A woman named Asha, 19 years old on that New Year’s Day in 1991, and her family were amongst those swallowed up by Somalia’s swirling black hole. Like most of Somalia’s young women, she was uneducated, married, and already the mother of two sons. As the fog of war engulfed Mogadishu, she and her family decided to stay, rather than move away. As often happens in tribal conflicts, Asha encouraged her husband to fight for their tribe’s honor and dignity. After all, that’s a woman’s role in Somalia.

Shortly after joining the fight, Asha’s husband was killed, another casualty of the civil war. His death created three more casualties; Asha and her two sons, left without a father/husband to survive on their own. Instead of fleeing Mogadishu, Asha decided to stay there, while her sons have become warriors and potential future casualties of war.

With no particular skills or work experience, Asha, like most Somali women, was a stay at home mom, while her husband was the bread winner. While marriage and raising families is certainly encouraged in any society, it has become equally important for young women to seek higher education in many countries of the world…but…not in Somalia.

It is time for this to change.

If Asha had been able to seek an education, her sons might likewise have carried schoolbooks instead of AK47s, which they’ve been doing now for four years. Even today, there are exceptions to Asha and 99% of her countrywomen, and Asha Geele Diiriye, a Minister of Women’s Affairs in Puntland, a regional state of Somalia. In December of 2008, she initiated a meeting in order to persuade a group of rival presidential candidates from engaging in war. Armed to the teeth, they could easily have used battle instead of ballots to settle their differences.

Diiriye asked that they engage in a civil political discourse, and to respect the outcome of planned elections. As a result of that meeting, the candidates held a joint conference and publically announced they would set aside their differences and respect the election results. Diiriye’s direct involvement, telling the candidates, “You can respectfully disagree, but do not resort to violence and respect the outcome of the election,” had turned the tide. She spoke…..they listened.

Had 19-year-old Asha been given the opportunity of education, perhaps her two sons would have been influenced by a speech similar to Diiriye’s. Or, her whole family may have moved away as the fog of war rolled in, and her husband would be alive today. Mothers are the foundation of every family. It is known that behind many successful men, there is a strong woman. For instance, President Barack Obama is married to a remarkable and intelligent woman, Michelle Obama. Michelle holds degrees from two Ivy League universities and is an asset to both the President and their family. Also, she is a role model to women worldwide.

There is an African proverb that says, “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual, but, if you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

For the sake of Somalia, let the education begin.

M. J. Farah is an independent analyst, lecturer, writer, entrepreneur, and he currently reside in the Unites States.

 

Washington Post Staff Writer 
Friday, October 9, 2009; 3:47 PM

At Reed, math scores on the District’s Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) standardized test have risen substantially since teachers began practicing lesson study — proficiency rates have more than doubled since 2007 to 74 percent. However, the school was one of six in the District with high concentrations of erasures on the 2008 tests. Principal Dayo Akinsheye attributed the high number of erasures to students having two hours to complete each 20-minute test, leaving plenty of time to check work and change answers.

Education researchers James Stigler and James Hiebert first popularized lesson study in the United States in 1999, when they published a book called “The Teaching Gap,”in which they compared education in cultures from around the globe. They described a Japanese system in which teachers are constantly examining and tweaking their practice rather than attempting wholesale reform, as has failed so many times in America.

“The evidence is pretty good that the only kind of improvements in teaching that are going to be sustainable are going to be small, incremental improvements,” Stigler said in an interview.

Lesson study is a way to organize those small improvements. Teachers work together on a “research lesson,” sometimes over the course of an entire year. They identify an objective, come up with a way to teach it and then script students’ anticipated misunderstandings and the teacher’s response to those misunderstandings.

One member of the group teaches the lesson in front of observers, who are instructed to record students’ responses and reactions. They don’t evaluate the individual teacher; the lesson has been created by a group, after all, and the purpose is to discover how it is received by students.

“We’re looking at the child and the thinking that you see evolving as the lesson progresses,” said Akinsheye, who is a member of the lesson study group. “That takes away a lot of the concern that teachers have.”

After a post-lesson discussion among the teacher and observers about what worked and what didn’t, the group revises and re-teaches.

G

What eventually bleeds from discrete research lessons into everyday practice, teachers said, is noticing whether students get it – learning to ask questions that elicit what a student is thinking, where that student is going wrong and therefore what it will take to correct her misconception.

“In the U.S., frequently students are trying to figure out what is in the teacher’s mind. What answer is the teacher looking for?” said Patsy Wang-Iverson, a consultant who has studied and written about the Japanese method for a decade and who now acts as the Reed teachers’ mentor. “In Japan, teachers are trying to figure out what is in the student’s mind — how they’re thinking, what they’re thinking and the source of their misunderstanding.”

At Reed, lesson study was spurred by Akinsheye, a former math resource teacher. Three years ago, she sent two teachers to observe a research lesson in Patterson, N.J., at the first public American school to adopt lesson study in the late ’90s. When they returned wanting to try it at Reed, Akinsheye got a $47,000 grant from the school system and hired Wang-Iverson. This year, the program is expanding to include teachers in every grade.

The culture at Reed has changed as a result of the weekly meetings, said faculty. Teachers don’t feel isolated as they face the daunting challenge of raising achievement in a school where 94 percent of the 319 students are poor and two-thirds struggle with English. They chat at the Xerox machine about partitive division. Bethel called Gomez after 10 p.m. one night last week to talk about multiplication arrays.

“You don’t stay in a corner there wondering, how do I teach this?” said Elinor Stephens, a fourth-grade teacher.

Lesson study also bolsters a teacher’s own grasp of math concepts during a stage in the research lesson cycle called kyozaikenkyu, or intensive learning. Teachers at Reed have assigned one another math homework. Last spring, they all took an online math course through M.I.T., and in addition to deepening their content knowledge, they learned humility.

“We all had gaps in our understanding of elementary mathematics,” said Bethel.

The larger benefit of lesson study, proponents say, is to push the conversation about improving teaching beyond luring more highly qualified people into schools to helping teachers grow once they have landed in the classroom.

“If we believe all students can learn, then the corollary to that is all teachers can improve,” said Wang-Iverson. “That is at the heart of lesson study.”

Source: Washington Post

Mark Hornbeck AND Marisa Schultz / The Detroit News

Lansing – Michigan lawmakers at long last have passed a school aid budget that slashes per pupil spending by $165 — and while district officials aren’t happy, at least they finally know where they stand.

When Gov. Jennifer Granholm signs the spending bill, as aides say she will, school districts will have the last piece of their financial puzzle in place more than three months after their budget year began.

The school aid cut amounts to 2.3 percent, far less than reductions suffered by other areas of the state budget. A House-Senate conference committee initially approved a $218 per pupil reduction, but legislative leaders found $100 million in revenue. Lawmakers are trying to close a $2.8 billion hole in the 2010 fiscal year budget.

“They say they are going to amputate your arm and they only take off your hand and then you feel better,” said Craig Fiegel, superintendent of Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, where they’ll use cash reserves and possibly make mid-year cuts to make up for the loss.

The bill requires districts to offer at least 165 days of instruction in 2010-11 and 170 days in 2011-12. Students now must attend school 1,098 hours a year, but it was up to districts how many days they attended. Districts also must report detailed financial information online.

David Martell, executive director of Michigan School Business Officials, said the feeling among his membership is that “it’s about time something was put in place.”

“The cut is not as low as we’d like it, but in this general economic environment, it could be a lot worse,” he said.

The pain will be felt especially hard in the 90 districts that have don’t have enough money to make up a $165 per-student cut from the state.

One more problem is that extra money for schools depends on the House and Senate passing revenue bills, which is always a risky proposition. “It’s not done yet,” Martell said.

“All options are on the table in terms of how we are going to deal with this loss,” said Hildy Corbett, spokeswoman for Utica Community Schools which has had to reduce its staff by 384 people and its budget by $42 million over seven years.

At Highland Park schools, the district has had to close two schools and a career academy in recent years and laid off workers. The reduction would mean more personnel cuts.

“It’s devastating,” Superintendent Arthur Carter said. “We still want to offer a first-class education to our students but it becomes increasingly difficult.”

Detroit and other districts figured into their budgets a $110 per pupil cut. The extra loss could mean more layoffs at Detroit Public Schools, which shed more than 2,400 employees this year, spokesman Steve Wasko said.

Some districts have posted their monthly check register online, but the legislation calls for schools to include detailed financial records, including expenditure pie charts, compensation breakdowns, lobbying fees, links to labor agreements, health care plans and audits.

“I find it interesting that they take money away from you and then ask you to do more,” Fiegel said.

Added Carter: “It’s more work for us, but in order to gain the support of parents I think we ought to give them the information they need.”

Other cuts in the school aid bill include:

• A 20 percent reduction for intermediate schools, which provide special education, vocational education and other services to local districts. That’s down from the 44 percent cut initially proposed, but it amounts to $16.3 million.

• An $8.9 million cut in early childhood programs.

• A 10 percent, or $3 million cut in vocational education and an 8.3 percent cut, or $2 million in adult education.

• Elimination of $8 million for Granholm’s small high schools program.

With a resolution near for this year, school officials have concerns about next year’s budget, when the amount of federal stimulus money, at $450 million, is cut in half and the economic turnaround likely will not have taken hold.

“Next year, we face the potential of an even bigger hole in the budget — one that cannot be filled with cuts alone,” said Iris Salters, president of the Michigan Education Association.

Ibrahim Khan, who has also memorised the Qur’an, said he was inspired by his grandfather, a historian who recently passed away, and encouraged by his parents to study from an early age dueto the importance Islam puts on gaining knowledge. 

“Caring for my bedridden grandfather, and seeing the patience with which he put up with the intense pain, showed me that there were much harder things in life than exams,” Khan told The Muslim News, who attended the Macmillan Academy in Middlesbrough. 

He is now taking a gap year after securing an offer to study Philosophy Politics and Economics at Brasenose College, Oxford University. During his time out, he is to get the first book of his WW3 trilogy published, do investigative journalism across the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, learn three languages, and start a business. 

Ibrahim said that he was “very pleased” with his results although “slightly disappointed with the B in Arabic” being one of three subjects, along with Urdu and Religious Studious, which were self-taught. “I merely did my best, then I left the rest up to God to decide.” 

Coming from the north-east, of Pakistani origin and being a Muslim, he believed were statistically three of the worst performing groups in education that he had to overcome. “I think my success shows that if you keep your aspirations high, you can achieve anything, whatever your background,” he said. 

Until recently, Ibrahim was also a member of the ‘Young Muslims Advisory Group’, who advise government ministers on tackling violent extremism. He also regularly plays cricket for his local club, having also played at county level. 

Despite his performance, he remained critical of the education system, saying that he studied physics fulltime for two years, and religious studies for roughly only ten hours, “yet I have an A in both which will be treated the same by universities.” Most modern teaching techniques “merely disguise the fundamental learning process of memorisation, which is no longer encouraged per se.” 

Ibrahim said that the difficulty of A levels needed to be standardised, while the new grade was a “ridiculous idea” instead of making exams harder. “So many people are getting top grades these days that it is hard to stand out. The quality of A levels has gone down, so I decided to stand out with the quantity.”

Rebekah Kim

In 1981, Eriko Amino received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in comparative literature, writing a dissertation on medieval French literature. When all goes well, a doctorate marks the beginning of an academic career, but for Amino it marked the end. “When I graduated,” she says, “many of us did not find anything other than adjunct positions.” While a friend secured a teaching position in South Dakota, Amino did not want to relocate to a place far from a metropolitan center. Unable to find a teaching position near a city, Amino took a job at a bank. “The decision,” she says, “wasn’t a happy one, but a practical one.”

Almost 30 years later, Amino reflects, graduate school students face similar obstacles. “I have a friend, who is in his 30s, who received his Ph.D. in English from Stanford,” Amino says. “He sent out 40 letters in the hopes of finding an academic position and got no acknowledgment of a single one.”

In recent months, universities have cut faculty costs and imposed hiring freezes to ease the impact of the recession. The Modern Language Association’s university job listings in English, literature, and foreign languages dropped 21 percent in 2008, their biggest decline since 1974. Since May 2008, the American Mathematical Society’s job listings have dropped more than 25 percent. Yet universities across the country continue to award doctorates by the tens of thousands. Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alone confers hundreds of doctoral degrees every year.

Victims of bad timing, this year’s graduates will face a particularly tough job market. But the recession has only brought into starker relief the fact that job prospects in academia have been slim for decades. Today, less than 50 percent of all Ph.D. candidates will secure tenure, according to education writer Thomas H. Benton’s reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rest must accept low-paying adjunct positions or—like Amino—leave academia entirely.

That many of those with doctorates cannot expect to find jobs in academia should be enough to give pause to anyone thinking about pursuing a Ph.D.—and that’s before considering the significant investment of both time and money grad school requires. The typical grad student—who will spend an average of eight years studying for a doctorate—will accrue $20,000 in debt in graduate school, on top of any undergraduate debt. While top private universities like Columbia provide students with grants and living stipends (at Columbia, a nine-month stipend comes to $22,500), they do not fund master’s degrees, which are now required for admission into many Ph.D. programs. Master’s tuition at Columbia is $18,000 per year, still a sizable chunk of change for any student.

Frustrated with a graduate school system that demands steep tuition but cannot guarantee jobs, Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, published a scathing op-ed in the New York Times last spring titled “End the University as We Know It.” In the article, Taylor argues that graduate programs have been abandoning their students at graduation—that schools fail to offer their students decent-paying jobs in their fields of study, rendering their years of arduous research pointless. To remedy this problem, Taylor wants to reinvent graduate education, so that doctoral programs teach students skills more readily applicable to the world outside academia. The response to Taylor’s article ranged from laudatory to vitriolic. Stan Katz of the Chronicle said Taylor’s list of reform measures was “a bewildering mélange”; Christopher Kelty, professor of anthropology at Rice University, called it “a plank out of the dying Republican Party’s tattered playbook”; and Daniel Drezner, who teaches international diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, labeled one of Taylor’s proposals “utter, complete, ridiculous crap.” On the other hand, Taylor says the article produced a significant positive response and that he continues to receive e-mails from current students, teachers, and former academics applauding his ideas.

There is, after all, something a bit odd about a rigorous program of study that trains students for jobs that do not exist. Graduate programs in law, business, and medicine prepare students for a range of lucrative, relatively plentiful jobs. When compared to these professional programs, which boast of placement rates above 90 percent, the state of graduate schools looks particularly bleak. At Columbia, for example, the law school Web site claims that “98% of the Class of 2008 was employed by graduation in a variety of legal fields,” and the business school reported that 92 percent of graduates in 2008 accepted jobs within three months of graduation. In the wake of the financial crisis, those figures will likely have dropped significantly, but there’s still a tremendous disparity between professional and non-professional programs.

Institutions like Columbia’s GSAS aren’t going to place nine of 10 graduates in relevant fields anytime soon. But if graduate school is going to remain relevant, reform—possibly painful reform—will be necessary.

F.or Taylor, that reform will require far more than minor tweaks or patches. It will mean overturning the graduate program as we know it. “Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs,” he writes in his op-ed. He calls for the elimination of distinct departments of religion, philosophy, or history, to be replaced with “zones of inquiry.” These zones would function as umbrella topics uniting students across disciplines—biology, sociology, political science, or physics.

“Think about it,” Taylor says in an telephone interview. “‘Moby Dick’ is one of the most important analyses of religion we have. Why is ‘Moby Dick’ only in the territory of the English department?” The key to his plan is eliminating barriers—among departments, genres, and subfields. “Webs, not walls,” he proclaims. “To bring the American university into the modern, global society, we need to move from a world of walls to a world of webs.”

These walls exist between and within departments. As academic jobs grow scarcer, scholars must look for their own narrow niches in order to publish unique work. Hyperspecialization, Taylor believes, atomizes the academic community, detracting from the quality and practicality of the research that is produced.

Contemporary Civilization lecturer Paul Weinfield, who received his Ph.D. in religion from Columbia in 2008, echoes Taylor’s view that fields within fields are little more than “smokestacks within smokestacks.”

“There’s a disconnect between the kind of research universities want and the kind of teaching they want,” Weinfield says. As a student, Weinfield specialized in medieval Iranian mysticism, but after graduation, he found that employers were looking for candidates with a broader body of knowledge. “After 9/11, religion professors have been asked to teach very general classes on Islam. But scholars are interested in conducting research on very specialized themes, research that doesn’t apply to undergraduate courses.” In his job search, Weinfield discovered there was minimal demand for his expertise. Most positions, he found, “required more of a basic knowledge of politics and current events than an in-depth knowledge of Islam.”

When Weinfield was part of Columbia’s religion department, he didn’t perceive that the University was tending toward hyperspecialization. He was required to take a few interdisciplinary courses, including survey courses on both Western and Eastern religions, but he feels they fell short of their mission. The courses “were co-taught in a very fragmented way, and basically everyone sleep-walked through them.”

Cloistered in his own narrow subfield, Weinfield received little preparation for jobs in fields outside of academia. His specialization was “a real problem … more of a badge of one’s credentials than an actual skill set.”

Taylor believes his zones of inquiry would address the concerns of people like Weinfield. These zones, he says, would encourage scholarly collaboration and offer students a more practical education. Instead of studying religion, a student in Taylor’s university might study water.

Designed to address the problems of water shortage and management, a water program would incorporate scholarship from ecological, cultural, economic, and religious perspectives. By uniting disciplines for a practical common purpose, the university would bring scholars out of their bubble and provide them with the skills to join non-academic industries. That, at least, is Taylor’s theory. “In many areas, it makes sense to erode some departmental boundaries,” he says. “I think of zones like nodes—points of intersection between disciplines.”

Taylor has already implemented elements of his proposal at Columbia. Beginning this academic year, doctoral candidates in the religion department are required to take an exam in their choice of five zones of inquiry: time, space, body, media, and transmission. Body, for example, encompasses studies in neuroscience, biomedical ethics, and gender.

“What’s involved here,” Taylor says, “is a different vision of higher education for the global world of the 21st century. The current system is 200 years old and tied to outdated political, economic, and social structures. How can we create an educational opportunity that will prepare students for today’s world?” His proposal takes a stride toward solving the problem of employment for doctoral candidates by widening their skill sets and areas of expertise.

Taylor’s program is based on certain assumptions of what is useful or practical. But it’s also based on the philosophy that we can reorganize or re-imagine our systems of knowledge. “The way in which knowledge is structured is not set in stone,” Taylor says. “The world is not divided up into disciplines. Today, scholars develop expertise in a particular area first and then look at problems. But what if we looked at problems first and then figured out what kind of expertise we need to solve the problem?” Taylor wants us to view knowledge as cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and applicable to real-world questions, rather than contained within rigid categories. By considering solutions from a wide variety of angles, he insists, scholars will formulate more useful approaches to their fields.

Critics have pointed out some fundamental organizational weaknesses in Taylor’s plan. Should students in the water program be building bridges instead of civil engineers? Can students gain an in-depth knowledge of both environmental biology and the sociology of coastal communities in the same program?

David Bell, dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a response to Taylor’s op-ed in the New Republic the day after Taylor’s article ran. Deeming Taylor’s piece a “yawp of pain,” Bell’s article calls for further proof of grad schools’ obsolescence. He notes that competition for spots at top universities is as fierce as ever, and America remains the world leader in Nobel Prizes.

“Intellectual inquiry has its own logic,” Bell says in an interview. “The logic is often one of specialization. We’re not going to turn Ph.D. programs into vocational programs.” It’s conceivable to see how something like Taylor’s water program might provide jobs outside of the academy for sociologists or anthropologists. But as Bell himself asks, “What do you do with a field like classics?”

Taylor’s response to this criticism reveals the most radical aspect of his program. “I don’t think knowledge for knowledge’s sake is enough,” he says. “It’s only viable if someone else is paying the bill, and as we know, private patronage is drying up.” The only way we can continue to fund the humanities, Taylor argues, is to emphasize the broader societal contribution the study of arts and letters can make. And not every area of study can make a contribution. “We live in a world of limited resources, and not everything that can be done should be done. Some fields will emerge and others will disappear.” As Taylor sees it, no field is eternal and none should be. Classics may be among the disciplines that cannot justify their own existence.

As one might expect, professor James Zetzel, chair of Columbia’s department of classics, has a different perspective. “I would be very worried about an academic world which thought that ancient Greece and Rome should be the center of university education; I would be equally worried if they were banned as obsolete,” he writes in an e-mail.

Taylor replies that Plato and Aristotle won’t necessarily fall by the wayside. “Do you need a department of classics to study Aristotle?” he asks. Universities can still cover the canon—students will simply study the great thinkers in the context of different zones or themes, rather than as part of a curriculum structured by time period. In fact, Taylor adds, “when you only study Hegel in a contemporary philosophy class, you can’t fully understand Hegel.” A fuller understanding of Hegel, he explains, comes from examining his work from different perspectives and within different frameworks.

Still, he acknowledges that his system may sacrifice those areas of study that don’t prove useful. His university would only invest in programs that either contributed to contemporary problem-solving or aided students in the post-grad job hunt.

Others in the academy see Taylor’s reforms as impinging on the intellectual experience that graduate school is designed to provide. Kirsten Ellicson, who studies 19th-century French literature at Columbia, is due to receive her doctorate this fall. “I don’t think that it should be the mission of graduate programs to prepare us for jobs outside academia,” Ellicson writes in an e-mail. “They should continue to train us to think and do research, to become producers of knowledge—while also encouraging us, as my department has, to communicate clearly what we do to people in other fields as well as to people outside academia.” The Ph.D. program is not a means to an end but “an experience in itself,” Ellicson says. “At the beginning, what I knew is that I wanted to continue reading and analyzing literature, to push my reflection on literature farther.”

Instead of complete reform, Ellicson proposes that graduate programs reduce the time it takes to receive a doctorate. “The longer the program takes, the harder it can be to envision yourself, and the job climate, upon completion,” she says. “I do think that some departments could more rigorously push its graduate students to finish earlier, by providing more feedback along the way, by demanding regular exchanges between advisors and grad students.” A shorter Ph.D. program might alleviate some of the intense pressure placed on graduate students to secure tenure-track jobs. If graduate school is more an opportunity for personal and intellectual growth than an expensive and lengthy means of jumpstarting a lifelong career, success for a Ph.D student would mean more than just a professorship.

There appears to be an unbridgeable gap between Taylor’s and Ellicson’s visions. Is it possible to offer a deeply intellectual and practical education without corrupting both ends? How can universities launch their students on a career path while still allowing for in-depth study of the “impractical” subjects?

Maybe they can’t. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Rigidly adhering to tradition for its own sake is foolish, but whatever its flaws, the current system has brought us some tremendous scholarship. Creating zones of inquiry in lieu of departments might improve grad students’ job prospects, but it would do so at the expense of the rigor that has produced real intellectual breakthroughs. In the academy, vast banality is often accompanied by a few sparks of genius. But that genius requires cultivation and refinement. Even men like Einstein and Foucault went through the grind of graduate school.

Source: Columbia Spectator

A recent episode of “Tash Ma Tash,” a popular comedy during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, plowed into the debate over how to adapt Saudi education to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing population and finding them jobs.

Next week Saudi Arabia opens a state of the art university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), with top-class faculty in the sciences from around the world and a curriculum outside the influence of powerful clerics.

Tash ma Tash comedy star Nasser al-Qasabi meets with tough opposition from senior bureaucrats at the education ministry when he presents his ideas on reform.

“When you teach a student one single opinion and deprive him of plurality and diversity he then becomes a prisoner of that opinion. Plurality and diversity are the key aspects of Islam from its tolerant perspective,” he tells a ministry panel.

The show’s other star, Abdulah al-Sadhan, is having none of it. “Where did this (education reform) idea come from? It came only from the West and their little agents. Do they really want the best for us? Are you suggesting that religion needs to be developed? Are you with us or with them?” A fresh graduate hoping to get a job as a teacher is grilled by a panel of religious sheikhs on his beliefs and background. “What sort of books do you like to read? … Do you listen to music?” says one who frowns upon music. “Grades are not everything. You are going to educate generations. We have to know how you think,” another says. Saudi education came under intense scrutiny after the September 11 attacks of 2001, after it emerged that 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis from al Qaeda, headed by Saudi Osama bin Laden. Clerics have wide powers in Saudi Arabia to impose their puritanical version of Sunni Islam, dominating education, the judicial system, as well as controlling mosques and their own coercive apparatus in the form of a morality police squad. In the comedy, a group of clerics have direct access to the minister of education, prompting the civil servant charged with developing reforms to consider resigning — reflecting real life disputes in the ministry since 2001. Offended at the clerics’ threats of consequences, the minister shows them the door and tells Gasabi to tear up his resignation. “Nothing is impossible… There is only resolve and implementation of the blessed reform project.”

Script writer Yahya al-Ameer said the happy ending reflected the desire of the government to push ahead with reforms. King Abdullah has championed “cautious reform” but faces challenges from senior princes, allied to the clerics. “(Education reform) is a royal project that is important to Saudis and to the leadership. Of course, change becomes more difficult when you are faced at once with bureaucracy and puritanism,” Ameer told Reuters. (Editing by Andrew Hammond and Samia Nakhoul) Source: Reuters

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today. 

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.   

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year. 

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn. 

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox. 

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve. 

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. 

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself. 

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide. 

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future. 

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy. 

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country. 

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in. 

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse. 

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right. 

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying. 

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. 

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America. 

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall. 

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same. 

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it. 

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things. 

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying. 

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in. 

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals. 

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best. 

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?  

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press Writer

As for the other half, no one knows.

District-by-district and school-by-school results from this year’s Proficiency Assessments for Wyoming Students, or PAWS test, have been out for nearly a month. But state and local officials have yet to compile a complete set of scores for the Wyoming Virtual School.

Wyoming Virtual School students essentially are home-schooled with some guidance from public school teachers. The partly online curriculum is provided by a private company, Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc.

Campbell County School District 1 in Gillette launched the K-6 school in 2006 and enrolled 76 students last year.

This was the first year more than a handful of students in the virtual school took the assessment test, an annual, statewide exam for students in grades 3-8 and 11. The virtual school students took the test in classrooms, not at home.

The available results — the combined scores of about 30 students in Campbell County — show less-than-stellar performance:

— Fifty percent of Wyoming Virtual School students in grades 3-6 scored in either the “proficient” range or “advanced” range in math. The statewide average for grades 3-6 was 76 percent.

— In reading, 41 percent of Wyoming Virtual School students tested in the proficient range or above. The statewide average was 64 percent.

— In writing, 22 percent of Wyoming Virtual School students scored in the proficient range or higher. The statewide average in writing was 53 percent.

“We’re not where we want to be. We’ll continue to work to improve and to raise those numbers in the future,” said Alex Ayers, the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and assessment.

K12 Inc. said it didn’t have enough information about the test scores to comment.

While the Campbell County School District compiled test scores for virtual school students who live in Campbell County, the district has yet to obtain scores from students elsewhere in the state.

About half of the virtual school’s students last school year lived in 10 other counties. The reason the Campbell County district doesn’t have those scores is the state Department of Education combined them with scores at brick-and-mortar elementary schools — the schools those students would be attending if they weren’t enrolled at the virtual school.

The principal of the virtual school, Roger Larsen, said he’s been trying to collect the rest of his students’ scores from other districts. He called the situation frustrating.

“The scores get scattered around the state, and just trying to gather them up we’ve found much more difficult than anticipated,” Larsen said.

The department eventually should be able to compile a complete set of scores for the Wyoming Virtual School, said Mary Kay Hill, the department’s director of administration.

“As we move along, you bet. We will be building a system that will allow us to pull up that data and be able to report, statewide, how those kids are doing,” she said.

(© 2009 The Associated Press.

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By Adil James,

Bloomfield Hills–July 4–A new Muslim Montessori school is revving up its engine in Beverly Hills.

Dr. Mouhib Ayas, who is on the board of the new school, explained to TMO that BHA purchased, two years ago, what used to be a Christian Middle School called Kensington Academy, with 50,000 square feet, and 8 acres of land in Beverly Hills.

Last year only approximately 36 students enrolled, but now is the time to begin planning to enroll for next year if you are close to that area–the school has the powerful backing of the well-to-do Muslim professionals of the area, and promises to be another Muslim powerhouse school in the future, to rival Huda and the other excellent local Muslim schools.

The yearly tuition will be roughly $7,000 to $8,000.  There is a comprehensive Montessori curriculum, and every teacher at the school is a certified Montessori method teacher.

The school teaches Arabic language and Islamic studies.

Mr. Ayas explained that it has “everything like a regular middle school,” with a huge gym that dwarfs the size of the already respectable BMUC gymnasium; in addition to the gym is a “library, and an Islamic school.”

In addition to religious studies there is a rigorous mainstream curriculum.  The school’s director is Ms. Sandy Gordon.

Soon non-Muslims may clamor and line up to pay tuition to attend the excellent local Muslim private schools that compete favorably with Cranbrook and Detroit Country Day at a fraction of the cost.

Source: muslimmedianetwork

Picture Source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1jkvR0uFKhM/R7cH-LULD-I/AAAAAAAAADw/cLxy0f3kdys/s320/P28-05-07_10.36%5B01%5D.jpg