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Today at the Global Education and Skills Forum, in Dubai, education entrepreneur and philanthropist Sunny Varkey announced a $one 1000000 prize, to be awarded to one outstanding instructor somewhere in the world. Nominations and applications are at present open up at globalteacherprize.com. The winner will be announced in Nov.

(disclosure: GEMS Foundation supported my coverage of this effect, but had no editorial input).

Global Teacher Prize
President Bill Clinton, Honorary Chairman of the Varkey GEMS Foundation, with H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, at the Global Education and Skills Forum.

For classroom teachers, this is the largest prize of its kind ever to be announced. In fact, information technology'due south larger than nearly prizes in near professional fields. It rivals the the Nobel Prize itself, currently around $i.ii 1000000. The MacArthur Fellowship (the "Genius Grant"), which is currently $625,000, went to a loftier school physics teacher, Amir Abo-Shaeer, in 2010.

Varkey is a newly minted billionaire, originally from Republic of india, who founded GEMS, the largest network of private for-profit schools in the world. It has 132 schools and 142,000 students across the Centre East, Africa, Europe, China, and Republic of india. He told the oversupply that the mission of the global teacher prize, supported by Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, was inspiration. "We want to inspire children from far-flung villages, towns and cities effectually the world to say 'I want that prize!' How many kids say they want to exist a reality TV star? Let'south go them aiming to be the greatest teacher in the globe."

The Global Education and Skills Forum was organized in partnership between GEMS' nonprofit foundation, UNESCO, The Commonwealth Business Council (a sort of global Sleeping room of Commerce), and UAE'due south monarchy. The underlying aim is to raise the profile of global education on the agenda of big-time philanthropy, international aid, and the business community directly. At the Forum, UNESCO also announced the Business Backs Educational activity campaign, which asks corporations to virtually double their giving to education-related causes, to $1 billion by this fourth dimension next year and to twenty percent of all corporate social contributions by 2020. Corporate charities donate sixteen times every bit much money to health-related causes as to teaching, even though cultivating man majuscule contributes directly to the bottom line. Every bit keynote speaker President Pecker Clinton told the GESF audience, every dollar invested in education returns $53 to employers through a ameliorate qualified, more productive workforce.

Here in the US we debate the benefit of big donors and individual wealth in schools. But in the developing earth the story is very unlike. Globally, 57 million children are non in master school. Many countries don't have the resources to expand access. "Universal Primary Educational activity" is #2 on the list of the Un's Millennium Evolution Goals; this would require an estimated six million new teachers past next year, 2015. The private sector has stepped into the alienation. GEMS is one of a new breed of private, for-profit concatenation schoolhouse operators that take sprung upward in China (where some are owned past Disney), the Middle E, and Africa. These global pedagogy organizations have a mix of pro-social and business motives.

Viewing access to schooling through the lens of global development lends a proper urgency to the effect. But it too encourages a narrow instrumentalist view of education as a means to economical growth and only economical growth. When a gathering is hosted past an accented monarch, sponsored past multinational corporations including Samsung, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Credit Suisse, one can't await much room for the role of pedagogy as a radicalizing, democratizing force.

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Anya Kamenetz, writes the Digital blog for The Hechinger Report. She is a contributing writer at Fast Company and the author of several books and book capacity nigh the future of instruction, including...