As National Charter Schools Week wraps up, new data show their potential to improve students’ scores. One thing nearly every expert in the field will tell you is that we have a long way to go before every student in America is getting a good education. The recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card, confirmed as much. The NAEP is administered to a sample of students in a variety of subjects from across the country every two years. Its latest math and reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders showed a general…
Author: Loknath Das
A trust that runs four primary schools spent thousands of pounds on overseas trips for its leaders, more than £1,000 on two hotel rooms for two nights and almost £10,000 on Facebook adverts for a free school that has not yet been set up, according to allegations in a draft investigation seen by the Observer. In a case that will raise further questions about the financial management of academies, an inquiry into Silver Birch Academy Trust claims it spent £6,117 on a fact-finding trip to China and New Zealand for its chief executive Patricia Davies, a former headteacher of the year,…
The United Nations joined the World Bank and four regional development banks on Friday to launch a plan to boost funding for education by $10 billion as new data shows a growing gap over access to schools. About 260 million children worldwide are not in school, including 10 million who are refugees, according to an education commission set up in 2015 to boost investment in education. If this trend continues, half of the world’s children — 400 million — will have no education beyond the age of 11 by the year 2030, said former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who…
Remember sweating over your Klout score? Seven years ago, Klout arrived, and suddenly, there was a way to measure your social media influence across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and more with a simple score. Must read: How has Google dodged data privacy issue? It’s the ROI In 2011 and 2012, we were obsessed with Klout. If you had a high Klout score — 77 here at its high, which was nothing to sneeze at — life was great. If it was low, you felt blue, and you tried hard to get your score back up. When Klout hiccuped and dropped everyone’s social influence score to…
Protests over land or services – what researchers have dubbed “a rebellion of the poor” – usually enter mainstream media as a traffic problem. If the protest is significant, like the one in the Siqalo informal settlement in Mitchells Plain, it might enter the evening television news bulletins or the next day’s newspaper. Then it is usually reported as an orgy of violence with images of burning, looting and barricading. Until recently, mainstream media would have largely set the agenda for the public understanding of these events. One characteristic of such coverage was that the voices of poor people would…
Pre-internet, the extent to which we knew about each other was the extent to which we volunteered information about ourselves. We generally kept our business to ourselves, and we were happy in our ignorance. We had a work life and, at the end of a long day, we went home to a personal life. Today we’re exposed to abundant details about our friends and family, including hundreds or thousands of “friends” we don’t even know. It’s the largest personal soapbox the world has ever known and we welcome anyone who’ll listen. We snap selfies over breakfast, film ourselves feeding the dog and host…
\ Not long ago, workers were personnel. Then, sometime in ‘80s, they became human resources. Today employees are often referred to as human capital. And it’s not just a semantics difference. The term human capital signifies that an employee’s value can be measured and increased through investments in training, benefits, compensation and so on. (For example, the Society of Human Resources Management offers reports benchmarking human capital.). And, of course, as the value an organization places on its workers grows, the software to manage HR functions and human capital has evolved as well. HRIS vs. HCM Today, you’ll see both human resource…
Something for the Weekend, Sir? “I want you to kill Barbra Streisand.” Yup, no problem, I’ll enjoy doing that. Anyone else? “Kylie Minogue. And bloody Madonna, I can’t stand her any more.” Consider them bumped off. It’s sounding a little misogynistic, though. Are you sure? “Leave Chaka Khan alone.” Fine, Chaka survives to sing another day. Anyone else you want wiped out? “Bros.” Now you’re talking. As you might have guessed, faithful reader, I have been tasked by The In-No-Way-Radioactive One with pruning an improbable list of some 563 MP3s that have been generically tagged Hits from the Eighties. The source material is sitting…
Just who is in-charge of updating the Social media accounts of one of the key ministries? This is the question people are asking after information that was deemed not related to the docket was recently posted on the ministry’s official Twitter handle. Interestingly, the CS and PS were both tagged in the post. See Also: Ask your mother! Sabina Chege responds to a man who asked about Wazir Chacha On noticing the gaffe after the tweet was widely shared by other users, whoever is in charge of the account deleted the embarrassing Tweet. See Also: Sonko asks what he should do about blogger who insulted him-…
Each day, hundreds of millions of people document and share their experiences on social media, from packed parties to the most intimate family moments. Social platforms let us stay in touch with friends and forge new relationships like never before, but those increases in communication and social connection may come at a cost. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers showed that those who documented and shared their experiences on social media formed less precise memories of those events. In a series of three studies led by Diana Tamir of Princeton University, researchers explored how taking…