Scholarships Grants

Bergen, Germany (AHN) – 71% of teachers feel that a secure internet “parent portal,” where parents could see details about their child’s schooling, would improve school-to-parent communication.

In the survey conducted by itslearning on teachers in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the U.S., 75% of the 5,805 teachers surveyed said parental involvement is important to student’s education. However 44% said they didn’t have the time or means to communicate with parents as much as they would like.

“Teachers agree that involving parents is critical, but they aren’t able to communicate with parents effectively,” says Morten Fahlvik, Research Manager at itslearning.

Teachers currently communicate with parents with 46% of them using email reach their students’ parents at least once a month; 37% use texts/SMSs and 24% still send letters.

School Boards and technology companies are currently experimenting with different online tools to make the teacher parent communication relationship more seamless.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The U.S. postal With the national unemployment rate running at 9.5 percent The U.S. Postal Service announced Thursday it is offering buyouts to eligible employees in an effort to cut 7,500 administrative jobs.

Postal officials hope the $20,000 buyout packages encourage enough workers to retire early to achieve the reduction of 7,500 employees.

The Voluntary Early Retirement plan and financial incentives is being made available only to employees who work as career nonbargaining personnel at “headquarters, headquarters-related field units, area offices and administrative personnel at customer service district offices,” USPS officials said in a statement.

Employees can choose to leave by May 31. But with the nation’s unemployment rate running at 9.5 percent, this buyout might not achieve its target, which was the case in 2009 when a buyout expected to encourage 30,000 workers to voluntarily retire only drew 21,000 takers.

USPS officials also said they wanted to close seven struggling district offices located around the country.

The postal service has seen a decline in mail volume and revenue as it competes with use of the Internet, as well as competition from companies such as UPS and FedEx.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe put the situation into perspective.

“It’s critical that we adjust our workforce to match America’s changing communications trends as mail volumes continue to decline,” Donahoe said. “At every step and with every change, our focus remains on our customers and continuing to provide outstanding customer service.”

The district offices are not used for mail delivery or collection. The offices slated for closing are located in Columbus, Ohio; Troy, Mich.; Carol Stream, Ill.; Providence, R.I.; Macon, Ga.; Big Sky, Mont.; and Albuquerque, N.M.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Harvard University remains the nation’s leading medical school but was overtaken by Stanford as the number one business school in the 2012 rankings of the U.S. News & World Report. Among law schools, a new school has moved up into the top 14 for the first time.

Yale maintained its ranking as the best law school for the 20th consecutive year. Harvard Law School kept second place for another year, as did all the others in the top 5, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago Law School.

A new school entered the top 14, which has featured an elite group of the same schools in different orders since the rankings began nearly three decades ago. The University of Texas-Austin School of Law broke into the T14, as it is known in the legal community, tying with the Georgetown Law Center in 14th place.

Among medical schools, Harvard is still in first place, followed by the University of Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.

Duke University shares fifth place with three other schools: Stanford, the University of California in San Francisco, and Yale. The University of Washington and Columbia University round out the top 10 medical schools.

Harvard slipped one notch to second place in U.S. News’ list of best graduate business schools, making way for Stanford to occupy first place. The two schools tied last year for the top spot.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School both came in third, followed by Northwestern University (Kellogg), which also tied with the University of Chicago (Booth) for fifth place.

Dartmouth and the University of California Berkeley (Haas) share seventh place, followed by Columbia and New York University (Stern).

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recommended Wednesday an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law because of shortcomings. According to Duncan, more than 80,000 of 100,000 public schools in the U.S. could be classified as failing, based on the law.

Duncan gave the estimate based on analysis of testing trends and the impact of the law’s pass-fail school rating system. Duncan told Congress that some of the country’s best-run schools would likely fail the No Child Left Behind fast-rising standardized testing targets.

While some experts challenged Duncan’s projection, educators said the secretary’s statement confirms their conclusion that the average American public school will never reach the standards in the law, introduced by President George W. Bush and passed in 2002, that aimed math and reading proficiency for all students by 2014.

The law requires all public schools to hold yearly testing of reading and math skills from third to eighth grades and once in high school. Average results for all students and results by ethnic groups and other criteria must be published. States were mandated to outline their statistical paths for the next 12 years.

Duncan stressed the law is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed this year, otherwise he forecast 82 percent of the schools could miss testing targets. That would be up from 37 percent in 2010.

Many educators have complained that they are unfairly penalized even if only few of their students perform poorly. The law placed a school on probation if students from any ethnic groups miss the targets. Schools that miss targets for two straight years are classified as “needing improvement” and face sanctions such as staff changes or shutdowns.

President Barack Obama favored loosening accountability rules for most schools, but tightening regulations for the lowest performers. Although Obama made public his recommendation in 2010, Congress has not acted on the president’s proposal although a substantial number of key Republic and Democratic legislators agree the law is due for amendment.

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Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (AHN) – Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah returned home Wednesday after months of recuperation abroad and immediately ordered an increase in social benefits for citizens.

The king, who underwent spinal surgery in the U.S. in November and stayed in New York and Morocco to recuperate, issued royal decrees increasing the country’s development fund and the state bank’s capital to provide more interest-free loans for use in building homes, getting married or starting up a business.

Abdullah also increased the social insurance fund and the number of beneficiaries to 15 from eight per family. He allocated $933 million in assistance for the poor so they can repair their homes and pay utility bills. Another $320,000 was allocated for vocational training courses for women to increase employment of the youth.

A foreign scholarship program was extended for five more years while salaries and benefits of government workers were increased 15 percent.

The king vowed to tackle youth unemployment that currently stands at 40 percent.

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Tucson, AZ, United States (AHN) – The University of Arizona has established an institute to promote civility in public debate. The center, which is chaired by two former U.S. presidents, follows last month’s shooting in Tucson that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and left six dead.

The National Institute for Civil Discourse is a non-partisan center at the university’s School of Government and Public Policy.

Its mission is to promote civic engagement consistent with First Amendment principles by developing programs and by gathering policy-makers to discuss issues that attract controversy and acrimony.

The center is chared by former President George H. W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton.

“Our country needs a setting for political debate that is both frank and civil,” Bush said in a statement released bythe university.

“America faces big challenges in revitalizing the American Dream at home and preserving our leadership for security, peace, freedom and prosperity in the world. Meeting them requires an honest dialogue celebrating both a clarification of our differences and a genuine stand for principled comparisons,” Clinton added.

The institute’s board is made up of a mix of liberal and conservative leaders, including Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff of the Reagan White House, and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

FOX host Greta Van Susteren and Harvard Institute of Politics director Trey Grayson are also members of the board.

Giffords was among 13 people wounded when a gunman opened fire outside a Safeway in Tucson on Jan. 8. One of her aides died in the tragedy along with a judge, John Roll, whom Bush appointed to the federal bench, and a nine-year old girl who had been elected to her school’s student council.

The shooting took place amid a highly charged national debate about issues such as immigration and healthcare. It ignited criticisms and accusations of partisanship and the use of inciteful political rhetoric, an argument President Barack Obama addressed in his speech at the university’s memorial for the shooting victims.

“The truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,” Obama had said. “None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.”

“If, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse,” he added, “let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The United States reiterated its focus on “visa fraud” in the ongoing investigation into Tri-Valley University while the subject was highlighted during high-level visits from Indian officials to the U.S.

The latest efforts of Sushmita Thomas, Indian Consul General in San Francisco, on Wednesday resulted in the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) de-tagging three more Indian students out of total 18, bringing the number to five.

Noting that ICE has returned the passport of these three students along with two others from whom radio tags were removed last week, Thomas elaborated that the students were taken to ICE by two immigration attorneys.

Both of the attorneys, Kalpana Peddibhotla and Manpreet Gahra, are from the South Asian Bar Association, which is cooperating with the Consulate to provide free legal aid for the Tri Valley students.

There has been a flurry of diplomatic activities over the last weeks, as more than 1,500 students of Indian origin await results of the ongoing investigation by the Department of Homeland Security into the murky waters of Tri-Valley University.

Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao met with U.S. Undersecretary for political affairs William Burn and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week.

Commenting on the meetings, Heide Bronke Fulton, director of the State Department’s Office of Press Relations, told All Headline News, “During these discussions the issue of Tri-Valley University was raised. This is the issue that the United States government takes very seriously. Our Department of Homeland Security is leading the investigation into the situation and has established a website to assist all students who are affected by the issue of fraud that has risen.”

Asked to sum up her advise to the affected students, Indian Foreign Secretary Rao told AHN, “To stay in touch with the embassy and the consulates —– to reach out to the embassy and the consulates and not to be afraid to reach out to embassy and consulates —- we are there to help you to try to seek a solution to your problems and to their parents back home similar message —- that we would do our best to help them and to take up their case with the US authorities —- we are there to help Indian citizens —- that is the primary responsibility and primary work of any diplomatic establishment abroad.”

Addressing journalists on Wednesday, PJ Crowley, the State Department spokesman, said, “We will work as cooperatively as we can with the Indian government as we move ahead here, but it’s hard to know exactly what is possible because the matter is still under investigation.”

Commenting on the phone conversation between Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the weekend, Crowley said, “India has made the point, and we understand it fully, that students caught up in this, the risk is that they’ll lose a year of schooling and go through great inconvenience as this matter is being investigated. We do understand that and we have pledged our cooperation.”

During the State Department briefing Crowley said, “But we do recognize that there’s – are strong indications of visa fraud, and we don’t know who is involved, we don’t know how they got involved, but this has to be investigated fully, and we will do that.”

Over the weekend visiting Indian minister Krishna told journalists in New York, “We would like to assure that we have taken attempt with the authorities in the United States at the highest level and we have been assured that the students in the Tri-Valley – so called university will be dealt in all fairness – just not legalistically but taking into on the basis of humanitarian situations.”

“Our consul general in San Francisco has already provided legal assistance to some of these affected students,” added Krishna.

Indian Consul General Thomas told AHN, “We have been speaking to ICE repeatedly regularly – in fact we have been speaking to their principal chief investigator in this case and we have finally got them to agree that they would be dealing with this in a very humanitarian manner – not just a legalistical manner – and that in the cases where they are convinced that the students were not guilty – they would be willing to help them -either leave for India and then come back without prejudice or allow them to transfer to other universities and if their transfers get accepted or allow them a reinstatement of their visas if the universities from where they originally transferred accept them back.”

Calling the process “a long haul,” Thomas said, “I feel definitely it would be much longer than that–six to seven months or eight months but definitely there is a lot of hope and a lot of student whom we can possibly help to reinstate themselves and to get back to their studies.”

Over the weekend, a group of 25 students along with Mohan Nannapaneni, secretary of the Telgu Association of North American (TANA), met with Krishna to apprise him of the situation.

After the meeting, Nannapaneni told AHN, “We had a very lengthy meeting. The foreign affairs minister and the external affairs secretary listened to our concerns very carefully and a lot of students came and they gave a very clear description of their problems that they are going through.”

“Until we met the minister they didn’t even have an idea what exactly was going on here and the ministry and the government – they did not understand the urgency of this issue – now at least we have a feeling that they know the urgency of the issue and they are going to work quickly on it,” hoped Nannapaneni.

Praising TANA for supporting the students in distress, the Indian Consul General urged other community organizations to come forward with their resources to help these students.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke says the unemployment rate in the United States will not drop to pre-financial crisis levels for a number of years.

Bernanke made that statement Thursday in answer to questions about the economy from the Congressional Committee on the Budget.

In addition, he said that it was impossible to consider the economic recovery to be established until there is a strong and sustained creation of jobs.

The U.S. economy only created 36,000 net jobs in January. That was not sufficient to cover population growth and did little to help the millions of people who lost their jobs during the recession or in its aftermath. For example, the economy needs to create from 120,000 to 200,000 jobs monthly just to absorb new workers entering the labor force for the first time.

Moreover, Bernanke said that the long-term challenges presented by the high federal deficit were “daunting” and that the present high deficit was “unsustainable.”

The total government debt is now 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and forecast to rise to 150 percent of GDP by 2030. The total federal budget deficit is 9 percent of current GDP.

By contrast, European Union nations try to keep budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP.

GDP is the total amount of goods and services consumed in the nation. The budget deficit is the amount the government spends each year in excess of its income, expressed as a percentage of the national GDP.

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Student loans in the United Kingdom is given to pay the tuition fees and the other essential educational everyday expenditure like hall fare, books, notes, etc. This is only appropriate for the private institutions. Government fund for education is not a fraction of Student financial aid. It means to award scholarship for each and every student. Some countries like Germany, gives a little amount of financial help for every student. A synonym of financial aid is scholarship. There are many types of scholarships and loans in the schools and colleges.

All the government of the states of U.S offers merit based scholarships, grants; work with job and educational loans. There is also some research based scholarship for the student. In this year, Norwegian government offers more than eight hundred scholarships for the students. Research based scholarship means, a student can get financial or facility help by working in the research works of the country. In this year, more than 8000 undergraduate or post graduate stunts are going to get scholarship according to their merit. There is some division of scholarship. The government has done a tremendous job here. Pell scholarship, SEOG scholarship, SMART scholarship, Academic performance scholarship, FWS scholarship, and FSL scholarship is almost same in the developed countries. All of these scholarships except FSL scholarship are for undergraduate students. FSL scholarship is for post graduate students. There are also some scholarships like Bill-Melinda scholarship, IBM scholarship, Munich scholarship for the school or college students. They are- Pell scholarship, SEOG scholarship, SMART scholarship, Academic performance scholarship, FWS scholarship, and FSL scholarship. Some educational loans also offered to the students. They are, Federal plus loan, FS loan, Federal parkas loan etc. In 10/7/2010, congress has eliminated PL loan, which act can hamper a life of a student. Without scholarship, this is kind of impossible to study in the developed countries like United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Norway, New Zeeland, Australia and Canada. Students from third world countries only come to these countries for study with scholarship. Without scholarship, this is impossible to bear the cost of study.

In many European countries, the student loan is very essential for the students, because the cost of education is very expensive there. The privet universities sometimes funded with endowment. The government institutions are normally funded fully or partially by the local state authority. Sometimes, the university governing body contributes a large amount of money for the students. In United Kingdom and in the United States, most of the Universities or other educational institutions are private. So the full free tuition fee culture is very low in those private universities. For this reason, the education is very expensive there. United Kingdom is a well educated country. The percentage of education is almost hundred percent there. As the education is very expensive there, student loans are very important.

Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – U.S. nonfarm employment figures rose slightly, far less than the pundits had predicted but the government cited severe weather as affecting construction payrolls while the White House welcomed the slight dip in unemployment.

Posting on the White House blog, Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) stated, “The 0.8 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate over the past two months is a welcome development; however, the rate remains unacceptably high.”

“Severe weather in some parts of the country may have impacted employment and hours in some industries,” Goolsbee said.

Speaking on the eve of the release on Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke said that it will be several years before unemployment returns to more normal levels.

Bernanke told his audience at a luncheon at the National Press Club that consumer spending and business investment are signs that a “self sustaining recovery…may be taking hold,” predicting, “a more rapid pace of economic recovery in 2011 than we saw last year.”

The figures are of paramount importance to the Federal Reserve policy, which includes $600 billion of long-term asset buying that begun in November.

Bernanke noted that the purchase is supporting the economy and cited both rises in stock market indices and basic economic as evidence.

The modest job gains delivered for January did not match other data for the month, which had suggested employment growth was picking up, raising hopes that the manufacturing-driven recovery was now spreading to other sectors of the economy.

Goolsbee, however, cautioned against reading “too much into any one monthly report,” as “The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision.”

He noted, “The overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years, but there will surely be bumps in the road ahead.”

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