All posts tagged: schools

UN urges Taliban to reopen girls’ schools in Afghanistan

UN urges Taliban to reopen girls’ schools in Afghanistan

Published by Sam Flores

Washington —  Editor’s note: this story was translated from the original VOA Pashto article. The United Nations is calling on the Taliban to reopen schools for Afghan girls beyond sixth grade, saying keeping girls in school is “one of the most powerful ways” to protect their rights and prevent child marriage. “[L]et us renew our commitment to end child marriage by promoting a healthy childhood, sustain advocacy for access to education and support opportunities for every girl child in Afghanistan, Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, said in a statement issued Sunday to mark the International Day of the Girl Child. The International Day of the Girl Child is observed every year on October 11 to highlight girls’ rights and the challenges they face. This year’s theme was “Ending child marriage and investing in girls’ rights.” A survey by the Afghanistan Reconstruction Fund and UNICEF released in 2023 said that 28.7 percent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18. The survey also reported that in some parts of the country, as …

UN urges Taliban to reopen girls’ schools in Afghanistan

UN urges Taliban to reopen girls’ schools in Afghanistan

Published by Sam Flores

Washington —  Editor’s note: this story was translated from the original VOA Pashto article. The United Nations is calling on the Taliban to reopen schools for Afghan girls beyond sixth grade, saying keeping girls in school is “one of the most powerful ways” to protect their rights and prevent child marriage. “[L]et us renew our commitment to end child marriage by promoting a healthy childhood, sustain advocacy for access to education and support opportunities for every girl child in Afghanistan, Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, said in a statement issued Sunday to mark the International Day of the Girl Child. The International Day of the Girl Child is observed every year on October 11 to highlight girls’ rights and the challenges they face. This year’s theme was “Ending child marriage and investing in girls’ rights.” A survey by the Afghanistan Reconstruction Fund and UNICEF released in 2023 said that 28.7 percent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18. The survey also reported that in some parts of the country, as …

Humanists UK responds to Conservative pledge on compulsory hijab in schools

Humanists UK responds to Conservative pledge on compulsory hijab in schools

Published by Sam Flores

The Conservative Party has pledged at its party conference to guarantee that children in state-funded schools, including faith schools, will no longer be made to comply with religious dress codes as part of school uniform policies. Humanists UK has welcomed these comments in recognition of children’s human rights, in line with the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It has said the law should equally protect a child’s right to wear, or to refuse to wear, a religious dress code or accessory such as a headscarf or a crucifix. Separately, Humanists UK has made separate comments about other aspects of the Conservatives’ announcements on protecting ‘impartiality’ in schools. Background on the case The pledge follows the row over Barnet Hill Academy, an Islamic faith school in north London which joined the state sector in September as a voluntary aided school, and whose published uniform policy requires girls it regards as Muslim to wear a white hijab from Year 3. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott raised the case in …

Only two of NI’s 1,000 schools meet Givan’s integrated education target

Only two of NI’s 1,000 schools meet Givan’s integrated education target

Published by Sam Flores

Only two of Northern Ireland’s approximately 1,000 schools currently meet the 40:40:20 pupil-mix aspiration promoted by the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) as the target for integrated schools, and cited by Education Minister Paul Givan when refusing to allow more integrated schools to open. Neither of the two is in fact an integrated school itself. Northern Ireland Humanists has called on NICIE to change its target, warning that it fails to reflect young people’s beliefs today and so is blocking progress towards the opening of more integrated schools. The finding comes from analysis of the 2025/26 school census by Jack Russell of Believe the Data, examining the barriers facing integrated education. He found that only Strabane Academy and Jones Memorial Primary School in Enniskillen meet the target of at least 40% of pupils coming from a Catholic background, and 40% from a Protestant background. Neither is an integrated school – both are controlled (i.e. de facto Protestant). The findings follow Education Minister Paul Givan’s refusal of four further schools’ applications to become integrated, …

We’re reporters, not teachers. We were able to start private schools anyway

We’re reporters, not teachers. We were able to start private schools anyway

Published by Sam Flores

We have no business running a private school. We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.  Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort. In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times. We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails. And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch. We used our names …

Conservative moms are fed up over Texas schools. For Gina Hinojosa, it’s an opening

Conservative moms are fed up over Texas schools. For Gina Hinojosa, it’s an opening

Published by Sam Flores

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. MCALLEN, Texas — Vanessa Ovalle has a “frontline view” of Texas schools as a single mom and a speech pathologist at a local school in McAllen, a city in the Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico. Ovalle described the state’s education system as “completely disappointing.”  In nearby Welasco, Catalina Ozuna said her daughter is working in an understaffed kindergarten classroom for little pay while being weighed down by the cost of daycare for her own child.  Meredith Keller, who for over a decade presided over a local school board south of Austin, calls a new voucher program that allows parents to use public dollars for private school “a slap in the face to everyone who went to public school.”  These Texas voters all have two things in common: They have backed Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the past and are now throwing their support behind Democrat Gina Hinojosa in the November …

Tackling the invisible pollution in homes, schools and workplaces

Tackling the invisible pollution in homes, schools and workplaces

Published by Miika Tikkanen

We spend most of our time indoors, but how much do we know about the air we breathe? EU-funded researchers are looking for answers and practical ways to improve it. Europeans spend up to 90% of their lives indoors, according to official estimates. Yet while outdoor air pollution has become a familiar public concern, the air inside our homes, schools and workplaces has largely gone unnoticed. That is changing. Researchers across Europe are investigating what is really in indoor air, how it affects our health and what can be done about it. “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have heard more about indoor air quality because people have become aware that aerosols could transport viruses,” said Jose Fermoso, a chemical engineer at Spanish research centre CARTIF and coordinator of K-HEALTHinAIR, one of seven EU-funded projects working together to investigate indoor air quality. “Thanks to this development, something invisible became visible.” But that greater awareness has not necessarily translated into concern about indoor pollution. Most contaminants have no noticeable smell, are difficult to detect and people tend to …

What Schools Can Do to Prevent Suicides

What Schools Can Do to Prevent Suicides

Published by Jenni Sidey

When 22-year-old Katie Meyer killed herself in her dorm room at Stanford University in 2021, it sent shockwaves across the San Francisco Bay Area and the country. One reason was that Meyer was the women’s soccer team’s star goalkeeper who had helped Stanford win the national championship two years earlier. The other reason was that she was the fourth Stanford student to die by suicide in just over a year. Stanford officials vowed to improve mental health services at the school, in part by hiring four more counselors and therapists. Eighteen months after Meyer’s death, however, all four positions remained unfilled, and the clinical staff was overwhelmed.[1] Most colleges offer mental health counseling for students, but this tends to be underfunded, poorly promoted, and difficult to access given staffing shortages. Assessing the need for mental health services, developing a comprehensive strategy for meeting these needs, and having clear policies for what to do if a student is in crisis or hospitalized enables school counselors, medical staff, and administrative leaders to act quickly and effectively to …

Why Parents Protesting Screens in Schools are Right

Why Parents Protesting Screens in Schools are Right

Published by Jenni Sidey

American parents knew there was a problem, and they were right: students’ scores have plunged on the first National Educational Assessment report since the Covid epidemic. Despite mounting parental protests, virtually all of America’s children (96%) regularly use individual laptops or tablets for schoolwork and homework, starting in Kindergarten. We can now see the results of this unprecedented classroom experiment, and they’re dismal: lower test scores in math and reading comprehension and—more disturbingly—an overall decline in cognitive capability. After a hundred years in which each generation scored higher than the last on IQ tests, the trend has reversed and today’s children are losing ground. How do we know screens are (at least partially) to blame? Because that decline hasn’t occurred in countries where traditional schooling methods are still used, and because the more time children spend interacting with screens, the worse their test outcomes become. But why would this be the case? The answer lies both in the nature of human learning and the nature of computer-based experiences. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that intelligence and learning …

How schools are experimenting with AI

How schools are experimenting with AI

Published by Sam Flores

Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly. For a few weeks last school year, a small group of students in Dayton, Ohio, regularly sat in front of laptops in conversation with a social-emotional learning chatbot named Jordan. Unlike AI chatbots that are designed to be agreeable — and even sycophantic — Jordan presents as angsty: On the day NPR visited, the chatbot told students, “Lately, I’ve been feeling like what’s the point of any of this? I’m not failing. I just don’t care. You ever feel like that?” “Jordan’s a little whiner, but I always help him out,” said K, a sophomore at the Alternative School at Jackson Center, which is part of Dayton Public Schools. “I built a little relationship with him,” K explained. “So I don’t really see it as like an AI on a computer. It’s Jordan — like, I’m texting somebody. That’s how I see it.” Many students at this alternative school would otherwise be suspended or expelled, and staff told NPR that students here often …