• Shiprock/ Central Consolidated School District Board Position to be Filled 

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS

 

Shiprock/ Central Consolidated School District Board Position to be Filled

 

Cibola Beacon

October 2, 2012

 

One of the most embattled areas in the Central Consolidated School District is going to have a new representative on the board of education, again.

 

The board is expected to decide tonight which of the three candidates it will choose for the District 4 seat, the Kirtland-area seat previously held by Dr. Chad Wood.

 

Wood, a family practice physician in Shiprock, resigned late last month because of a family move to Utah.

 

Wood, who held the position for a year, replaced Bernice Benally, who passed away unexpectedly in September 2011.

 

The board at 7 p.m. tonight will hold a special meeting in the Shiprock CCSD boardroom to determine who the third person to take over the position in slightly more than a year will be.

 

The selected candidate will serve the board until February 2013, when the position will be up for election by voters.

 

The candidates include:

• Myron Begay,
• Christina Aspaas, and
• Randy Jensen, who in February was banned from district property for threatening members of the board.

The district will allow Jensen to attend the special meeting, according to district spokesman James Preminger.

 

Jensen, who is taking legal action against the district for violation of his civil rights, said the district is trying to make amends and never had the authority in the first place to keep him from the property.

 

"They have lifted the trespassing order because they have wronged me," said Jensen, of Kirtland. "They have no choice."

 

Jensen, who's publicly denounced the current board and Superintendent Don Levinski, said he may not be able to show at the meeting tonight based on legal counsel.

 

Regardless of whether he is chosen to fill the District 4 seat, he will continue to advocate for children's rights, he said, calling the task a "triple handful."

 

Jensen is the husband of former CCSD Assistant Superintendent Sharon Jensen, and also is the owner of Interstate Recovery and Towing in Kirtland.

 

The lesser known candidates in the running are Begay and Aspaas.

 

Begay, of Nenahnezad, and Aspaas, of Fruitland, both are concerned parents.

 

"I support children's education, and I believe all children are entitled to a quality education," said Begay, whose three-year-old daughter is not yet enrolled in the district but will be in future years.

 

Begay attended schools within the district until graduating from Kirtland Central High School, after which he discontinued his education.

 

Aspaas is an electrician for BHP Billiton, a volunteer for United Way, and a single parent.

 

"Frankly, this position will be a new endeavor for me, however I am eager to broaden my experiences and apply my education as a board member," said Aspaas in her letter of interest.

 

The deadline for letters of interest for the position was Friday. The board expects to select a candidate during an open session at the meeting tonight.

 

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Washington DC/ Education Secretary Arne Duncan Outlines Progress and Challenges Ahead

"Moving Forward with Focus" is Theme of National Press Club Speech

 

US Department of Education Release [Ed.gov]

October 2, 2012

 

Education Secretary Arne Duncan told an audience at the National Press Club today that the country is more focused on improving education than ever before and saluted teachers, parents, students and community leaders for embracing real change in a challenging economy.

• "Today, we are asking much more of ourselves and much more of each other - and everyone is stepping up - parents, teachers, administrators, community leaders - and, of course, students," Duncan said. He highlighted ongoing reform activity across the entire educational continuum: early learning, K-12, higher education and adult education.

Duncan and his senior staff just completed a cross-country bus tour, "Education Drives America," that took them to 12 states for more than 100 separate events. In his remarks, the Secretary explicitly linked education with the economy saying, "People everywhere understand that the path to the middle class runs right through our classrooms."

 

Duncan discussed major education reforms underway, including:

• College and career-ready standards in 45 states and D.C.
• State-designed accountability systems in 33 states serving more than 60 percent of students; more local decision-making around interventions in low-performing schools.
• Nearly 10 million students attending college with Pell grants - up from 6 million; rising college enrollment and completion.
• Greater labor-management collaboration around issues like teacher and principal evaluation, compensation, and career pathways for teachers.
• Duncan acknowledged budget pressures affecting states and districts across the country and highlighted the administration's effort to protect 400,000 education jobs through the Recovery Act and the American Jobs Act. He also raised concerns about cuts to education in Congress.

"The choice facing the country is pretty clear: some people see education as an expense government can cut to help balance our budgets. The President sees education as an investment in our future," Duncan said.

 

Vowing to "double down on what we know is working," Duncan outlined several educational priorities for the country:

• High quality early education for more low-income children.
• State-driven accountability that demands progress for all kids.
• More local decision-making and fewer mandates from Washington.
• More support for principals and teachers to translate high standards into practice.
• More personalization in the classroom and greater student engagement.
• A stronger partnership between teachers and technology.
• A new generation of math and science teachers recruited from America's top universities.
• Passage of the DREAM Act.
• Reforming career education programs in high schools and community colleges.
• Closing the skills gap for millions of unemployed or underemployed adults.
• Reforming and simplifying student aid to help drive college affordability and completion.

Duncan closed his remarks with an urgent appeal for bipartisan commitment to education reform, saying: "America must unite behind the cause of public education and recognize that the solutions don't come from one party or one ideology. They come from all of us - you and me - challenging ourselves and holding ourselves accountable. We don't have a minute to waste."

 

Note to editors: Secretary Duncan's remarks as prepared for delivery are posted online at: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/moving-forward-staying-focused. They will be updated later with the final speech. Note that delivered remarks may differ from the prepared version.

 

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Washington DC/ Educators Craft Own Math E-Books for Common Core

 

By Erik W. Robelen

Education Week,  [Edweek.org]

September 26, 2012 [posted online 10/3/12]

 

Concerned about what they see as a dearth of instructional materials aligned with the Common Core State Standards in math, several educators in Utah, with support from the state office of education, are taking matters into their own hands. They're in the early stages of developing a set of e-textbooks for high school math that will be freely available.

 

In fact, two-thirds of the first e-book, for 9th graders, is already online for schools to use, with the rest expected later this fall.

• "There was not a textbook out there that we felt reflected the common core," said Janet M. Sutorius, a math teacher at Juab High School in Nephi, Utah, who is a co-author. "We felt like the textbook companies were just reorganizing the chapters of their old books."She added:
• "We wanted to teach our students in a different way, to make sense of the mathematics and make connections."

Finding strong materials has been especially challenging, those developing the e-textbooks say, because Utah has adopted a statewide policy of using an "integrated" model of high school math under the common core, dispensing with the traditional Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 pathway in favor of blending math subjects in each course.

 

So, Utah public schools are grappling not only with new standards, but also a reconfigured set of courses the state calls Secondary Mathematics I, II, and III. (In some Utah districts, 9th grade is taught in junior high school.)

 

A Task-Based Approach

Ms. Sutorius is joined on the writing team by another classroom teacher, two academic officials in the Salt Lake City district, and a professor of math education at Brigham Young University.

 

The authors describe the enterprise, dubbed the Mathematics Vision Project, as embracing a "task-based" approach to fostering math proficiency that is closely aligned with the common-core standards.

 

Diana Suddreth, the STEM director for Utah's state education agency, said she sees great promise in the project, which the authors began before the state stepped in to offer financial and other assistance.

 

The need is urgent, she said, given that Utah is now implementing the math standards.

• "To leave teachers without any resources is something we can't do," Ms. Suddreth said. "[They're] writing what we hope to be a coherent and rigorous and focused set of textbooks."

It's up to districts to decide whether or not they want to use the materials. Ms. Suddreth notes that about one-quarter of Utah's 41 school systems have reported using the first e-textbook so far.

 

The math project is part of a broader push in Utah to promote greater use of online, "open source" materials that meet the needs of Utah educators and help districts save money.

• In January, the state education agency announced plans to help produce and support open textbooks in several areas, including high school math, English/language arts, and science, expanding on an earlier pilot project.
• The state office will encourage districts and schools statewide to consider using the textbooks.
• A separate, state-supported effort with the University of Utah, meanwhile, is crafting e-textbooks for middle school math.

With Utah now pursuing an integrated approach to high school math under the common core, Ms. Suddreth said it's been difficult to find appropriate materials.

 

"The publishers were giving us what I call these crazy-quilt textbooks," she said.

 

Jay Diskey, the executive director of the Association of American Publishers' schools division, said the industry is working hard to deliver aligned materials.

• "Publishers large and small are doing everything they can to meet the market need that the common core presents," he said. "In some cases, that means creating whole new things, in others it may mean looking at what they have and making significant adjustments."

He added: "If a group of Utah educators says, 'We didn't see the sort of things that we need,' I certainly take them at their word, but perhaps they didn't look as far and wide as they should have."

 

Although the common-core math standards are organized by grade level in grades K-8, at high school, they are organized by conceptual categories, such as algebra and geometry.

• An appendix added later to the standards documents outlines four model pathways for states to consider, including a "traditional" approach consisting of two algebra courses and geometry (with some data, probability, and statistics included in each).
• Another approach suggested, and common in other countries, is an "integrated" sequence of math courses, each of which blends material across math-content areas.

Integrated Math

Utah and West Virginia appear to be the only states that have adopted as statewide policy the integrated approach, state officials and experts say, though in many places there is no state policy so districts may use an integrated model.

 

A statewide task force in Utah decided on the integrated approach after examining the issue carefully, Ms. Suddreth said.

 

"When you think about mathematics and how people use it, we use it in an integrated way," she said. "We don't think, 'Now I'm going to do some algebra, or now I'm going to do some geometry.' "

 

Ms. Suddreth concedes that the e-textbooks being designed by the Mathematics Vision Project may be seen as unorthodox.

• "Everybody kind of has a picture in their mind of what a textbook is: some explanatory text, some problems, and homework," Ms. Suddreth said. "We've replaced the explanatory text with math tasks. ... The book is really a guide to help teachers take students through learning experiences."
• The teacher's edition does include explanatory text for each task, helping teachers understand the task's goal and the particular standards addressed, and suggesting whole-class and small-group activities. The student edition has homework assignments for each task.
• The authors say there's plenty of places students may go online for explanations of particular concepts.

In an introduction, the authors explain their approach, saying it is "neither purely constructivist nor purely traditional." The materials aim to get students engaged in problem-solving, guided by teachers, to promote math proficiency. Each unit, they write, has been designed and sequenced with "rich" tasks that develop concepts in the standards, with careful attention to the way math knowledge emerges.

 

Also, there will be regular and "honors" versions of each book.

• "We wanted materials that were task-based so that students were ... engaged in the practices and making sense of the mathematics for themselves," said Barbara B. Kuehl, a co-author and the director of academic services for the 24,000-student Salt Lake City district.

Ms. Sutorius from Juab High School said one challenge has been to generate the materials rapidly.

 

"We're just running barely faster than [districts] are," she said. "We work full time, so we're working evenings and weekends, but there was just such a desperate need for the textbook."

 

An Impressive List

William G. McCallum, a math professor at the University of Arizona who was a lead author of the common math standards, said he was not prepared to comment on the content of the e-textbooks being developed, but that he's encouraged to hear of such projects.

• "Anything that is trying a different way of writing textbooks is a good idea," he said, so long as the materials are well-designed and adhere to the standards. He said he was especially encouraged that the effort appears aimed at tailoring materials to the state's needs.
• "There is a temptation to recycle old material and arrange it in different ways," he said.

Mr. Diskey from the publishers' group said he has no objection to educators creating their own e-textbooks, but he cautioned that it's not easy work.

 

"Developing a core instructional program, particularly one that meets the needs of all types of learners, is a very difficult task," he said. "There is scope and sequence, standards alignment, research, editorial development. All of these things come into play."

 

Ms. Sutorius acknowledged that the e-textbooks may not have universal appeal: "Not everyone is going to like it."

 

She added: "There are lessons I've struggled through, and they need to be improved." But as an e-book, she notes, it's easy to revise.

 

Brigham Young University plans to conduct research on the project, tackling such questions as whether the tasks are accessible to students and spark the intended student discourse. Later research will try to gauge the effect of the curriculum on student achievement.

 

Travis L. Lemon, another co-author and a math teacher at American Fork Junior High School, in North American Fork, Utah, said he's pleased with his classroom experience using the material so far.

• "The students have a lot of opportunity to problem-solve, make sense of problems, listen to other students' reasoning, and refine their own thinking," he said, "and we solidify those understandings."

But student reaction varies.

 

"Some students respond much better than others," he said. "If they've been encouraged in the past to persist and dig in and make sense of things, they're more willing and apt to do that now. The ones that aren't, it's a little more challenging."

 

The first e-textbook is being used by 9th graders in the 7,300-student Uintah district in Vernal, Utah, said Keith D. McMullin, a math instructional coach for the system.

 

"It's been very positive," he said of the district's experience so far with the material, especially after teachers attended a workshop with two of the authors. "I was excited, and all the teachers that were there were excited."

 

He commended the teacher's edition for its thoroughness in guiding instruction, and said that, overall, the emphasis on tasks in the e-textbook brings the math to life for students and covers a lot of concepts.

 

"If you look at the tasks that are in there and really list all the things you can teach, ... it's a very impressive list," he said. "You're always building on what students learn the day before."

 

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Washington DC/ Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wants Digital Textbooks

 

By Josh Lederman

Associated Press

Denver Post

October 2, 2012

 

Worried your kids spend too much time with their faces buried in a computer screen? Their schoolwork may soon depend on it.

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Tuesday for the nation to move as fast as possible away from printed textbooks and toward digital ones. "Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete," he declared.

It's not just a matter of keeping up with the times, Duncan said in remarks to the National Press Club. It's about keeping up with other countries whose students are leaving their American counterparts in the dust.

 

South Korea, which consistently outperforms the U.S. when it comes to educational outcomes, is moving far faster than the U.S. in adopting digital learning environments.

• One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea has set a goal to go fully digital with its textbooks by 2015.

"The world is changing," Duncan said. "This has to be where we go as a country."

 

The transition to digital involves much more than scanning books and uploading them to computers, tablet devices or e-readers. Proponents describe a comprehensive shift to immersive, online learning experiences that engage students in a way a textbook never could.

• A student studying algebra might click to watch a video clip explaining a new concept or property. If they get stuck, interactive help features could figure out the problem. Personalized quizzes ensure they're not missing anything-and if they are, bring them up to speed before they move on to the next lesson. Social networking allows students to interact with teachers and each other even when school isn't in session.
• Using digital textbooks, schools can save money on hard copies and get updated material to students more quickly. School districts may also be able to pick and choose their curriculum buffet-style. A district might choose one publisher's top-notch chapter on Shakespeare, but follow it with another publisher's section on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."

But adopting digital textbooks isn't as easy as a directive from Washington. States set their own processes for selecting and purchasing textbooks that match their needs.

 

Over the last two years, at least 22 states have taken major strides toward digital textbooks, said Douglas Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association.

• Until recently, Levin said, states struggled to collaborate because each had its own curricular standards, a particular burden for smaller states.
• That burden has been eased now that 48 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards, a set of uniform benchmarks for math and reading.

"There are opportunities for the federal government to encourage states and districts not to reinvent the wheel," Levin said.

• A school district in Huntsville, Ala., launched an effort over the summer to become the first district to transition fully to digital textbooks. To do that, the district must first ensure every student has either a laptop or a tablet computer.
• In California, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a pair of bills in September aiming to make his state a national leader in electronic college textbooks.
• Still, many districts, already buckling from diminished budgets, don't have the bandwidth or the equipment to make digital materials available to every student. That's created a new challenge for the educational publishing industry as it works to market products to district across the technological spectrum.

"We haven't produced anything that's print-only in over three years. One hundred percent of what we have is available to school districts electronically," said Vineet Madan, senior vice president of new ventures for McGraw-Hill Education.

 

A central tension in the movement toward digital materials is what it means for textbook publishers whose profits rely on replacing old, worn-out textbooks with new ones. Yet to be seen is whether textbooks, like music, will become easy to steal or copy without payment, or whether the industry will find new ways to make money off of teaching materials.

 

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El Paso TX/ School District Rebuilds After Fraudulent Testing Practices by Administrators

 

By Juan Carlos Llorca

Huffington Post           

October 2, 2012

 

 During his sophomore year, Jose Avalos was urged by a principal to drop out of high school. The next year, his brother was told to do the same after entering the 10th grade. A third Avalos brother shared the same fate in 2009.

 

Administrators at Bowie High School cited excessive tardiness in their efforts to remove the siblings.

• But now the brothers suspect they were targeted for an entirely different reason: The district was trying to push out hundreds of low-performing sophomores to prevent them from taking accountability tests.
• The scheme was designed to help El Paso schools raise academic standards, qualify for more federal money and ensure the superintendent got hefty bonuses.

"I thought I was going crazy. I even doubted my sons," said the boys' mother, Grisel Avalos. She said she tried several times to keep her sons in class, but district officials "were on the side of the teachers and the principal."

 

Three years after the youngest of the Avalos brothers dropped out, the former superintendent faces prison time, state officials are strictly monitoring the schools and the district is trying to contact ousted students to help them complete their education.

• "A few people did a lot of damage," interim Superintendent Kenneth George said. "Now we want to make sure these things never happen again."

The idea to cast out the weakest sophomores originated with former Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia, who pleaded guilty to fraud in a case that could put him behind bars for up to 3 1/2 years. He's scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

• After being hired in 2006, Garcia soon began implementing a plan with several other administrators that included pre-testing 10th-graders to identify those who were likely to fail standardized tests. He even asked an employee to photograph students crossing the border so they could be forced out on the grounds that they were living in Mexico and not within the district.
• Garcia "was looking for `bad kids,'" said Mark Mendoza, the district official who reluctantly photographed students crossing a border bridge during three days in 2008.

"I told him: `Is this a residence check? Or are you asking me to get rid of kids that will not perform well?'" Mendoza recalled. "It was the most uncomfortable thing in the world for me. I threw the game. I tried to find all the reasons possible to kill this idea."

• In the short term, the strategy worked. Test scores improved at eight of 11 high schools. The district's overall rating improved from "academically acceptable" in 2005 to "recognized" in 2010 - the second-highest rating possible.
• But the achievements came amid startling enrollment declines for sophomores.

Austin High School, for instance, had 615 freshmen in 2005, but that number had dropped 40 percent by the time accountability tests were given the following school year. With the next batch of 571 freshmen, only about half were still enrolled by the time the tests were administered.

• Students with bad grades, low attendance or limited English proficiency would be held in the ninth grade and then promoted to the 11th grade.
• Or if they were old enough, they might be told to seek other options such as attending a charter school or obtaining their GED elsewhere.
• Many of them had recently transferred from nearby Juarez, Mexico.

The whole idea, said former state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, was to make those students "disappear" so they would not be counted among the students who were tested.

 

Other large districts have been ensnared in scandals to raise test scores, most recently in Atlanta, where educators gave answers to students or changed answers after tests were completed. But none has been so brazen as to cast off low-scoring students.

 

In June, Garcia admitted defrauding the Texas Education Agency and the U.S. Department of Education in his efforts to secure $56,500 in performance bonuses and federal funding for the district. His lawyers did not return repeated requests for comment.

 

At Garcia's plea hearing, prosecutor Debra Kanof said the former superintendent instructed employees "to do anything they could" to make it appear that students were making adequate yearly progress as defined by the No Child Left Behind act.

• Court documents indicate at least six other people helped Garcia organize the scheme. The FBI has said it is still investigating.
• Johnnie Vega, an assistant principal at Bowie High, admitted his participation and provided information to the FBI. "At the time, I wish I would have known how serious this was going to be," Vega said. "I regret not having said no."

Bowie, one of El Paso's oldest high schools, was on the brink of being shut down after years of low performance.

 

"When grades improved, they gave us these really nice polo shirts. Mine is brand new in my closet, I didn't want to wear it," he added. "All my career as an educator I felt like I made a difference, except for that year."

 

Shapleigh was first alerted by parents who came to his office to complain about their children being dropped from El Paso schools.

 

When he looked closer at Bowie, he found that student enrollment from ninth to 10th grade dropped by 55 percent in 2007 - the year after Garcia was hired.

 

In 2010, the Texas Education Agency had cleared Garcia of allegations brought by Shapleigh. But in late 2011, the El Paso Times filed a Freedom of Information request for correspondence between the federal Education Department and the school district. When the attorney general ruled that the records must be released, the district acknowledged the scandal.

 

State officials soon placed the district on probation, named a monitor to oversee it and said the schools had shown "utter disregard" for student needs.

 

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said the agency closed its initial investigation after accounting for most of the students who were pushed out of high school.

 

Putting the TEA in charge of a solution to the El Paso problems was "like putting the fox in charge of the chickens," said Shapleigh, who is now collecting signatures to demand the resignation of the trustees, overhaul the district's transparency policies and obtain restitution for students.

 

Meanwhile, the district is trying to find students who were thrown out to offer academic, as well as counseling, tutoring and social services.

 

For those who were booted out of class, the wounds run deep.

• "They took away my high school, my time," said Cesar Diaz, who was told to drop out after the school claimed it had proof he was living in Mexico. "I wanted to study in the U.S. because I'm a U.S. citizen. My future is in the United States."

Diaz was born in Aurora, Ill., but moved to Ciudad Juarez when he was a child. His grandmother, who lives in El Paso, became his tutor, and he moved in with her so he could have a U.S. address.

• As for the Avalos brothers, they want to see Garcia in prison and to move on with their lives. Roger Avalos, now 21, is seeking his GED while working at a cowboy boot factory.

"Justice would be getting my high school diploma, a picture with the cap and gown," he said.

 

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Miami FL/ OPINION: Education Gambit Needs Players

 

By Andres Oppenheimer

The Miami Herald

October 3, 2012  

 

While the speeches by President Obama, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew the biggest headlines at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, there was a major event that went almost unnoticed: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's launch of a plan to put education at the center of the world's political agenda.

 

Ban's initiative, called Education First, could have been by far the most important event of the General Assembly, but it's likely to end up as the biggest missed opportunity in recent history to improve world education standards and reduce poverty. Before we get to what's wrong with it, and how it should be fixed, let's look at what the plan is all about.

 

Ban announced the formal start of the $1.5 billion global initiative to improve education standards at a Sept. 26 ceremony.

• Several countries - including Denmark, Australia, South Africa and Brazil - were appointed as "leaders" of the plan and will champion the initiative in their respective regions.
• In addition, several corporate foundations such as the Western Union Foundation and the MasterCard Foundation have pledged to support the project.

"It's probably the first really high-level campaign that is being supported by the U.N. secretary general himself, rather than just one particular U.N. agency or government," UNICEF's global chief for education, Susan Durston, told me. "It's the highest level of advocacy we could have hoped for."

 

The idea of launching a global plan to improve education standards couldn't be more timely.

• "In our knowledge-based world, education is the single best investment countries can make toward building prosperous, healthy and equitable societies," Ban said in his introduction of Education First.
• The plan's top priorities will be putting every child in school, improving the quality of learning, and promoting values such as peace and environmental responsibility.

Education First will "rally together a broad spectrum of actors" over the next five years to achieve that goal, Ban said. The No. 1 actor must be governments, followed in descending order by donor nations, teachers, families, students, civil society, multilateral organizations such as U.N. agencies, the business community, academia and the media.

• "There is no substitute for national political leadership, policy and resources," the Education First mission statement says, referring to the governments' role in improving education standards.

My opinion: The problem with Education First is that it believes that governments will make it their priority to improve education standards.

 

They won't for the simple reason that political leaders think in electoral time frames whereas investments in teacher training and other key tasks to raise education standards pay off in 15 or 20 years.

 

It wasn't a coincidence that so few heads of state attended Education First's launch.

 

Unless there is a huge social pressure from the bottom to improve education standards - like we are seeing now in Chile - very few governments, no matter how well intentioned they are, will invest heavily in long-term education plans. They may invest in school buildings that can be inaugurated before the next election, but few will prioritize long-term investments in teacher training and other tasks that don't lend themselves to a presidential photo opportunity.

 

Education First should take its lead from what happened in Brazil, where business leaders, media owners, entertainers and sports stars teamed up to create Todos Pela Educacao (All for Education), a powerful group that set concrete and measurable goals to improve education standards over the next decade, and then launched a massive propaganda campaign to place education at the top of people's priorities.

 

Once education became a national priority, the government listened and ended up adopting the group's entire education improvement plan while claiming it as its own creation.

 

In order to make the new U.N. plan work, it should turn its list of key actors upside down. Instead of relying primarily on governments, it should first team up with big media companies, multinational firms, Hollywood stars and soccer champions to help create the social pressure that will move governments to invest in long-term educational goals.

 

Otherwise, without pressure from the bottom billions, Education First will be one more concoction of international bureaucrats that's doomed to fail.