies have seized the opportunity. Kumon, a Japanese concern, has launched a programme for children aged two to four. It has 1,200 tutoring centres in the US.
Kaplan, an America-based firm that has storefront tutoring centres, has doubled the number of students in its programme for four-16-year-olds to 82,000 per year. Of those, a fifth are under seven. Studies have shown that high-quality tutoring can propel a student from the bottom fifth among his peers to the top half.
Greater autonomy for state schools
Chicago’s top state schools are to receive broad new self-management powers, handing them similar freedoms to those enjoyed by America’s burgeoning but controversial charter schools. Measures announced in June will release 85 schools — 15 percent of the city’s total — from education authority control, granting them greater autonomy over what they teach, how they spend funding and run daily operations right down to building maintenance and repairs.
Officials hope that cutting red tape for schools with a proven track record will encourage innovation by local staff who know their school best, rather than having decisions made by bureaucrats trying to find common denominators in widely-varying schools. The new measure will give high-performing schools "entrepreneurial flexibility", while freeing up administrative resources for struggling schools, says Barbara Eason-Watkins, Chicago’s chief education officer. The schools will be able to set their own timetables, order textbooks and train staff, and enjoy greater discretion over how they spend budgets. They must comply with academic standards, "but how they get there will be upto them," says Eason-Watkins.
The schools will have freedoms similar to charter schools, while still enjoying unlimited recourse to authority resources if needed. Publicly-funded but autonomous, charter schools were first set up in America in the 1990s. The idea was to spark fresh ideas and methods particularly for students who were failing to respond to standard educational approaches.
South Korea
Foreign teachers protest discrimination
English language teachers in south korea are to set up a national union to counter a backlash against foreign workers. In May delegates at a conference organised by Asian EFL Journal, attended by some 400 teachers agreed to press ahead with "long overdue" plans to establish a union in order to protect teachers’ rights. The union would be the first of its kind for English language teachers in the country.
An official from the ministry of labour says that any foreigners working in the country legally have the right to unionise. English teachers who work on government education programmes are already entitled to join unions for native Korean teachers, although applying can be a long process.
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| English language teachers in Korea |
The move has been prompted by recent attacks on the profession in Korea. A documentary that portrayed English teachers as lazy and unqualified broadcast on national television earlier this year, coupled with salacious comments about where to meet Korean women discovered on the talkboards of a website specifically for English teachers caused widespread consternation in the local press and sparked an online petition to keep foreigners out of the country.
This was followed in March by the high-profile arrest of two Canadian teachers who were jailed and later deported following a fight outside a bar in Seoul. One of the Canadian teachers was believed to be working in the country illegally. The Korean government has been on a mission to expel illegal foreign workers for some time. Although the justice ministry denies there is a renewed crackdown, there does seem to be a more concerted effort to clean up the ELT (English language teaching) sector, with raids on schools and the arrest of owners and teachers.
Four Korean recruiters were recently fined up to $10,000 (Rs.4.5 lakh) for employing illegal teachers. And in March, police raided 28 English language schools in the sourthern city of Pusan and arrested their owner for employing unqualified teachers who were working in the country on tourist visas.
Official figures put the number of English teachers working legally in Korea at 7,800 but the number of those working without the necessary papers is believed to be significant. Two years ago the Korea Times put the figure at close to 20,000. An increase in the number of hagwon — privately run schools — set up in the country over the past 10 years to meet the growing demand for English language lessons has been partly blamed for the rise in illegal workers. Owners of some of these schools regularly flout labour and immigration laws, turning a blind eye to standards and employing foreigners without visas and in some cases with fake qualifications.
"The sector is totally unregulated, and that’s the problem," says Tom Davidson, who runs the EFL-law.com website, which offers legal advice to English teachers working in Asia. The idea is that everyone should have a recognised Tefl certificate, but (the government) just can’t get it off the ground," he says, adding: "Anyone can set up a school, any time. The owner doesn’t have to know anything about teaching; they just need a licence."
China
Moonlighting ban against teachers
Shanghai has banned senior teachers from moonlighting as textbook compilers or helping to set entrance exams for individual colleges or high schools. Education officials in the city are trying to curb the surfeit of extra-curricular study guides written by teachers to sell to anxious students and parents. They say these guides often set at far too difficult a level, mean parents force their children to spend too much time doing extra academic work at the expense of other activities. Many parents also feel obliged to purchase extra materials, spending more than they can afford.
"Excessive exam-oriented exercise books have seriously burdened school students, and the new regulation is another action taken to ease the burden and create a healthy study environment," the commission says. Publishers often invite senior teachers who have set exams to compile textbooks, hoping the fact they are written by examiners will attract parents.
Teachers who flout the ban will be barred from all city-level exam design, writing and editing textbooks, or giving lectures. They will also be stripped of ‘senior’ status, losing prestige and pay. The commission examined more than 1,500 books available locally and found many "poorly written or duplicating content from other books". "We are worried about the quality of these extra-curricular books, whose content is monotonous and seriously surpasses the normal study-level requirement," says Zhang Fasheng, a researcher with the Shanghai education commission.
The commission’s survey found that nearly half of the maths revision books sold for primary school students are in fact related to the Maths Olympiad, an international maths competition for the brightest students. From September, the commission will begin publishing its own affordable study guides.
Italy
University/ vocational degree choice
Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government is introducing a dual track secondary system separating academic education from vocational training. From September 2006, 14-year-olds will have to choose between five years in an academic environment, leading to the university entrance exam, or four years preparing for a vocational or professional qualification, interspersed with work placements. The vocational sector will be controlled by regional government, while the academic sector will stay with central government.
One consequence of the reform will be to raise the number of years spent in compulsory education or training. Previously, pupils could leave the system after scuola media at age 14 or 15, although most stayed on. Those who now opt for vocational training will have to spend 990 hours in the classroom until the age of 18, as well as doing work placements in local industry from 15.
Presenting the reform, Letizia Moratti, the education minister, underlined the principle of "non irreversibility", by which any pupil wishing to go into higher education after four years of vocational training can stay on for a final year to prepare for the university entrance exam. She claims that success for all pupils is guaranteed, since everyone would come out of the system "either with a diploma or a professional qualification".
But the main teaching unions disagree. The secretary of the largest union, CGIL, says it would create a social divide between young people, while a spokesperson for COBAS (a high-profile union which represents more radical teachers) dismissed the reform as "a way of providing private industry with a free workforce".
Hong Kong
IB-style diploma preference
Hong Kong has decided to abandon its British-influenced exams system in favour of a new International Baccalaureate style diploma. The former British colony, now a Chinese Special Administrative Region, has published its education action plan. It wants to replace the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examinations (equivalent to GCSE) and A-levels, with a three-year diploma.
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| Hong Kong classroom: radically different curriculum |
Pupils will spend three years in junior secondary and three years in senior secondary, ending at age 17-18. This will allow them all full access to secondary education — only 30 percent of pupils take A-levels at the moment. University courses will be extended from three to four years.
Following consultations earlier this year, the new academic structure will be phased in from 2009, a year later than proposed, to give schools and teachers more time to prepare. The curriculum will also be radically different. Students will study four mandatory subjects and two or three electives which can include vocational courses. It will also include the independent enquiry study, similar to the International Bac’s extended essay.
Fifteen to 35 percent of the school day will be devoted to other learning experiences, including moral and civic education, community service, aesthetic, physical and career-related activities. Secretary for education, Prof. Arthur Li Kwok-cheung says there is huge support for the changes, which are a "landmark in our education history". The government will invest HK $7.9 billion (Rs.4,424 crore), compared with HK $ 6.7 billion (Rs.3,752 crore) originally proposed, to meet the preparation costs.
Chris Wardlaw, deputy secretary for education, says the plans would enable Hong Kong to catch up with other countries — its participation rate in senior secondary education is low by international standards. It would also be "leaping ahead" with new approaches to learning, teaching and assessment.
Canada
New retirement package
Mandatory retirement has been abolished in Canada’s largest university and is on the way out in the country’s largest province. From July 1, academics and librarians at the Univesity of Toronto can work past the age of 65 under a deal reached between the university and its faculty association.
As early as autumn next year, all of Ontario’s 12,000 faculty — spread over 18 universities and 24 public colleges — will have the right to choose when to leave, under a legislation introduced recently by the provincial government.
"What is really nice about the current arrangement at Toronto is that it is a package deal," says George Luste, president of the university faculty association. "It makes it easy for people to retire early if they want, it allows people to work beyond 65, and it encourages people who have retired to still be part of the university community," he says.
Six Canadian provinces already protect workers against being forced to quit the workforce at 65: Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Academics fought long and hard to end the practice in Ontario, home to one third of Canada’s population and many of its top-calibre universities. The struggle lost significant momentum when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled by five to two in 1990 that mandatory retirement as practised by universities did not violate civil rights.
At Toronto University, academics who turned 65 before July 1 will still fall under the old rules, but anyone younger can work until they please, provided they continue to meet normal performance standards. "This is a balanced and flexible arrangement that has been arrived at over a long period of time," says interim university president Frank Iacobucci. "This has truly been a historical undertaking."
The full details of Ontario’s bid to abolish mandatory retirement have yet to be worked out. In cases where it can be justified as a bona fide job requirement, such as for firefighters and airline pilots — though not professors — the law will still allow mandatory retirement.
"People are healthier and living longer, so it is unfair to insist that they stop working simply because they’ve turned 65," says Chris Bentley, Ontario labour minister. "Ending mandatory retirement would allow workers to choose when to retire based on lifestyle, circumstance and priorities."
Australia
Private varsity shuts shop
Australia’s first private university set up by a public institution is to close after eight years and losses of at least A$ 20 million (Rs.50 crore). When Alan Gilbert, the University of Melbourne’s former vice-chancellor, launched Melbourne University Private in 1997, he predicted it would generate more than A$ 200 million (Rs.500 crore) a year and attract 10,000 students from Australia and around the globe. But Glyn Davis, his successor at Melbourne, announced in June that the private arm would merge with the parent university and that all students would be able to complete their courses there.
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| Davis (left): failed dream |
Prof. Davis describes MUP as a "brave experiment" that had hastened the introduction of domestic full fee-paying students at Australian universities. But with A$ 20 million already invested, spending more money could not be justified, he says. "As a business enterprise, this has not been as successful as we would like. The point about private institutions is that they live and die by the market, and the market decided." But Prof. Davis credited MUP with influencing federal policy — for example, making it harder for ministers to hold the line against domestic fee-paying students. "The private university has been a major catalyst for change inside the public university," he says.
With more than 3,000 fee-paying Australian students, Melbourne University became the most successful public institution in the private market, says Davis. But that meant the parent university was competing with its own private offshoot. Melbourne’s governing council committed A$ 25 million to the venture and then took out A$250 million bank loan — the largest sum borrowed by any Australian university — to meet the cost of the building project which Prof. Gilbert had expected would be financed by corporations. Although more than a dozen of Australia’s top corporations and Victoria’s state government financed a A$ 250,000 feasibility study, the project failed to attract business community support.
By 2001, MUP had already lost almost A$ 3 million. Prof. Gilbert told a meeting of deans and heads of departments that MUP was unlikely to be commercially viable. Only a merger with one of the university’s other commercial offshoots, a company running English language schools around the world, saved it from financial collapse. Four years later, MUP had only 600 higher-education students enrolled.
But Davis says that shutting the private arm would also affect the federal government’s efforts to involve more private institutions in higher education. "If the federal government wants for-profit private universities then it will have to think about its regulatory framework," he says, adding "we have struggled to run under these conditions."
Egypt
First Chinese university in Middle East
China and Egypt have agreed to set up a university in Cario with classes taught almost entirely in Chinese. The Egyptian Chinese University (ECU), the first institute of its kind in the Middle East, is backed by northeast China’s Liaoning University, which will provide curricula and accreditation.
The university’s infrastructure projects will be the responsibility of Egypt’s International Education Institution. At the signing ceremony Chinese ambassador Wu Sike said: "This agreement will further enrich relations between China and Egypt, which have witnessed steady development in political, economic, cultural and educational fields."
The first ECU undergraduates are expected to enroll in the 2006-07 academic year. Fewer than 1,000 students are expected in 2006. China is an important economic ally for Egypt, as its fifth largest import partner. The establishment of the ECU is part of Egypt’s attempt to encourage more direct foreign investment in the country.
Last October, the Chinese department at Cairo University said it would create more opportunities for Egyptian scholars to study in China. Chinese vice-education minister Zhang Xinsheng says there are further plans to co-operate in higher education.
(Compiled from Times Education Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Guardian)