STUDENT  FIRST! News School Choice
Weekly Update on Education (Issue No 265) 07 Jan 2014
- Neha Thirani Bagri
Researcher/Reporter, New York Times
Private Schools for Poor Pressured by Right to Education Act

This blog was originally published in the New York Times Blog, India Ink and reprinted here with permission from the author. You can find the original article here.

In Dharavi, a Mumbai slum, a ramshackle building houses the Bombay South Indian Adi-Dravida Sangh school, where 1,000 students from poor families take their classes in English, a language increasingly perceived as the key to a white-collar job.

Many education experts argue that the Right to Education Act, while lofty in its goals, does not pay attention to the ground realities of low-budget private schools. In a study of 15 budget private schools in New Delhi by the Center for Civil Society, it was found that to comply with the infrastructure requirements in the Right to Education Act, the schools would have to have an approximately four-fold increase in their fees, making them unaffordable for the section of society they currently serve.

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Research

The Role of Education Quality in Economic Growth
Author: Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Wößmann
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4122, February 2007

Brief: The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population – rather than mere school attainment – are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth.

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Education News
 

Poorly Taught Economics
- Forbes, 03 Jan 2014
And this young lady said that she enjoyed the iPolicy sessions of CCS because they discussed a very different type of economics from what she was taught in college and the theory was validated by experiential testing.

School violated RTE norms: Education officials Silver Oak school
- The Times of India, 04 Jan 2014
In the evening, the education officers and MLA Nitin Bhosale (MNS) went to the Sarkarwada police station and filed a written complaint against the school.

Iffy future for RTE online admission
- The Times of India, 31 Dec 2013
The ambitious project of the state education department to conduct admissions in a centralised and online manner for 25% reserved seats in schools under the Right to Education (RTE) Act may not take off for the second consecutive year.

Building better universities
- The Hindu, 28 Dec 2013
A large number of universities will have to cater to the growing demands and aspirations of Indian youth to be educated and, in that process, employed.

RTE Admission Process Begins Today
- The New Indian Express, 06 Jan 2014
First preference will be given to those whose annual income is less than `1 lakh. If the number of applicants is more, seats will be allotted by lottery.

Poll
Would you, as an Indian taxpayer, pay more to improve education in India?

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Factoid
Only 74.51 % of secondary and higher secondary schools in India have a boundary wall (SEMIS Flash Statistics 2010-2011).

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