# data[].attributes.body
Jacob Cichosz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you've ever tried to command the attention of more than a handful of youngsters -- or, let's face it, adults -- it's not hard to see why low student-teacher ratios are highly sought-after in the education world. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the overall ...

# data[].attributes.body
Jacob Cichosz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
See more videos at: http://talkboard.com.au/ In this video, we look at the Human Development Index as an alternative measure of living standards to GDP.

# data[].attributes.body
Jacob cichosz

# data[].attributes.body
Jacob c

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is one slump in growth rate that the nation can rejoice over. According to the Census of 2001- 2011, India's population has grown at 17.7 per cent as against 21.5 per cent in the decade.

The country's population at present is 1.21 billion, an increase of 181.96 million since 2001. What is even more comforting for the country's planners is the fact that female growth rate has been better than male growth rate.

The male population has gone up by 90.97 million, against a rise of 90.99 in the population of females over the last 10 years.

The rate of growth of the female population is 18.3 per cent, while the male growth rate stands at 17.1 per cent, according to the final census released by Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Tuesday.

While there has been a 3.8 per cent drop in the overall growth rate, there is still scope for improvement as 14 states and Union Territories have registered over 20 per cent growth in population figures.

Among the major states, Bihar has recorded the highest decadal growth in population (25.4 per cent), surpassing West Bengal, which occupied the first position in 1991-2001. More than two-third of the country's population lives in rural areas.

As per census 2011, 833.5 million people live in rural areas, while 377.1 million people live in urban centres.

Delhi has the highest proportion of urban population at 97.5 per cent.

Top five states in terms of urban population are Goa (62.2 per cent), Mizoram (52.1 per cent), Tamil Nadu (48.4 per cent), Kerala (47.7 per cent) and Maharashtra (45.2 per cent).

The literacy rate in India has risen to 73 per cent in comparison to 64.8 per cent in 2001.

While male literacy rate stands at 80.9 per cent, which is 5.6 per cent higher than the previous census, the female literacy rate has been recorded at 64.6 per cent, an increase of 10.9 per cent since 2001.

The gap in literacy rate between urban and rural areas and between males and females has also declined.

In Census 2011, the gap stands at 16.3 points. India's sex ratio in 2011 stands at 943 (females against 1000 males), which is 10 per cent more than the last census, when it was 933.

Haryana has the worst sex ratio at 879, while Kerala is the best at 1,084.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
India's literacy rate rises to 73 per cent as population growth dips

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to the Census of 2001-2011, India's population has grown at 17.7 per cent, as against 21.5 per cent in the decade. The country's literacy rate has risen to 73 per cent in comparison to 64.8 per cent in 2001.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Can the world do better? Experts and diplomats have been working for two years to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the previous millennium goals in guiding development strategy and steering international aid over the next 15 years. The targets are expected to be formally adopted by the United Nations in September.

An educated population is a critical precondition for broadly shared prosperity - an essential tool for nations seeking a role in the global production chains driving economic growth around the world. But simply pursuing "universal education" will not get us there. It cannot do the job alone.

Aiming resources at expanding access will probably be fruitless without an understanding of what a quality education means. And without some clear, measurable standards laying out the skills that must be achieved, the strategy is likely to fall short again.

A report published on Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the PISA standardized tests taken every few years by a sample of 15-year-olds in some 75 countries, offers up a distressing take on the state of the world's learning. Even among relatively wealthy countries, many students fail to master the most basic skills.

Take Mexico, a middle-income economy with near-universal primary education and a secondary school enrollment of 70 percent. In the 2012 PISA test, 54 percent of Mexican students failed to meet the most basic level of proficiency, which the O.E.C.D. considers "necessary for participating productively in modern economies."

Achieving PISA's Level 1 requires no more than a sort of modern functional literacy. Fifteen-year-olds need to be able to figure out, for instance, how many South African rand Mei-Liing will get if she changes 3,000 Singapore dollars into the South African currency at the rate of 1 Singapore dollar for 4.2 rand. (The answer is 12,600.)

Among 15-year-olds, 89 percent of Ghanaians failed to reach this level, as did 74 percent of Indonesians and 64 percent of Brazilians. So did 24 percent of Americans.

These deficiencies impose a huge cost. The O.E.C.D. report - put together by Professor Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich - takes a shot at modeling the impact of education on economic growth.

If the skills of every student in secondary school were to be brought up to Level 1 over the next 15 years, it estimates, Ghana would add more than 1.2 percentage points a year to its economic growth over the long term. Indonesia would grow nearly 1 percentage point faster. Bringing every child in secondary school up to this level would provide far more economic punch than universal secondary enrollment at the current quality.

It is not surprising that the world settled for targets on the quantity of education but skimped on quality, which is not only difficult to deliver but also more contentious and harder to measure.

"Universal education is an agenda with no opposition; it offers free services and swells public employment," said Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development. "Quality is a little more politically contentious."

Policies aimed at promoting enrollment, like subsidies or the conditional cash transfers offered to parents who sent their children to school in Mexico or Brazil, added students to the system without improving its capacity.

"The challenge on quality is an outcome of success," said Chandrika Bahadur, director for Education Initiatives at the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a group advising the world body on the new development strategies. "Systems were overburdened by the influx of children coming in, and very quickly it became a problem to ensure that they were learning well."

They weren't. There is still very little information on how well - or badly - children around the world are doing at school in many countries. But a recent effort by the World Bank to measure the quality of education systems in some African countries painted a dismal tableau of what they are being offered.

In Uganda, only one in five elementary schoolteachers meets the minimum standard of proficiency in math, language and pedagogy. Few of them spend much time teaching anyway. In surprise visits to public schools, survey takers found that 27 percent of teachers were absent. Of those present, 56 percent were not in the classroom during scheduled teaching hours.

The O.E.C.D. report - aimed at influencing the debate over development goals at the United Nations - proposes a target of providing universal secondary education by 2030 that ensures all students achieve the basic level of skill as measured by PISA. The economic gains, it argues, would more than pay for the effort.

Distressingly, the educational goals under discussion do not focus on quality. The draft of the United Nations document hazily promises "equitable and effective" universal secondary education that produces "relevant and effective" learning outcomes. But it fails to define the terms. The promise to eliminate illiteracy among the young is the nearest it comes to a concrete, meaningful target.

Achieving quality will be tough and more expensive. Teachers have to be retrained, curriculums revised and pedagogical approaches changed. All this while providing universal secondary education and closing the gap that still remains in primary access at a time in which development assistance for education is waning.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle is developing a useful measure of educational competence to ensure accountability around the world among radically different cultures with different educational philosophies. "Is there a common set of questions?" Ms. Bahadur asked. PISA tests, she noted, are designed for rich countries.

The superheated debate over the use of standardized tests in the United States suggests how difficult that task can be.

But without an improvement not just in the inputs to education (like the number of teachers and time devoted to instruction) but in the outcomes as well (better-performing students), much of the effort may go to waste. "Equity at the price of poor overall outcomes," said Andreas Schleicher, who heads PISA at the O.E.C.D., "is not doing anyone any good."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
organization for economic cooperation and development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Can the world do better? Experts and diplomats have been working for two years to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the previous millennium goals in guiding development strategy and steering international aid over the next 15 years. The targets are expected to be formally adopted by the United Nations in September.

# data[].attributes.body
Dylan redetzke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a metric developed and used by the United Nations to take the emphasis off economic growth, and instead, focus on human physical and educational wellbeing. Its purpose is to show that even though a country has a high per capita income, that country has to adopt policies that use that economic prosperity for the benefit of its citizens.

The HDI is a geometric mean of three categories of human achievement:

1. Life expectancy, using a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of 85 years

2. Education, which has two subsets:

1. Average years of education for the adults over 25 and

2. Average expected education years for children entering school

3. (Both subset categories for education are capped at 18 years)

3. Gross national income per capita, with a range of $US 100 to a maximum of $US 75,000

The calculated amounts for these three categories are then combined into one composite HDI index for a given country. The calculation is based on the geometric mean of the three categories.

As of 2013, Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Netherlands, and the United States held the top 5 positions on the HDI index list of Very High Human Development.

Sierra Leone, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo and Niger were at the bottom of the HDI index as countries with Low Human Development.

The United Nations notes that the HDI does not highlight other important human issues such as inequality, poverty, human security and safety, and empowerment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a metric developed by the United Nations to take the emphasis off economic growth and focus on human wellbeing.

# data[].attributes.body
Tyler Foust

# data[].attributes.body
Tyler foust

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This chart depicts the pupil-teacher ratio worldwide for primary schools. This ratio is calculated by dividing the number of pupils enrolled in primary school divided by the number of primary school teachers. Depicted on the map is the average of each cou

# data[].attributes.body
Dylan Redetzke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Some countries are making great strides in human development, others less so
SINCE 1980 the country that has made the greatest strides in improving human development is Nepal, according to the UN's annual Human Development Index (HDI). The index is a combination of three sub-indices covering wealth, health and education. The countries whose HDI has improved the most since 1980 are mainly in Asia. China and India have been helped by rapid GDP growth, but even slower-growing countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh have fostered human development by making progress in health and education. The countries where HDI has improved the least are mainly in Africa, with Zimbabwe at the bottom of the pile.

For the first time this year the UN's report also considers the unevenness in the distribution of wealth, health and education among a country's people to produce a new inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) which penalises countries according to the inequality of their development. This reduces countries' 2010 HDI scores by 22% on average. China's HDI is reduced by 23% and India's by 30%, which suggests that the former's rapid development has been the more equitable.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Human Development Index: Developing humans | The Economist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some countries are making great strides in human development, others less so SINCE 1980 the country that has made the greatest strides in improving human development is Nepal, according to the UN's annual Human Development Index (HDI). The index is a combination of three sub-indices covering wealth, health and education.

# data[].attributes.body
Tyler Foust

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pupil-teacher ratio in primary education (headcount basis) | Data

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pupil-teacher ratio in primary education (headcount basis) from The World Bank: Data

# data[].attributes.body
Dylan redetzke