International Issues

Last spring, while Tunisians and Egyptians celebrated the fall of authoritarian regimes, the people of Bahrain also staged a series of peaceful protests. They were met by fierce repression.

Leaders of the teachers' union were arrested and sentenced to long jail terms. This weekend, their appeal comes before the courts.

The Education International, representing some thirty million unionized teachers around the world, has called for a major online campaign to press the Bahraini government to drop the charges.

Education International (EI) calls on you to urge the Bahraini authorities to review the charges and convictions and commute sentences of all teachers, teacher unionists and students charged with offences related to exercise of freedom of speech and right to assemble.

Read more: Teacher trade unionists face long jail terms - your protests needed

Another plank of the education platform of the Gillard Government is in danger of collapsing. The fast-track teacher training program Teach for Australia is under question following new research findings that the majority of teachers in its US counterpart Teach for America leave teaching after 3 years. The attrition rate in Teach for America is much higher than for traditionally trained new teachers.

If similar high attrition rates are reproduced in Teach for Australia not only will $22 million be wasted, but it will end up exacerbating the problem it is supposed to solve – namely, retaining high quality teachers in disadvantaged schools.

The whole idea behind Teach for America (TFA) and its Australian clone is to improve results in disadvantaged schools by fast-tracking high achieving graduates who do not have formal teacher qualifications into teaching in these schools. Graduates get five weeks of intensive teacher training (in Australia it is six weeks) and they agree to stay in disadvantaged schools for two years.

Read more: High Teacher Turnover in Teach for America

Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA is requesting donations to assist victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa. Donations will be directed to one of our Solidar alliance partners, the German Workers' Samaritan Federation, which is working in the area to provide relief, food, water and healthcare assistance.

Due to two years of drought and subsequent crop failure, many people in Somalia, southern Ethiopia, South Sudan and Djibouti have fled their land to seek assistance in refugee camps in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.

An estimated 11.3 million people are in immediate need of assistance and about 10,000 people a week are arriving at the giant Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

Read more: East Africa Famine Appeal - Please give generously

Rupert Murdoch wants to sack half of Britain's teachers and replace them with cranky computer systems sold by one of his companies.

Any normal education secretary would laugh at the idea. But Murdoch's companies gave Education Secretary Michael Gove hundreds of thousands of pounds.

And Gove seems to be taking Murdoch's educational ideas as seriously as he took Murdoch's money.

Before we come onto why the publisher of sleazy newspapers thinks he should be in charge of our children, let's look at Gove.

It seems that the Murdoch companies have a policy of handing money to Conservative Party figures.

Read more: Do you want Murdoch in charge of your kids?

I will be marching with the Save Our Schools coalition of teachers and parents on July 30 in Washington, D.C. I know you will be, too. I hope we are joined by many thousands of concerned citizens who want to save our schools from the bad ideas and bad policies now harming them.

I am marching to protest the status quo of high-stakes testing, attacks on the education profession, and creeping privatization.

I want to protest the federal government's punitive ideas about school reform, specifically, No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top. Neither of these programs has any validation in research or practice or evidence. The nation's teachers and parents know that NCLB has been a policy disaster. Race to the Top incorporates the same failed ideas. Why doesn't Congress know?

Read more: USA: Save Our Schools March