Education in India

National Education Finance Corporation - Why has the MHRD abandoned it?

This seemed like a very good idea. The HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, proposed the idea for a National Education Finance Corporation in early 2010, and expanded on it in the Rajya Sabha by making a persuasive case for it.

Under the present policy framework if you want to set up an institution there is no Government agency that can finance you.  So, there is no access to finance to setting up a new educational institution.  So, he will have to go to the bank to actually get financing from the bank at the lending commercial rate.  Now, human resource development is not considered as an infrastructure development and the Supreme Court has said that this is charity, this is for public service.  So, an activity which is for public service has to borrow if he wants to set up an educational institution at commercial rates.  But, an activity which is in the infrastructure sector, namely physical infrastructure, you can borrow at softer rates because that is priority sector.  So, what the policy framework within which we are working is, that anybody who wants to set up an educational institution should have access to finance. That is the first purpose.  This has nothing to do with UGC.  Secondly, if you set up an educational institution, under the present guidelines you will get grants from the UGC or from the Government or under schemes of the Government only when you have achieved certain milestones.  Now, in the meantime if you want to enhance your infrastructure -- and nowadays, with research and development expanding exponentially -- you need new capital investment.  There is no way that you can get finance.  You have to cross many milestones.  So, when you want to set up an educational finance corporation, our objective is that anybody who wants to set up an educational institution should have free access to finance as a priority lending sector.  What happens is, when you call it charity, State Government control fees.  Once it is charity, State Government control fees and they cannot increase fees in their institutions.  Many of them do the kind of practices that they are doing and that is the root cause of the problem.  When they will have free access to finance and every child has free access to loan why will he need to sell the family silver to enter into an educational institution?  So, I think it is the need of the hour and I would require you to give me suggestions as to how we must move forward because unless we build that infrastructure and capital we will not be able to move forward.

Kapil Sibal's proposal was welcomed by a few other MPs during the discussion in the Rajya Sabha.

But the Planning Commission apparently raised some objections and the MHRD seems to have given up on the idea.

"Proposal for setting up of National Educational Finance Corporation (NEFC) was prepared and sent to Planning Commission for concurrence. Planning Commission has raised certain objections to the proposal. Therefore the proposal was not taken forward." Source: Lok Sabha UnStarred Question No. 4410 Answered on 21.12.2011

I wish the MP, Rajaogpal Lagadapati, who asked the question had raised a supplementary question about what the Planning Commission objected to and whether the MHRD is pursuing any alternatives, or has given up the idea for good.

A report in The Hindu (May 10, 2010) throws some light on the Planning Commission's thinking on the NEFC as well as the idea of providing loan guarantees:

The Planning Commission has suggested that the Human Resource Development Ministry examine the option of setting up a loan guarantee authority as a separate division within the purview of the proposed National Education Finance Corporation (NEFC).

The proposed NEFC aims at refinancing student education loans and institutional loans at concessional rates with longer repayment, which will help expansion and new investments in the higher education sector, particularly universities.

While putting the NEFC on a “fast track”, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia reportedly told the Ministry to also look into the possibility of creating an authority that would stand guarantee for education loans to students or institutions who borrow money for investment in the higher education sector, instead of only refinancing.

 Mr. Ahluwalia is said to have suggested to the Ministry that both the options of refinancing and standing guarantee could be brought under the purview of the NEFC. The proposed NEFC would have two divisions, one as a loan guarantee authority and the other to deal with infrastructure loans.

....

If the NEFC stands as a guarantor, it will have to pay only for defaulters, who would be few. The Ministry, open to the new suggestion, is working out mechanisms to cut down on defaulters before approving the loans.

The refinancing of loans for investment is also expected to curb capitation fees, since, at present, investment for infrastructure has to be borrowed at commercial rates where the interest is high and the repayment period short. To avoid this, institutions often borrow money from the market, and in order to repay it quickly, charge capitation fees from students. Once the loan is repaid, the capitation fee turns into profit. With the availability of soft loans, this is expected to come to an end.

The NEFC will refinance to the bank at a lower rate the sanctioned loan that it releases to the student or an institution. The bank makes its margin from the difference in interest rates, while the NEFC will use the educational cess released by the government, which is free of cost and also borrows from the market, so that the average cost of funds advanced as loans is lower than the rate at which it lends to banks. This differential rate will be the NEFC's margin or profit.

The Planning Commission doesn't seem to have objected to the idea of the NEFC per se - it has only provided constructive suggestions on how the NEFC could also look at providing student loan guarantees.  The report in The Hindu had indicated that the MHRD was open to the Planning Commission's idea and was working on incorporating it into the scope of the NEFC.

Why then is the MHRD claiming now that the Planning Commission objected to the idea of the NEFC and citing that as the reason for abandoning the idea of the NEFC altogether? An eminently sensible idea seems to have been buried quietly. The MHRD needs to explain its thinking instead of providing bland statements.

Newspaper, magazine and television companies can help children learn their lessons

A brilliant idea proposed by Andrew Rotherham in his School of Thought column.

So here's a modest proposal: newspapers and broadcast networks are sitting on a trove of material that can be converted into curriculum and sold — yes, sold — for use in our nation's schools and universities. Digitizing these so-called rough drafts of history would not only bring to life many of the events and ideas that students (and adults) should understand as informed citizens, but would help a struggling industry expand its revenue sources.

He goes on to provide examples of media companies in America that are already doing something on this score, and also what more can be done.

This isn't an idle fantasy. There are already some efforts under way. A few years ago, NBC used its video archives to launch a curricular tool for teachers that is designed to supplement Advanced Placement classes. The site offers a free 30-day trial; after that, schools have to pay an annual subscription. Even though television archives contain just a part of our national story, teachers can use contemporaneous footage to craft engaging lessons about events such as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Print archives go back much further, of course, and a project called Chronicling America, which is run by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is digitizing newspaper archives for classroom use. The New York Times offers lesson plans linked to specific articles and groups these plans by category — and yes, one of them is civics!

Meanwhile, Time and other publications offer free access to their amazing digital archives. But that content could help students even more if it's aligned to academic standards about what students need to know and put in a format teachers can easily incorporate into lessons.

I wonder if there have been any such efforts in India. If not, this is eminently doable by Indian media companies, especially by the print media - they have a veritable treasure trove in their archives.

Video is the killer app for ICT in education in India

Listen to the talk by Salman Khan of Khan Academy at TED 2011 where he advocates using video to reinvent education. Brilliant stuff. Don't miss it. 

Salman Khan describes how he got started, what they have been doing at Khan Academy using video, and brings out the following key insights in his talk.

• Self-paced learning can make a huge difference. Students prefer to learn by watching videos rather than learning face to face from a teacher. Videos offer students the ability to learn at their own pace from the comfort of their own homes, replay the videos any number of times, go back and replay videos of concepts that they want a refresher on and not be embarrassed to have to ask their teacher to repeat something many times.
• Rather than teach in class and assign homework to test the understanding, students can now learn at their own pace at home. Their understanding can be tested in class under the watchful eye of the teacher
• All of the tests can be administered online and the teacher can have access to all the usage and test data to to be able to diagnose and address the gaps in the students' understanding.
• The conventional model tests the understanding of students but doesn't insist on mastery. The teacher simply moves on to the next topic after administering a test and grading it even if there are gaps in the students' understanding. But now the students can be asked to master a topic before moving on to the next. Students can be encouraged to fail and the teacher is there to help students gain mastery. They will be asked to move on to the next topic only after achieving mastery on what they are currently working on. This ensures that there are no gaps in the students' understanding.
• Rather than the conventional approach of improving the student-teacher ratio to improve the learning outcomes, the metric we need to focus on is the student-to-valuable human time spent with the teacher ratio. This humanises the classroom experience and facilitates learning far better.
• Students who have gained mastery can help their peers who are yet to gain mastery. Since the Khan Academy model works over the Internet, this kind of peer-to-peer learning could happen between two people anywhere in the world. We could have a global one-world classroom.

Video is the killer app for education in the Indian context, since children learn best in their own native languages. Of all the Digital Learning Resources (DLR) or Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) we can use in improving learning, video is the most effective at least cost. Imagine the possibilities if we had a Khan Academy equivalent of thousands of videos in each of the Indian languages with the best teachers teaching each of the subjects. Every child in India will have access to these and can learn at his or her own pace.

There are multiple constituencies that can benefit from these videos.

• School children can now learn from the best teachers at their own pace, from the comfort of their homes.
• College students and those already in the workforce who may not have learnt their basics thoroughly in the past can now relearn whatever they want from the best teachers at their own pace and in privacy.
• Today's school teachers who may not be fully on top of their subject (due to lack of good teachers when they were in school/college) will now have the option of strengthening their understanding in the privacy of their homes, without any embarrassment.
• School teachers who may be thorough with their subject but not very good at teaching can now learn from the best teachers on how to help children learn by diagnosing and addressing the gaps in students' understanding.
• Parents can also learn the stuff that their own children are learning in school. As adults they will learn the stuff faster and also help their own children learn better. Parents need no more feel at sea when their children are learning stuff that they know nothing about.

With the imminent explosion in the number of screens (computers, tablets, mobile phones, and even the good old television) that will be accessible to children, all enabled for WiFi/3G/4G/DTH, videos would be an excellent way to make the best teachers accessible to every single child in India.

An organisation like the Azim Premji Foundation is ideally placed to do a Khan Academy in India, if they choose to do so.

 

The Advent of the Jedi and AWIM augurs well

Kindling the Joy of Engineering, Design and Innovation is the theme of the Jed-i program. They have launched the Jed-i Project Challenge for engineering students in India - an annual event designed to identify and showcase the best final year engineering project. The challenge is open to students from all branches from all engineering colleges across India. For more details, check out their website or contact challenge@jed-i.in - registration closes on March 15, 2011.

A similar program to expose school children in India to the joy of exploring the physical sciences is A World in Motion organised by the Society of Automotive Engineers India.

The A World in Motion curriculum joins together teachers, students, and industry volunteers in an exploration of physical science while addressing essential mathematic and scientific concepts and skills. Industry volunteers play an essential role in motivating the next generation to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math by bringing their everyday experiences into an AWIM classroom. Each of the AWIM activities is designed around current math, science, and technology standards, and SAE India provides the AWIM curriculum and materials at no cost to classroom teachers who complete a Statement of Partnership.

Current (courtesy of SAE International)
Students make balloon - powered toy cars that meet specific performance criteria like travels far, carries weight, or goes fast. Jet propulsion, friction, air resistance and design are the core scientific concepts students explore in this challenge.

Electricity & Electronics - Standard VII to IX
The Electricity & Electronics - High School activities guide student teams through in-depth experiments involving transistors & semiconductors, analog integrated circuits, and digital integrated circuits.

SAEIndia conducted the AWIM Olympics 2010 in many schools across India. The AWIM project is a part of the worldwide A World in Motion and A World in Motion II programs developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Here's how they describe the program.

A World in Motion and A World in Motion II are two programs developed under the leadership of the Society of Automotive Engineers that are designed to enable teachers, supported by engineers, scientists, and other technical professionals, to give students in grades 4-6 and 7-8 respectively hands-on inquiry-based experiences in which they learn about certain physical principles. In AWIM II especially, they also learn about the many aspects and challenges of engineering design. Because engineering bridges the gap between pure science and the "real world", the students in A World in Motion II become familiar with its many strands: science, technology, planning, design, making presentations, marketing, etc. The programs are thus truly interdisciplinary, involving the academic disciplines of science, mathematics, technology, social studies, and language arts.

The educational experiences provided by the instructional materials and led by teachers benefit from the presence of volunteer technical professionals who can make one-time visits, can play a more frequent consulting role, or can even become mentors in the classroom. In the elementary-school program, there is a partnership between a teacher and a volunteer. In the middle-school program, the partnership is established between school administrators, and a business or organization. In both cases, the partnership is a valuable feature and is key to the success of the program.  

Goals. The goals of these two programs are 1) to educate children about certain physical principles, 2) to introduce them to the nature of engineering design and the excitement that its challenges can generate through teamwork, 3) to provide interdisciplinary learning opportunities for students, and 4) to involve engineers, scientists, and other technical professionals and their employing organizations in support of scientific and technical education in grades 4-8.
 

Strategy and Scope. These two programs are designed to teach children in grades 4-6 and 7-8 about certain physical problems and many aspects of engineering design. To accomplish these goals, engineers, scientists, and other professionals go into the classroom in support of teachers who are using these materials. These professionals are usually supported by their employing organizations or other interested organizations. More than 33,000 elementary-grade kits have been distributed, while the middle-school kits are, less than a year after their publication, spreading rapidly to middle-school classrooms.

In an earlier post, I had looked at Design Kids, a very interesting reality TV show on PBS in the United States, to promote engineering concepts to school children in the age-group of 9-12 years.

Jed-i and AWIM are a good start towards impressing upon children at an early enough stage the joy and excitement of science and engineering. I hope they continue to do well and more such initiatives come about.

Democratising the quality of education for all children in India

Of the four ideas that I talked about in my TED Talk titled Education for All - More of the Same or Something Different? on December 13th, 2010 at TEDx Kumaun, the fourth idea was about democratising the quality of education for all children in India.

Our focus in terms of achieving the goal of providing an Education for All continues to be on the following:

• enrollment - ensuring every single child goes to a school,
• attendance - ensuring the child attends school everyday and
• time spent and completion - ensuring the child spends a certain number of hours per day at school and a certain number of years in school and is deemed to have completed schooling.

We haven't yet paid enough attention to the quality aspect of education. While Enrollment, Attendance and Completion are important, it is paramount that every child gets a high quality education. To determine if that is indeed happening, we need to focus on learning outcomes and constantly keep testing to see if children are learning and taking appropriate steps based on the results of the tests so that every child learns what it ought to have learnt by the time it leaves school.

The quality of education or learning outcomes is integrally linked to the quality of teachers, especially so for the large number of first generation learners who won’t be able to get any support from their own parents at home. Great teachers can make a huge difference to a child. A recent study by Eric Hanushek of Stanford University attempts to quantify the value of a great teacher and also the value lost in the case of poor teachers.

But not every school has great teachers. What can we do to ensure that every single child in India has access to great teachers, thereby democratising the quality of education for all children across the country?

There are many excellent teachers in India today and they have been doing a great job unsung and unnoticed for years. A few of these teachers are identified and recognized with “Best Teacher” awards at the state and national levels every year. For a start, we could pick these award-winning teachers and create video recordings of all these teachers teaching in their own classes in the various Indian languages. These video recordings could then be broadcast on television and also put up on YouTube and other web sites for children and other current and aspiring teachers to watch. We could also study these videos to try and understand the traits, methods and skill sets of good teachers to help create many more good teachers.

How do we identify teachers with great potential? How do we attract good teachers to the teaching profession?

Imagine a reality show for teachers on television to unearth teaching talent from across the country and showcase it to the national audience of children. Existing and aspiring teachers can be invited to come forward to teach on prime time television, in all the Indian languages. Imagine them teaching Algebra, Poetry, the History of the Indus Valley Civilization, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, The Structure of the Atom and more. Along with a panel of eminent teachers as judges in the studio, children and parents sitting at home and watching these teachers on television can also rate and vote for the best teachers. The best teachers could become national stars and celebrities.

Every child in the country will have access to these programmes either on television or on YouTube or other similar sites. Not only will children realize that the best teachers can make every subject interesting and fascinating, they will also begin to expect the same high standards of teaching from their own teachers in their schools. Teachers from all across the country will also be able to watch and learn from the best in their profession. While good teachers ought to be paid as well as other professions if not more, this kind of national recognition for good teachers can play a huge role in making teaching an attracive and fulfilling profession.

I had described the other ideas that I spoke about in my TED Talk in earlier posts.

• Background
• Taking a leaf out of the Government’s own RSBY Project
• Opening up education to for-profit entities
• The need for political innovation to make education a top political priority.

Reality show for schools in Kerala

The Kerala State Education Department plans to run a reality television show on schools in Kerala, says a report in Indian Express.

The show would be aired on the state-run IT@School ViCTERS channel, the country's first channel exclusively meant for educational shows through EDUSAT network. This would showcase the various innovative initiatives taken by the schools and its students and teachers such as peer teaching, green endeavours or any other innovations related to education.

"This show will be the first attempt to integrate the learning elements with the societal roles of children. Here, both children and teachers will be presenting the achievement of their schools with the help of videos and IT-enabled communication tools. This will be a competitive space, where diverse types of unique models in learning will be presented," says K Anvar Sadath, executive director of IT@ School project.

The three-month long show, starting November, would have 45-minutes long 75 episodes presented by 100 schools - both government and private ones.

According to a Sify report on the show,

The achievements can be in the pedagogical innovations - activity-based, bringing in IT into education, infrastructure, best teaching practices, physical fitness programmes, agriculture initiatives in schools, sanitation and cleanliness etc.

'This show will also be an ideal opportunity in understanding the different aspects of the learning process and will help in gauging the feedback of students and teachers for policy making,' said Sadath.

Each episode will have three segments. 'The first segment will be a profile of the school, then there will be a video prepared by our crew on the different activities of the school, and then the school will be given an opportunity to present their performance before a jury. The overall performance of the school in at least three of the fifteen sectors suggested will be evaluated,' said Sadath.

I had earlier explored the possibilities of other types of reality shows in education.

Reality TV show on engineering education

Thinking further about the idea of a reality TV show for school teachers in India, I stumbled on Design Kids, a very interesting reality TV show on PBS in the United States, to promote engineering concepts to school children in the age-group of 9-12 years. It would be great to have something like this in India to promote Science and Engineering to children at an early enough stage to impress upon them the joy and excitement of science and engineering.

Here's how Design Squad, now into their third season, describe themselves,

Design Squad is high-energy, high-drama reality TV that lets kids show off their smarts as they design and build working solutions for real-world clients-people who are hungry for clever ideas from a new generation of innovators. From creating remote-controlled flying football targets for Hasbro to dry land dog sleds for the Jamaica Dog Sled Team, the action culminates in the final episode when the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize: a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

and their educational philosophy.

Design Squad is one of the few places on TV where kids can learn about engineering. The specific educational goals of the Design Squad television series, web site and outreach events are to:

• Increase students' knowledge of engineering and the design process
  Design Squad will be as hands-on as television can be. Viewers see Design Squad teams take raw materials and with very little adult intervention, transform them into workable solutions. The series presents kids using technology (such as computers, electronics, and machine tools) to do a wide range of activities that have a scale and complexity that will excite the viewing audience, and motivate them to do these activities on their own.
  
  
• Improve the public image of engineering
  Design Squad presents viewers with positive role models who experience engineering as a fun and engaging process.
  
  The image many still have of engineers is the outdated 'nerds with calculators and pocket protectors.' Design Squad goes a long way to address this. Our diverse cast of high school students are high-energy, smart, and approach the challenges they face with enthusiasm. And not a single one of them wears a pocket protector.
  
  
• Encourage further exploration
  Design Squad is more than just a television series.
  
  The Design Squad Web site extends the concepts presented on the show and provides viewers with an opportunity to explore content through the lens of "engineering as problem-solving using science, math, and technology."
  
  Engineers and educators have partnered with Design Squad to help support kids as they try out the ideas first-hand. These real world experiences give kids a stronger understanding of engineering, equip them with science and math skills, and ultimately lay the foundation they need to participate in engineering activities later in life.

Their list of funders and sponsors include the Government, Foundations, Corporations and the Professional Engineering Associations.

Major funding for Design Squad is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Intel Foundation, and the Lemelson Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Noyce Foundation, United Engineering Foundation (ASCE, ASME, AIChE, IEEE, AIME), National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, ASME, the IEEE, Northrop Grumman, and the Intel Corporation.

DST / CSIR, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian National Academy of Engineering and other professional associations, foundations and companies should be funding something like this here in India.

The case for working with your hands

is the subject of a book by Matthew Crawford titled Shop Class to Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. In an article he wrote in the New York Times, Crawford, a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, describes the insidious nature of his own experience of being a knowledge worker and how and why he chose to switch careers to running his own bike repair shop, very satisfyingly at that.

Ian Jack, writing about Crawford's book in The Guardian, wonders if our rush to embrace higher education has started to become economically destructive.

In this context, I remember an engineering student fresh out of college who had applied for a job, some job, about ten years ago, when I was looking to hire someone for some simple HTML work at Cricinfo. He knew no HTML at all, but said he was willing to learn. I was thinking of giving him a chance to learn on the job and prove himself, but was taken aback by his salary expectation and his justification for it. He wanted a monthly salary of Rs. 8,000. His justification was that even a mason was paid as much. When I pointed out that the mason built something and added value, whereas he knew nothing to start with and had to learn before he could prove he could add value, it didn't cut. His point was that he was an "engineer'.

Crawford, in his New York Times piece, argues for exposing children to some trade or craft involving hands on work, early on in their lives.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

A reality television show for teachers - a game changer?

Imagine the best school teachers from across the country competing on live TV to teach us Algebra & Geometry, The History of the Indus Valley Civilization , Darwin's theory of Evolution, Each and every Indian Language, The Geography of the Himalayas, Newton's Laws of Motion, The structure of the atom, The story of the Indian Independence Movement, The Working of the Human Digestive System and more, in an absorbing and exciting manner.

Also imagine not just school children watching these shows on TV each night, but doing so along with their parents who will also get the benefit of getting an education from India's best teachers.

How can we do that? Consider a reality TV show for teachers that will unearth teaching talent, enable it to bubble up to the top and showcase it to the national audience. Wouldn't that be a game changer?

How would it work?

• Students and school managements submit the names of their best teachers to the TV Production House, for each class from class I to class XII, for each of the school subjects.
• The TV Production House goes from city to city across the country and conducts an audition of the teachers registered from that city. The teachers are invited to come on a specific day for the audition to the studio and teach any concept/topic of their choice in a 10-15 minute slot before an invited audience comprising of students, parents and judges who are experienced educators. The teachers come prepared and the judges evaluate the teachers on a set of parameters and select the best teacher in each city for each class and each subject.
• The best teachers from each city, as chosen by the judges, are then invited to the second level of the competition where teachers from different cities compete with each other. As before, the competition will cover every subject for each class from class I to class XII and cover everything in the syllabus.
• The reality show will culminate in selecting the best teachers in the country for each subject by the end of the school year and give away the Best Teacher awards along with a substantial monetary prize for the winning teachers.
• The teachers can be asked to teach in English and/or the local languages of each of the states to enable the large audience of school going children across both rural and urban areas to benefit.
• The teachers will be evaluated on their ability to bring about conceptual understanding amongst the viewers and stimulate further interest and excitement in the subject.
• This program can run right through the school academic year to cover all subjects for all classes, with a break during the summer holidays.

The benefits of the reality TV show for teachers

• We can discover India's best teachers and offer them national level recognition
• We will enable every teacher across the country to watch from home and learn from India's best teachers in action and strive to improve and do as well as the best.
• We will be providing students and parents across the country, whether in rural areas or urban areas, with a high quality education right in their homes through exposure to excellent teachers. The students and parents will not only end up learning but will also then expect more from their own school teachers, thereby raising standards overall. We often settle for what we have, only because we haven't seen anything better yet.
• We can make the teaching profession sexy. We can change the perception of the teaching profession by presenting it as exciting and rewarding both emotionally and financially, for good teachers. We will inspire today's students to become tomorrow's teachers and attract talent into the profession.
• The best teachers will be courted by the schools who will compete to recruit them to teach their children. Salary levels will rise for the better teachers.
• A huge amount of superb educational content will be created in the process. All of the content can be put up on the Internet and students will have the ability to watch the programs of their choice in future at any time and learn at their own pace and progress step by step. One can always go back to relearn a concept which may not be clear or something that one may have forgotten. This will become a continuing education opportunity for adults too - they can learn things they didn't learn in school.
• We could do the same thing for college and university level education too.

Funding and operationalising the reality show for teachers

• A huge audience of students and parents are likely to watch these programmes. There will be substantial interest from advertisers for this huge nationwide audience, especially since parents themselves will want their children to watch this program. Which other TV programs do parents want their children to watch every day?
• Given the multitude of reality television shows to discover musical talent with no dearth of advertisers, a reality television show for teachers ought to be viable. I'm sure we can find a way to make it work - our television executives are amongst the best in the business.
• The details of the duration of each teaching segment, the structuring of what to teach in each slot, how to link it to the syllabus, the parameters on which the teachers will be evaluated, selection of the judges etc.. will have to be worked out. When multiple channels pick up on this, there will be constant innovation in these operational aspects to try and do better than the others and the innovations that work with the audience will get picked up by the other channels.

This could potentially revolutionise education in multiple ways, if we can make it work.

NewSchools Venture Fund - a cross between a VC fund and a public charity

The NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF), set up in 1998 by John Doerr and Brook Byers, both venture capitalists with VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Kim Smith, co-founder and executive chairman of NSVF, is a very interesting idea.

Here's how they describe themselves on their web site.

NSVF believes that all children are entitled to an education that will serve them well in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Sadly, too many children are being left behind at schools where expectations for achievement are low, where academic programs are weak, and where too little learning is taking place. NewSchools stands alongside education, business, nonprofit, and policy leaders working to transform the K-12 public education system that exists today.

Our approach is powerful, unique and proven. We raise early-stage capital from institutional and individual donors, and we invest it in nonprofit and for-profit ventures led by promising education entrepreneurs who are creating high-quality, scalable solutions that address the most critical problems facing education. And, because education is complex and change-averse, we fortify our positions with thought leadership designed to foster an environment that is conducive to high performance and to real change.

NewSchools Venture Fund is a public benefit, 501(c)(3), nonprofit organization designed to improve public K-12 public education, particularly for underserved students. As a venture philanthropy firm, we invest in a select portfolio of the most promising for-profit and nonprofit education ventures. Like a traditional venture capital firm, the NewSchools team reviews business plans, conducts extensive due diligence on promising ventures, and invites ventures that best fit the NewSchools criteria to be part of the investment portfolio.
NewSchools differs from traditional firms in that the return on our investment is measured not in dollars, but in improved educational outcomes. NewSchools differs also in that we invest in both for-profit and nonprofit entities. Any financial returns that are generated from for-profit investments are re-invested in the Fund and used to support more education entrepreneurs.

Our track record demonstrates the power of entrepreneurs to improve education. Since 1998, we've invested $60 million in leading ventures, and together they've produced incredible results:

• Over 1 million underserved children learned to read, empowering them with the single most important foundational skill they need to progress through elementary and secondary education.
  
• 2 million children in high-need urban and rural areas have been taught by over 14,000 high-achieving college graduates, deployed with the vision of ensuring our underserved children receive the best education available.
  
• 150,000 underserved children measurably improved their algebra skills, providing a critical stepping-stone towards notable achievement in the fields of science and technology.
  
• Over 100,000 students attend schools led by a new breed of highly-qualified principals who were recruited from diverse backgrounds and trained to deploy their unique skills and talents in the service of our nation's greatest asset -- our children.
  
• Nearly 15,000 low-income students today attend 61 industry-leading charter schools, receiving an education in foundational and higher-order skills to rival their middle- and higher-income peers -- by 2009, almost 58,000 students will benefit in over 160 schools.
  
• Each month, 2 million parents, teachers and others use an online information site to become more informed decision-makers about, and advocates for, their children's education.

NSVF's portfolio ranges across public, private and charter schools.