Education in India

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 [email protected] - 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.

The need for political innovation to make Education a top political priority

In the 1970s, the political slogans of the day were Garibi Hatao and Roti Kapada aur Makaan. In the 1990s and the 2000s, our politicians latched on to a new slogan – Bijli, Sadak aur Pani. But have you heard of Shiksha or Swasthya figuring in a popular political slogan yet? Think about it. Why hasn’t Shiksha figured in a slogan yet?

It is not because we don’t care about education. Every single one of us cares deeply about education and will do whatever it takes to get the best possible education for our own children. If we can afford it, we send our children to a private school. Only those who can’t afford to send their kids to private schools, resign themselves to sending them to Government schools.

Step back a minute to think about how we, the public, react to other problems we face in our daily lives. Faced with power cuts, water shortages or crumbling roads, we get angry and vocal about our unhappiness. The media are only too happy to amplify the discontent and the politicians take note and try to respond since that gives them an opportunity to talk about having done something to address the needs of the public when the next elections come by. Sadly, we don’t seem to get angry and vocal at all about the fact that we haven’t been able to ensure a quality education for every single child, even 60 years after independence. We try to find a way to give our own children the best education and get on with it. [Aside: It would be an interesting exercise to build a crowdsourced wiki list of the schools that the children and grandchildren of all our elected MPs, MLAs, Councillors and Panchayat/Ward Members go to or went to, and look at how many or how few of them go to or went to a Government school]

The politicians recognise what we, the public, get angry about and what we don’t get angry about, and have little incentive to do something that isn’t going to get them credit or votes at the next election. That is probably one of the main reasons for a lack of any sense of urgency on their part in achieving the goal of educating all our children. The progress thus far has been due to the efforts of enlightened and progressive politicians and bureaucrats who have felt that education is an important enough issue and something ought to be done, irrespective of whether the voters are vocal in demanding for something to be done or not.

Making our goal of providing a quality education for every single child in the country a top political priority requires political innovation akin to Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha – which was a stroke of genius in political mass mobilization. In the early 20th century, most people in India were poor and lived in villages and were the least bit concerned about kicking out the British. Survival and subsistence were more pressing concerns for them. Gandhi had to find a way to communicate and connect with the masses and persuade them that achieving independence was important and ought to be the top priority. Gandhi picked salt (pun unintended), something that was freely available in nature, and something that was an integral part of every Indian’s diet, and made an issue of the tax imposed on making salt. Gandhi’s innovation was to present the injustice of the Salt Tax as a symbol of an unjust, unrepresentative and alien government and galvanise the people to protest non-violently to kick the British out. The rest is history.

Smart politicians looking to make a name for themselves, could take a leaf out of Gandhi's book to come up with similar innovative ideas that could capture the imagination of the people and make Education for All a top political priority. But we can't leave it entirely to the politicians. We need to think of ways of signalling to our politicians that we care about providing a quality education for every single child in the country and forcing the politicians to take notice and act. As and when that happens, Shiksha (and Swasthya as well) could well be the next big ideas of our times, resulting in rapid action towards achieving our goal of an educated and healthy workforce in the decades ahead.

This was the third idea, 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 other ideas that I talked about are described in separate posts.

• Background
• Doing an RSBY in school education
• Opening up education to for-profit entities
• Democratising the quality of education for all children in India

Opening up Education to for-profit entities

The second idea, 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 is another policy change - to open up education to for-profit entities.

Today, by law, only the government or non-profit charitable trusts can run schools in India. Those in the educational policy establishment believe that a just society must provide state-funded and state-delivered education for all children for free and the private sector has no role to play. They are ideologically against for-profit education and believe that it is simply wrong to make a profit from education.

Another argument against private delivery of education is that all the major developed countries in the West educated their children almost entirely through public schools and so we must do the same. But to put that argument in perspective, we need to understand that all those countries had much smaller school-going populations to educate during their respective growth phases and more importantly they all had the luxury of time to be able to gradually bring different sections of society under the ambit of public schooling over decades. Today in India, we face challenges and circumstances that are very different from what the developed countries faced then. We have a school-age population that is many times that of the developed countries and we want to educate all of the children within the next five years, going by our current target of achieving education for all by 2015.

Having failed to educate all our children for the past 60 years through Government and non-profit schools alone, despite repeatedly setting targets, a good part of two generations of children have lost out on getting an education. If we had somehow been able to educate every child back in 1960 (the target that we set ourselves in 1950), India could have been in far better shape today in terms of the economy, society and as a result the polity as well.

We ought not to be dogmatic anymore by continuing to insist on education being run only by Government and non-profit entities. It is time to consider opening up education to for-profit entities and co-opting the private sector to help us achieve the national goal of educating every single child quickly.

Opening up education to for-profit entities should not be seen through an ideological lens. It is not a change of ideological stance from the Government as the ideal provider to that of not wanting a leading role for the Government and favouring the private sector as the panacea for everything. It is more a matter of pragmatism at this point of time to ensure we are able to address the national goal in a time-bound manner, through all means available, public and private, non-profit and for-profit. If we refuse to be pragmatic, we will be condemning a large part of yet another generation of children to a life without education or opportunity.

We have successfully co-opted the private sector to meet national goals in other sectors like telecom, housing, power, roads and health where for-profit companies are well accepted and are playing an important role. Without the help of the private sector's contribution in drastically expanding supply and improving quality in these sectors, we couldn't have provided these services to the hitherto unreached on such a large scale in such a short time. Although we have made progress, we still have a long way to go in providing these services to a large segment of the population. Issues like profiteering, corruption and poor quality of service by both Government and Private players do crop up in these sectors from time to time. We have put in place regulators who are tasked with addressing these issues and ensuring quality and preventing malpractices and the regulators will get better and better over time. The Private and the Government sectors have shown that they can work in tandem to achieve the national goals in these sectors in short periods of time.

It is time we did the same in the Education sector too. We must experiment with opening up education to for-profit entities to complement the efforts of the Government and non-profit sectors. Along with implementing the RSBY model in education, if we open up education to for-profit entities, and regulate them effectively, the anticipated increase in both Government and private investment in education can help us scale dramatically and achieve our goal of providing a quality education to every single child in the country at least by 2020.

How do we build support for these policy changes? That brings me to the third idea that I spoke about in my TED Talk  - the need for political innovation to make education a top political priority, with attendant electoral gains.

What is the value of a good teacher?

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.

according to a recent paper by Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University, in the context of schooling in USA.

NPR's Planet Money Podcast asks if this could help to grow the U.S. economy dramatically and discusses the findings of the paper with Eric Hanushek, who puts in perspective the $100 trillion value of replacing the bottom 5%-8% of teachers by comparing it to the U.S. stimulus package of $1 trillion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Go listen to this podcast. [Aside: I strongly recommend following NPR's Planet Money blog as well - they do an excellent job of explaining the economy to the layperson.]

We would need to figure out the corresponding numbers for the value of a teacher in the Indian context, but whatever be the numbers, the economic value of a good quality education is something that we in India need to think about in the context of  our efforts to provide a quality education for every single child in a timebound manner.

If we had somehow been able to educate every child back in 1960 (the target that we set ourselves in 1950), India could have been in far better shape in terms of the economy, society and as a result the polity as well. A good part of a couple of generations of children have lost out on an education since 1950. We are still grappling with the challenge of educating every single child today and still stuck with ensuring enrollment, attendance and promoting children to the next higher class every year, irrespective of learning outcomes. While these are important, we also need to focus on the quality of education outcomes, which Pratham's Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has been throwing light on.

We need to ensure that the salaries of good teachers are far far higher than what they are now and figure out ways to evaluate teacher performance to identify those teachers who are doing extremely well and try to figure out what makes them good teachers.

An earlier report on the findings of a study by Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University had talked about the value of a kindergarten teacher.

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.