Thursday, February 27, 2014

Blog 4: World Bank Opens Data Tool to Benchmark Global Education


 Summary

Recently the World Bank Group launched a new open data tool that provides an in-depth, easy accessible, and comparative data on education policies around the world. They call it the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) and this tool helps countries collect and analyze information on their education policies, compare themselves to other countries. Countries all over the world have had a hand in funding this program. With this data available to them, countries will be able to find the problem areas within their own education systems and target them as an area that requires reforms. The ultimate goal is for everybody to go to school and learn. The number of children in schools has been increasing over time but the amount being learned still remains low. This new tool guides countries to implement more effective reforms, investments in a variety of educational programs, and finding ways to spread a quality education to those who do not have access to it. The program has already begun to show success reaching over 100 countries so far. The Bank Group plans to use the data to help countries with policy changes that will enhance student performance.

Analysis

This tool is the result of a failing system. Education has tried dozens of new reforms in the attempt to find a solution and nothing has been making significant improvements. This program is going to find the problem and fix it at its source for each country. But it is important to keep in mind that this tool is also comparing countries to one another keeping globalization rising as well as keeping countries competitive to beat everybody else. Technology has become a very prevalent part of our world and it has helped solve a lot of our world’s problems while at the same time creating new problems. This program has already shown success in places such as Nigeria where currently there are 11 million children that are not going to school. SABER was used to look at this country’s education policies and find its faults such as the lack of standard information on student learning and a mismatch between teacher skills and student needs. Now that these problems have been identified it is the hope that the proper efforts will be put forth for them to be solved. Globally, this will help the education crisis that we have found ourselves in and socially this will help people of a lower socioeconomic status around the world become more educated which will give them the ability to keep up with today’s ever changing world.

This article can be found at:

No comments:

Post a Comment