Educating India

Dear Reader,

Take a minute, and imagine education in India.

Have that image in your head? Not the stereotypical Indian-educated engineer.  I mean, students who are currently being educated in India.   If it’s anything like mine before I got here, it looks approximately like this:

Photo borrowed from the ASER Flickr, featuring studentsin Bihar state in Northeastern
India  (I'll be doing some data analysis from the project depicted here)

Adorable children learning in  a ramshackle school building    If this was  what you were thinking of, you’re mostly right.

Except for the learning part.

India is building more schools in far-flung areas and enrolling more students, but is not doing an effective job of educating them.

Pratham English Assessment

My internship this summer is with the ASER Centre, that adopts the revolutionary approach (for India) of measuring education in terms of the desired outcome: learning, rather than the inputs, such as the number of students in school or the schools built. They use a pretty sophisticated survey sampling method, go to households in rural villages across the country, and conduct a deceptively simple oral test in the student’s native language.  Examiners see if they can identify letters and numbers, read words, perform simple calculations, and read simple texts designed for a second grader.   I’ll write a lot more about this later, but the data they collect is sobering. For example, they found that "among Std. V (5th Grade) children enrolled in government schools, the percentage of children able to read Std. II level text (such as the left panel above) decreased from 50.3% (2009) to 43.8% (2011) to 41.1% (2013)"

So if you're reading this now, you should probably thank a teacher, and also reflect on the fact that if you were a public elementary school student in India, you probably couldn't.

Government School

Why?  There are a number of reasons.  The big one, cited by each of the several reports I've read and abundant testimony from field visits, is the utter ineffectiveness of the government-run schools. Teachers often just don’t show up, for no apparent reason.  When they do show up, they don't often teach.  When they do actually teach, they follow standard syllabi and rush through textbooks with limited to no individual assessment or attention.  ASER’s parent organization, Pratham Education Foundation and other organizations are trying  to work to fix that, but there’s so much more to be done.  I visited a government school for girls today in New Delhi, where 1 out 3 classrooms, as far as I could tell, had teachers in them.  Students still stayed at school, did their best to learn on their own and work in their exercise books, but self-study is not going to be very effective if basic literacy and numeracy skills are not already in place.  Families are increasingly spending their meager resources on private tutoring, but that isn’t going to be enough to meet the learning deficit in a growing population.

Yet the government still puts out reports evaluating schools by inputs and pat themselves on the back for doing a great job on education. I am saddened by the missed opportunities to teach the children who seem to want to learn so dearly, and happy to spend my summer supporting the work of an organization that’s trying to do something to remedy things.

A Pratham Learning Center (for elementary students) I had a chance to visit.  Since girls usually attend school in the mornings and boys usually go in the afternoons, Pratham offers free education programs focusing on math and reading for each gender during the off-hours.

A free Pratham preschool program teacher

Typical preschool reaction to seeing a camera. He quickly fixed it, but I like this one better.  Like a good teacher, I wanted to end this on a good note. 

Thanks for reading. Comments, questions? Leave it below!

All the best,

Me

Further Reading (as recommended by my outstanding colleagues here):

• The 2013 ASER Report
• The PROBE Report....Dated but, sadly, still relevant
• Section on education from the India Human Development Report