Friday, January 27, 2012

Blog 2: A Boost For the World's Poorest Schools


In the article by Tina Rosenberg, A Boost for the World’s Poorest Schools, she is trying to address how the program, Save the Children is working to improve the reading level of children. She starts off this article by stating that the world has made great progress toward the goal of having all children in school. She also gives several statistics. One of these statistics is that 69 million school-age children do not attend school as of right now. However, this is an improvement compared to the year 1999 in which there were 106 million school-age children not attending school. Countries have made progress by getting rid of school fees, building schools in distant areas, switching the language of teaching to the one children actually speak, and giving families incentive to send children to school with school food. But, the flowing in of new students in many places has affected school systems that were already having a hard time. Some schools in countries such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia often have no materials or books other than a chalkboard. Sometimes at these schools, teachers do not even speak the same language as the students, and do not even show up for class. Save the Children is trying to help schools. In Tigray, Ethiopia, 23 percent of third grade students in a school supported by Save the Children could not read a single word in one minute. In Nepal, it was 50 percent. The Save the Children organization created Literacy Boost. This program is now in schools in 12 countries and expanding to another six this year. It works in any language and culture. It also holds workshops to help teachers learn effective teaching methods. The goal of this program is to expose children to reading as much as they can, and boost children’s literacy skills.
Reading this article made me realize how lucky we are to live in the United States and receive a good education. Sometimes, we take it for granted. It completely blows my mind to think that there are children around the world who are in third grade and cannot read a single word. I also cannot believe that teachers are not even showing up to school to do their jobs. I won’t get myself started on that aspect. One thing that saddened me during this article was that some schools in poor parts of the world have no other learning materials besides a chalkboard. We are so fortunate to live in the United States, where we have just about everything we need to learn. One thing I thought was interesting about this program was that all of the books are homemade. This makes the stories more interesting and children can learn to appreciate the work that was put into creating the books. From what I have read in this article, I think that Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program is a successful and rewarding program. I also think that we should create something like this for the under-privileged schools in the United States. This program has been proven to work, and can only help students in the United States improve their literacy skills even more!
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/118675/?scp=19&sq=Education%20Problems&st=cse

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