Teachers at a local primary school here, the Escola Municipal IV Centenário, are trained to help their pupils find cover in case of gun battles.

This is only one unusual feature of an educational project that goes much further than providing special attention to communities affected by violence in Rio de Janeiro.

The school is one of 152 “Escolas do Amanhã” (Schools of Tomorrow) selected from the municipal school network for their location in high-risk areas.

Complexo da Maré, a “favela” (shanty town) in the northern suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, is home to 1.5 million people and, like other unplanned, self-built housing sprawls, it lacks basic services.

Favelas have historically been dominated by drug traficking cartels and must also put up with the recent emergence of parapolice groups, known as “milicias”, that work for economically powerful groups.

“We are all trained for this. We did a course. So on the days we have police raids, we know what we have to do,” Rita de Cassia Magnino, the school’s head teacher, told IPS.

Their training helps them to protect the school against the effects of an undeclared urban war. The teachers take the pupils to protected places, like partition walls, away from windows where there is a danger of bullets and broken glass.

Magnino hopes that days like these will come to an end when the pacification process reaches Complexo da Maré this year. The plan started in the favelas of Rio in 2008, and includes – as well as police occupation of the neighbourhood – sanitation, infrastructure, health and income generating projects.

The Schools of Tomorrow programme was established in 2009 by the Rio de Janeiro education secretariat to reduce school absenteeism and improve learning in at-risk areas, and its results have far surpassed the partition walls that shelter pupils from flying bullets.

“The challenge is to create schools with high-quality education, in order to meet the needs of communities that have a history of deprivation,” Jorge Werthein, the head of the Brazilian Centre for Latin American Studies, told IPS.

“In order to achieve this, the needs of the communities served by the Schools of Tomorrow must be understood, as well as how to motivate them to participate in school activities,” said Werthein, who is a former director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) office in Brazil.

“The only way to really combat violence is with quality education,” Magnino said.

This quality education is based on six pillars, and benefits over 109,000 children in pacified and non-pacified communities.

The first pillar is a comprehensive approach to education, with more than 50 activities including extra tutoring and cultural, artistic and sports activities.

Unlike other municipal and provincial schools, the Schools of Tomorrow have reading rooms, computer centres and science laboratories.

Another pillar is the “Scientists of Tomorrow” programme, based on a new science teaching method from the Sangari Institute, an NGO, that stimulates children to develop reasoning and critical thinking.

“It is fantastic, the students learn how fish breed by tending an aquarium, and how flowers grow,” Magnino enthused.

“The educational coordinator does important work alongside the head teacher in administering this political-paedagogical project,” she said, emphasising an essential feature of the initiative, which is on-going training for teachers and other educational agents.

“Health in Schools” is another pillar, a programme promoting regular health checks for pupils. When problems are detected the child is treated at a municipal health centre.

Magnino emphasised, however, that the programme would not be possible without the participation of the community and the children’s families.

The programme “Bairro Educador” (Educational Neighbourhood) integrates neighbours and parents with the school and tries to diagnose the problems in each household. It also incorporates volunteer mothers and university students on placements as auxiliary tutors.

Magnino holds fortnightly meetings with parents and guardians, between 85 and 90 percent of whom attend. This is all the more remarkable because many households are headed by a single woman working full time.

“Problems arise when the family does not participate, because it is really important,” said the head teacher, who runs the school for 500 children aged four to 12. “We call so often on mothers and fathers to attend meetings that they end up believing in the project,” she said.

The teachers have also been trained to mediate in conflicts between the school and the community, and to address issues like drug taking and violence.

In Magnino’s view, putting a stop to violence begins at school.

“We explain to the children that violence doesn’t solve anything, but that everything can be resolved through dialogue,” she said.

“What makes the most difference is promoting a different kind of education, one that is comprehensive and uses dynamic methods, that can address cognitive blockages resulting from overexposure to violence,” Claudia Costin, education secretary for the city government of Rio de Janeiro, told the local press.

The results are already visible in the Schools of Tomorrow.

“They manage to capture the children’s interest, and the dropout and absentee rates have fallen,” said Werthein, who described the initiative as “extremely interesting and innovative”.

Official data show the school dropout rate has fallen from 5.1 to 3.2 percent between 2008 and 2011. The national Basic Education Development Index indicates that the Schools of Tomorrow retained more students in the higher grades, at the ages when children are recruited by criminal gangs. This sign of progress is particularly impressive because the schools are in such high risk areas.

“The schools are located in areas where gun battles still occur, or have occurred over a long period of time, and students used to drop out and join the drug traffickers,” Costin said.

The Schools of Tomorrow are still little more than a drop in the ocean among the 1,074 municipal schools, but the authorities in Rio de Janeiro want to extend the programme to their entire educational system, while other states are considering setting up similar schools.

Werthein pushed the boundaries even further. “Establishing quality schools in the favelas is an example that could be emulated in many Latin American countries,” he said.

In New Orleans, which was struck by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, residents are planning strategies to prepare for the next natural disaster. Above, a house damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Credit: Steve Wilson/ CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Dec 14 2012 (IPS)

Many residents are still rebuilding their lives seven years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region of the United States. Those who are able are looking ahead and organising so that they will be better prepared for future natural disasters.

Although at a recent conference in Doha, Qatar, the international community failed to reach meaningful agreement on preventing more global warming, disaster preparedness will become an increasingly important topic for communities, especially those near water, around the world.

A new book, “Not Meant to Live Like This: Weathering the Storm of Our Lives in New Orleans”, by the members of the All Together in Dignity (ATD) Fourth World Movement living in New Orleans, addresses the topic of community organising for disaster preparedness.

A symposium at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Dec. 13 addressed the same issues. Both the book and the symposium received support from the Southern Partners Fund, a philanthropic group that promotes social change in the American South and which launched a Justice Fund for Disaster Relief and Renewal shortly after Katrina.

New Orleans still recovering

Martin Luther King III, the son of Martin Luther King Jr., emphasised in an interview with IPS that some parts of New Orleans have not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina.

In the Ninth Ward, he said, “homes were torn town and not rebuilt”, adding, “I am not saying it was intentional…but somebody must have made the decision.”

Even the parts of New Orleans that have been rebuilt have changed dramatically. Public housing communities that served low-income residents were torn down. Public schools have been privatised. Even the homes and businesses that have been rebuilt simply do not look quite the same.

“That happens in every community,” Marilyn Self, manager of the Disaster Readiness programme at the American Red Cross of Greater Atlanta, said during a panel at the symposium. “It’s never the same again. Even if every home is rebuilt and everyone comes back – which they don’t – it’s not the same church spire. The high school has a different look. It’s not the one you have a treasured memory in.”

Sharing responsibilities

“You have a personal responsibility to prepare for yourself in an emergency,” Winston Minor, chair of the Public Safety Committee for the Concerned Black Clergy of Atlanta, said during the panel, advising people to always have at least three days of food, water and medical supplies on hand in case disaster strikes.

“FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] expects you to be able to make it for three days,” Minor said.

But, Minor pointed out, “the community has a responsibility to make sure the community can respond,” and so “everyone in the system needs to be educated”. He said churches should be a vital component of that effort.

The Red Cross has been chartered by Congress since 1881 to help respond to disasters across the United States. Its ability to provide help, however, depends in part on partnerships it establishes at the local level, Self remarked.

One of the biggest problems faced by the Red Cross during and immediately after disasters is shelter. “We need spaces to hold several thousand people. We’ve been bickering with the mega-churches, but there is no agreement in place yet. It’s always, ‘We’ll get back to you.  Let’s talk to our lawyer,'” Self said.

Transportation is also an issue. Local workers who drive public buses or school buses are often relied upon to help transport people out of harm’s way when a storm is coming.

“That has to be communicated down to the person who drives the bus. Public employees need to know there’s a role for them in the disaster plan,” Self said.

Local organisations should have partnerships in place before disasters occur to determine how to cooperate in responding to them.

Housing problems

One key issue after Hurricane Katrina was the drastic decrease in affordable housing units.

In New Orleans today, “affordable housing is very scarce and the rent is very high,” Marie Victoire, co-author of “Not Meant to Live Like This”, told IPS. These factors make it “difficult for low-income people to come back”.

Public housing communities were demolished and replaced with so-called mixed-income housing. Four developments with nearly 5,000 units were demolished after Katrina. Replacement housing has not yet been built, but fewer than a thousand affordable units are planned, with the rest of the units at or near market rate.

“There was no right of return for former residents. They have a million ways to keep people out,” Jay Arena, assistant professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, who lived in New Orleans at the time, told IPS. Arena is the author of a book called “Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization”.

“The political and economic elite saw Katrina as a grand opportunity to deepen their neo-liberal privatisation agenda, change the racial and class demographic of the city, and that’s what they did, by closing down thousands of units of badly needed but hardly damaged public housing units, clearly in violation of international law,” Arena said.

Many low-income families paid 200 to 400 dollars per month on run-down housing before Katrina. After those homes were renovated following the hurricane, prices went up to 700 or 800 per month.

Arena believed that other countries should learn many lessons from what has happened in New Orleans. Above all, he argued, the likelihood of future disasters is another reason to greatly expand the public sector. He added that policies must be put in place to promote the right of return, including rent control and the rights of renters to return to their housing.

“They closed most of the public schools, they closed down the public hospital, Charity Hospital – that probably caused more deaths than even Katrina,” Arena concluded.

Afghan teachers and students are stuck with shoddy textbooks riddled with factual and typographical errors. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Kreshma Fakhri
KABUL, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

New textbooks, printed as part of an ambitious multi-million dollar exercise to reform the curriculum in Afghan public schools, have been found to contain glaring mistakes, adding yet another burden on a cash- and resource-strapped sector of this war-torn country.

The ministry of education forked out 91 million dollars for the printing of new textbooks as part of a planned massive overhaul of the public education system in Afghanistan. The authors were paid handsomely to ensure the books were of the highest quality.

Instead, teachers and students have been saddled with barely legible study guides and are struggling to make sense of textbooks that are riddled with both typographic and factual errors.

Civil society and some parliament members have placed the blame on “nonchalance and corruption in the ministry of education”. Unrepentant, the latter has assured the public the mistakes will be rectified.

Farooq Nekbin, a teacher in Habibia High School in the capital, Kabul, said there are “many scientific and factual mistakes” in the new textbooks. For instance, he pointed out that the invention of the microscope has been dated differently in the textbooks for 10^th, 11^th and 12^th-grade students.

A teacher of mathematics at the same school, who did not want to be identified, said, “The figure for the newton, the SI unit of force – shown on page 40 of the class 11 textbook – is completely wrong.”

Nadera Saeedi, head of the mathematics department at Rukhshana High School in Kabul, was of the opinion that the authors recruited to draft the new texts simply plagiarised the content, despite having been being sponsored by the Education Ministry to travel to Iran, Turkey and Jordan to study textbook writing.

“The text of the books has been copied from other countries’ books,” she said. “They are very difficult (to understand); nobody can solve the exercises.”

One of the physics teachers at Rukhshana high school said she found 15 mistakes in the first 15 pages of the new physics textbook for 11^th-grade students. Even the illustrations contained errors, she said.

Furthermore, the books have been organised illogically, with no concept of the education levels in Afghanistan.

Teachers are now struggling to make sense of the new curriculum.

This oversight could have particularly destructive consequences in Afghanistan, where the literacy rate was a miserable 30 percent in 2010.

As one of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), Afghanistan has fought hard to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of providing universal access to education by 2015.

This latest holdup in the public education sector could set Afghanistan back several years in meeting the internationally determined target.

Official indifference

Though Education Ministry officials have not denied the problem outright, they have offered a different explanation for the mistakes.

According to Abdul Zaher Gulistani, director-general of curriculum development and compiling of textbooks, “We accept the existence of the mistakes but these mistakes cannot be used to question the content of the textbooks.”

His deputy director, Asadullah Muhaqiq, said the mistakes would be rectified in the next edition of the textbooks.

Sediq Patman, deputy minister for academic affairs at the Education Ministry, insisted there would have been no mistakes if the authors had approved the proofs. But this was not possible since “the books were not printed in our printing houses but outside the country”.

But Khalil Ahmad Shahed Zada, a member of parliament from the western Herat province and a member of the parliamentary cultural commission, blamed the shoddy production on the “nonchalance of the authorities”.

“If the mistakes happened during the printing it was because of lack of supervision,” he said, adding that Afghan schoolchildren should have got the best of books because “we (paid) the money to have the best”.

“Even the books that are available in the bazaar have so many mistakes.”

He joined others in lamenting the fact that neither the parliamentary commission nor local schoolteachers were consulted about the design, content or production of the new textbooks and curriculum.

The head of literature in one of Kabul’s most famous schools said the ministry of education only sought teachers’ views on the quality of the books after they had already been printed.

“They (the Education Ministry) should have invited experienced teachers to contribute before the curriculum was finalised,” he said. “What is the use of giving our views when everything is done?”

External specialists

The project for curriculum reform in Afghan schools began in 2002 and has since absorbed millions of dollars, including a tenth of UNICEF’s total budget for Afghanistan in the last three years, according to Aziz Froutan, a UNICEF spokesperson.

Officials in the Education Ministry and the Educational Curriculum Development Directorate said the costs kept mounting due to delays, the hiring of external specialists, and exorbitant production expenses.

Ministry officials said roughly 400 people have worked on curriculum development since the project’s inception. According to Gulistani, half of them were external advisors, mainly Afghans based abroad, whose wages were paid with assistance from the World Bank.

“Each advisor worked with us for one year, and left. Only 40 of them are still working with us,” he said.

Not unexpectedly there has been considerable dispute over the disparity of salaries between external experts and locals. Even Gul Ahmad Saghari, head author of the textbook project, has complaints.

He told Killid the Afghans based abroad “worked with us for exorbitant salaries … we worked for small salaries, sitting up all night to improve the books.”

And meanwhile, far away from the political wrangling, Afghan school children are muddling along as best they can with flawed textbooks.

*Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.