PROPOSAL:
MASTER TEACHERS BY SATELLITE
FOR AFGHANISTAN
To supply by satellite television an elementary school
& literacy education for every little girl and little boy in
Afghanistan who does not have a regular school, including in rural
areas where distance and dangerous conditions still obtain, and to provide
literacy training for adults who desire it.
A PROPOSAL TO FILL, WITHIN SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR,
THE UNMET NEED FOR LITERACY
AND FIRST TO THIRD
GRADE TEACHERS
IN AFGHANISTAN
FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS
I
Problem: An
acute shortage in Afghanistan
of teachers and elementary schools, particularly in rural areas and especially
for girls.
The
adult literacy rate in Afghanistan
is 43% and, for female adults, it is 14% (UNICEF, Attachment A). An estimated 1.2 million girls, who should be
in primary school, are not. (Id.)
This
shortage has been well recognized. UNICEF, together with the Afghanistan
Ministry of Education, has attempted in the past two years to create “community
based schools” (CBS) in rural villages (Attachment B). There are over 2,600 of
these CBS in rural Afghanistan. But they are little more than a package of
notebooks, literacy texts and pencils, presided over by a marginally literate
local volunteer, attempting to teach reading and writing to children.
International
charities have constructed a few schools in rural villages in Afghanistan.
But
even as we write this, schools in Afghanistan are being burned and destroyed,
including those recently constructed by international charities in rural
areas.
This
tragic situation has been aptly described by Tamim Ansary:
“Many groups set out to build schools in rural areas,
because they saw the struggle in Afghanistan as a battle for hearts and
minds: they saw that young people growing up unable to read and
cut off from information about the larger world were locked into a sort of
prison, defenseless against Jihadist propaganda injected into their milieu
by stateless thugs.” . . .
“These are the schools now under attack by local reactionaries, by
drug lords’ henchmen, by cross-border terrorists, by stateless militant
international revolutionaries eager to drag Afghanistan (and the world) back to
an invented past, by the whole kit and
caboodle the media usually lumps under the single heading of “Taliban”—a
misnomer because it suggests an organization with headquarters and leaders,
whereas, in fact, “Taliban” increasingly refers to an ideology, a social
movement, a historical current.” (Attachment C is the full text of this Letter;
Tamim Ansary is an Afghan-American journalist and the author of West of Kabul, East of New
York.)
II Review of Possible Solutions:
a) More local, rural teachers and schools – but:
Training teachers takes years. Village children,
particularly girls, cannot travel to central schools because there are no
roads, no vehicles, and ample danger. And
the very act of teaching now invites attack.
b) Attract teachers from outside Afghanistan, from Iran
or Pakistan,
or returning refugees – but even these fully trained teachers,
themselves Afghans, cannot be sent into danger.
c) The UNICEF-organized Community Based Schools (CBS) in
rural villages – but although creative, this program is essentially just
giving books and pencils to students without the teacher to engage, motivate
and help them.
d) None of these are real-time solutions. Therefore please consider the following
proposal.
III The Master Teacher by Satellite Proposal: Solving Literacy and First through Third Grade
in 6 to 12 Months, and for the Next Ten Years.
(1) Identify one of the best working teachers in Afghanistan for each level, literacy and first through
third grade, one in each grade, at the best public schools in Kabul.
(2) Broadcast -- for the two hours of 10:00 AM to 12 noon every
day, 6 days a week, 40 weeks a year, on one of each of the existing five satellite
channels -- a master teacher teaching, with extensive complementary
audio-visual aids, in literacy and grades one through three.
This is known as “distance learning”,
and is a rapidly growing educational phenomenon throughout the world.
(Broadcast time is one of the 3 largest
components of the budget for MTSA. The Afghanistan national satellite T-V
station, Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), has already committed to provide
this broadcast time as an in-kind contribution to MTSA). (Attachment D, commitment letter from RTA).
(3) The broadcast must adhere closely to the
prescribed curriculum as approved by the Ministry of Education, focused particularly
on reading and writing and numbers. Complimentary
to the traditional teacher, the broadcast shall include the full range of
audio-visual resources available, giving preference to locally produced
material specific to Afghanistan.
(Production of this 480 hours of
teaching content is one of the 3 largest components of the MTSA budget).
(Attachment E is an example of the preliminary script for one proposed daily 15
minute literacy segment, based on a beloved Afghan comic figure, Mulla Nasrudin,
plus pages from the official literacy curriculum. See also Budget, II-C.)
(4) Each school and every home in Afghanistan
with a T-V must be able and permitted to
receive the instruction lessons, absolutely free.
(5) Each school room or village anywhere in Afghanistan
without a certificated teacher shall be provided with a TV and satellite dish,
a receiver and a solar power cell, sufficient to receive the programming. The
MTSA will incorporate and build on the over 2,680 Community Based Schools (CBS)
developed by UNICEF and provincial Ministries of Education in rural areas of Afghanistan.
(Installation of this equipment in the
villages in one of the 3 largest
components of the budget for the MTSA Project).
In addition, there will be a half-time teachers’
aide to supervise the students before, during and after the instruction. Each class will be supplied written materials,
paper and pencils.
(6) If as anticipated there is no school
building, the students and aide and the equipment can be accommodated in a
private house of one of the students, or a shed or a tent. In many public city schools now operating in Afghanistan
instruction is outdoors because of a lack of classrooms. The children sit on mats in whatever shade is
available. The UNICEF staff on the
Community Based Schools (CBS) for the Central Provinces of Afghanistan has
agreed to identify the 100 village CBS which might be appropriate for the MTSA
pilot project. (Attachment F is an unofficial Report on the current state of
the existing Community Based Schools.)
(7) The private satellite channels will be asked
to donate two hours per day, and also be asked to contribute to the cost of
making the reception equipment available to every school or village that needs
it. Reception in the private and
government sectors to MTSA has been extraordinarily positive. Another TV channel, just getting started, has
already endorsed the MTSA and offered assistance, and government agencies have
indicated their support. (Attachment
G). Still to be negotiated, of course,
is the final approval of the Ministry of Education, which cannot occur until a
fully developed educational content is in place, which cannot occur until
funding is found for producing it.
(8) The video teachers shall assign homework to
be collected by the teachers aide, and also shall suggest additional school
work for the students, such as art projects, reading books of social sciences,
natural sciences, literature and history, and, as required in Afghanistan,
religion.
(9) How can the program avoid the problems of
undesirable material or even pornography being seen by children? Built into the T-V and the receiver box at
the factory shall be a chip which will guarantee that the reception on the
equipment shall be limited to the educational material prescribed in this
program. This will avoid the problems of
parental control, as well as the unauthorized use of the equipment. This will
also make the equipment not worth stealing, as it cannot be used for any other
purpose.
(10) In summary, the program will deliver the literacy and
first to third grade curriculum of the Afghanistan Ministry of Education to
presently unserved students, using an innovative model of combining the
following tried and tested methodologies:
the standard curriculum, a teacher’s aide, and modern audio-visual educational
programming which will motivate, inform and instruct the students.
IV
Follow-up On The Basic Program
(1) The broadcasts shall be recorded, both at the studio and at
each class site. At the village or remote class site, each recorded two hour unit
can be replayed for the same or a different set of students (for example, for
older boys in the first morning class, then girls, then younger boys in the
afternoon, or for adults in the evening).
(2) In the year following the first year, the daily tapes can be
edited, and the best elements saved to make an official tape version of each
class, for each day of the school year.
(3) In the year following the first year, in addition to the
edited tapes, the MTSA Project or the Ministry of Education can produce manuals for
training, and instructions and materials to go with the tapes.
(4) Even though there are tapes, live broadcasts and production of
new content should be continued as well, so as to allow tapes with both female
and male instructors, and Dari, Pashto and other languages. (By the time all of these variations have
been completed, it may be time to start the series again because times and the
official curriculum may have changed.)
(5) As sophistication of the technology
advances, each day’s T-V and instructional program can be stored on a web site
and ordered as desired, e.g., choosing the class for the second Tuesday in
April, a class would be able to choose a lesson in Pashto directed to boys, or
in Dari to girls, etc.
(6) Because the video
instruction received will be recorded on the equipment at the village site, even
in the first year, if there are enough students, classes of girls and boys can
be taught separately, with, for example, the girls receiving the broadcast in
the morning and the boys then watching it in the afternoon.
(7) For each up to 30 students
in the class, a half-time assistant teacher or teachers’ aide would be hired. These aides need not even be literate, as
their job is discipline and to follow the spoken instructions of the on-screen lessons.
(The aides may not know the material initially but will be able to learn it
with the students.)
(8) At least one person in the local village or school must be found
who is sufficiently literate that simple attendance records can be kept. If at all possible, some one somewhere in the
area should also be found who is technology literate with access to a computer
and e-mail. The tech aide can fix simple
equipment problems, email questions to the central staff or to a master teacher,
and deliver answers. Common queries can
go to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) computer web site.
(9) How can the homework and tests of the students in this remote
distance learning program be corrected and graded? In a more perfect world, traveling master teachers
of the MTSA Project could travel around the country, meeting students and
aides, answering questions, and reviewing homework. That is not feasible in the present unsettled
state of the countryside.
(10) But even illiterate and uneducated aides can receive homework and
sort it into a file for each student, essentially vouching for the quantity,
even if not the quality, of each student’s work. Later on, when a fax machine and satellite
cell phone can be added to the project’s equipment, the aide may be able to fax
tests to the Ministry of Education or the MTSA Project for correction, or
receive a correction sheet for correcting multiple choice tests, such as in
math.
(11) As
the program gets more sophisticated, some of the techniques used by commercial
and university distance learning programs can be adopted, including direct e-mail
questioning by the students, video conferencing, and live chat between students
and a master teacher. The day’s assignments
for each day may also be stored on a web site to be accessed selectively as the
program matures.
(12) The above plan works for math, reading, science, geography,
history. There are some special cases,
for example writing composition, however where other solutions are needed:
(a) high tech: have the students write their papers, then
fax or scan and upload for review at a central site, or
(b) low tech: use local literate
volunteers, or
(c) when it becomes possible: have traveling
master teachers.
(13) Parent participation: In
addition to the aides, and even though probably there is no custom of parent
participation in education, this could be developed. It would require first an educational program
directed at parents, to encourage them to participate, even if they are
themselves illiterate, in the education of their children. The school could “tax” each parent ½ day per
semester to work at school, doing teacher aide work, or even more basic work
like building desks or providing lunch.
(14) In
upper classes, variations on this plan can also be tried -- with a different
master class program for each subject, maybe adding foreign teacher volunteers
for language and computers.
(15)
Possible Funding Sources – Public: United Nations, UNESCO, UNICEF, Ministry of
Education regular budget of the Government of Afghanistan, and Appeal to donor
nations which prize education, especially Japan, Germany,
USA. Private: Foundations, individuals and
companies with an interest in education, technology or Afghanistan.
MTSA has already submitted one proposal
for a portion of the project to the UN Democracy Fund, which is pending
A proposal by
MASTER TEACHERS BY SATELLITE FOR AFGHANISTAN
A project of the World Family Development
& Educational Program, Inc,
An IRS recognized 501(c)(3) California
corporation, Tax ID # 93-1048117
68 Ramona
Av, San Francisco, CA 94103 -- Rev. 061009
800-815-8103 Fx
415-522-1933 crs@afghanfriends.net
Kabul office c/o NOOR EDUCATIONAL CENTER 011-93-70-280-675
Project Director:
CAROL RUTH SILVER
Attachments:
A. UNICEF Schools Survey for Afghanistan 2006 [see pdf file and Attachment G below]
B. Community Based Schools (CBS) program of
UNICEF & Ministry of Education [see pdf file]
C.
Tamim Ansary letter on Schools in Afghanistan
[below]
D. Commitment
Letter from Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) General Director [see pdf file]
E.-1 Sample
screen play for Mulla Nasrudin series [below]
E- 2 Example
pages from new Literacy Textbook from
Afghanistan
Minister for Functional Literacy [see pdf file]
F. Endorsement
Letters [see pdf file]
G. Unofficial report on Community Based
Schools [below]
ADDENDUM ATTACHMENTS (Not
included in the pdf file)
Attachment H. Template
for eight 15-minute segments in 2 hours [below]
Attachment I.
Contest for Mulla Nasrudin
scripts [below]
V Budget
BUDGET
Rev
5 June 2006
FOR
MASTER TEACHERS BY SATELITE
FOR
AFGHANISTAN
(MTSA)
|
ITEM
|
IN KIND
|
DOLLARS
|
TOTAL
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I.
Fixed costs for broadcasting
|
|
|
|
|
A.
Broadcast time: 10:00 a.m.-12:00 noon,
six days
a week, 40 weeks per year, = 480 hours @ $1000 per hour (estimated value). Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) has committed
to this contribution =
|
$480,000
|
|
|
|
B.
Ancillary equipment necessary at RTA
|
|
$15,000
|
|
|
C.
Editors and producers, 3 person team at RTA @ $850 per month per
person inclusive of benefits x 3 = $2,550 x 12 =
|
|
$30,600
|
|
|
Totals
|
$480,000
|
|
$ 45,600
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
II. Fixed costs for programming
|
|
|
|
- Audio-visual
materials: Acquisition and modification
of existing available educational content for use by MTSA Project, on vendor
and independent contractor basis (cost to be determined)
|
|
TBD
|
TBD
|
- Professional Teacher frame for audio-visual content
|
|
|
|
|
B-1. Stipend to
part-time master teachers for advise on content and filming of their activities as
teacher, $100 per month X 12 months = $1200 X 5 =
|
|
$ 6,000
|
|
|
B-2.
Camera crew, 2 persons, half day, 6 days, 40 weeks,
@$500 per month each, X 12 months =
|
|
$12,000
|
|
|
B-3.
Director half time @ $500 per month X 12 =
B-4.
Script Writer @ $400 per month X 12
|
|
$ 6,000
$ 4,800
|
|
|
Sub total personnel
|
|
$28,800
|
|
|
B-5.
Additional personnel costs (taxes, insurance, etc.) estimated @ 20% of
personnel costs =
|
|
$ 5,760
|
|
|
|
IN KIND
|
DOLLARS
|
TOTAL
|
|
B-6. Editing tapes, one tape per
Class = six
per week X 40 weeks =
240 X 5 =
1200 tapes to edit @ $5.
per tape
(independent contractor basis) =
|
|
$ 6,000
|
|
|
B-7. Camera, boom, mike, lights, computer
aid, at rental value
= $200. per month X 10 = $2,000. X 5 =
|
|
$10,000
|
|
|
B-8.
Tapes—-six per week @ $5. per tape = $30 per week X 40 weeks = $1200. X 5 =
|
|
$ 6,000
|
|
|
Subtotal Sec. II-B costs (EXCLUDING
AUDIO-VISUAL CONTENT COSTS WHICH ARE TBD AS THE SUBJECT OF THIS PROPOSAL)
|
|
.
|
$ 85,360
|
|
C. Mulla
Nasrudin literacy series – The first
15 minute segment of each programming day will be a newly created series,
to be shot at the studios in Kabul of Afghan Film, featuring beloved Afghan
comic character Mulla Nasrudin teaching literacy (letters, numbers, reading
and writing, up to the full first grade level). Following is the budget submitted by Afghan
Film. Note that it is on a per-segment
basis,.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
C-1.
Personnel: actors, including
Mulla Nasrudin, his wife, his
donkey, villagers, boys, farmers, etc.
|
|
$ 5,000
|
|
|
C-2.
Personnel: crew, including
Director, script writer, camera man
& assistants (2), sound recorder & assistants (2), light men (2),
production manager & assistant (1), editor & assistant
|
|
$ 5,700
|
|
|
C-3.
Music background
|
|
$ 300
|
|
|
C-4.
Equipment: including camera Sony HDV, booms and mike,
Dado light, HMI light, reflectors, and
computer system G5
|
|
$ 1,400
|
|
|
C-5.
Property for use on set
|
|
$ 2,000
|
|
|
C-6.
Other miscellaneous costs, including transportation, food,
etc.
|
|
$ 1,500
|
|
|
Subtotal Sec. II-C costs for each Mulla Nasrudin
segment
For 240 segments at this cost =
|
|
$15,900
X 240 =
|
$3,816,000
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IN KIND
|
