Education in India

Education in India Podcast with Parth Shah on School Choice in India

I discuss the idea of school choice and the prospects for it in India with Parth Shah, President of the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) in this episode of the Education in India podcast.

• Listen to the audio podcast (~ 1 hour), or
• Download the podcast (~14MB; MP3) and listen to it at your convenience. To download the podcast, right-click on the download link and select "Save Link/Target As".

You can read the full transcript of the interview.

In the podcast, we talk about a wide range of issues relating to school choice as outlined below. The time location of each broad topic within the audio podcast is mentioned below, for those who may want to jump to a specific point in the podcast.

• 00.03.00 - Explaining school choice to the layman. 

• 00:06:50 - What would a parent need to do to benefit from school choice?

• 00:09:55 - What are the policy changes that would be required to implement school choice?

• 00:12:30 - On the scarcity of schools and difficulty in finding land for new schools especially in urban areas.

• 00:14:43 On the incentives for setting up new schools

• 00:17.39 On the freedom for schools to pick or choose the students they want to admit, social stratification in schools and fostering social mixing

• 00:27:04 On how to help parents make informed choices when selecting schools for their children

• 00:33:39 On dealing with switching costs for changing schools and the long time it takes to get feedback on the value added by a school.

• 00:36:42 Different school choice models

• 00:42:15 - The Charter School Model and its Indian variant

• 00:43:50 How has School Choice worked in other countries?

• 00:47:56 The prospects of implementing school choice in India and the receptivity for the idea of school choice.

• 00:54:52 On the role of grassroots political demand for improving education in India
  

 

Education in India Podcast with Subir Shukla of IGNUS-ERG

In the first episode of the Education in India podcast, Subir Shukla, Principal Co-ordinator at IGNUS-ERG, talks about a wide range of topics relating to education in India. Subir has worked for over 25 years in school education in India in the areas of quality improvement, curriculum and textbook development and teacher training, amongst many other things. 

• Listen to the audio podcast (~77 minutes), or
• Download the podcast (~18MB; MP3) and listen to it at your convenience.

To download the podcast, right-click on the download link and select "Save Link/Target As".

I will also try to transcribe the audio and link to the text when it is available. You can read the full transcript of the interview.

This chat with Subir covers some of the important projects and programmes in education in India over the past 20-30 years. The topics covered in this podcast are outlined below. The time location of each broad topic within the audio podcast is mentioned below, for those who may want to jump to a specific point in the podcast.

• 00:00:40 - Subir tells us a bit about his background and the work he has done in education. 

• 00:01:30 - Why and how he chose to work in the area of education?
  • His days at Eklavya, an outfit set up by Kishore Bharti and the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme.
  • His time at the National Book Trust, setting up the National Centre for Children's Literature.

• 00:08:10 - His time as the Chief Consultant to the Govt of India on Quality Improvement and Teacher Training under the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP).
  • The thinking behind starting the DPEP in 1994 and the goals of the DPEP.
  • The survey of learning levels in India by the NCERT in 1994.
  • How the survey showed that learning levels were very low in Kerala in 1994, even lower than Bihar and how this led Kerala to drastically change their philosophy, systems and processes of teaching and learning, which is one of the reasons why the learning levels in Kerala are high today. 
  • The achievement of the DPEP.

• 00:22:15 - The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA).
  • The thinking behind launching SSA, after the DPEP.

• 00:24:28 - Teacher Training
  • What is good teaching?
  • His role in developing ADEPTS - Advancement of Educational Performance through Teacher Support - Teacher performance standards for the MHRD in 2006-07.
  • The role of the Centre and the States in teacher training.

• 00:28:12 - How the philosophy of teaching and learning has changed in India over the years
  • Three broad stages: content-driven, objectives-driven, and process-driven teaching and learning.
  • How and when the shift from content-driven, to objectives-driven, and then to process-driven teaching and learning occured in India.
  • Minimum Levels of Learning (MLL).
  • Continuos and Comprehensive Evaluation - CCE.
  • The thinking behind removing detention of students under the RTE Act.

• 00:47:06 - The National Curricular Framework 2005 (NCF)
  • The thinking behind creating the National Curricular Framework in 2005.
  • The use of NCF by the States as a framework.
  • Why the States don't want to use NCERT's textbooks.

• 00:54:31 - Age-appropriate curricula vs overambitious curricula
  • Why children are often being compelled to learn things they can't really understand at their age.

• 00:57:26 - National level surveys of learning levels in India
  • NCERT's surveys of learning and achievement levels.

• 00:58:35 - The value of Pratham's Annual Survey of Education Reports (ASER)
  • Why the ASER reports have limited value.
  • Two negative effects of the ASER reports.

•  01:04:20 - Teacher Accountability
  • Teachers themselves should be enabled to monitor the learning levels in their classes.
  • Why are only teachers being held accountable, but no one else higher up in the education system?
  • The need for top-down accountability rather than bottom-up accountability.

• 01:08:35 - The relevance of PISA tests in India
  • Why PISA tests may not be relevant for India at this time.
  • The lack of a national vision in India for what kind of quality we want in our secondary school students, and what they ought to know by the time they leave school.
  • The need to develop a vision for secondary school students and put it out in the public domain for debate - IGNUS-ERG is working on this.

Primary school teachers in Tamil Nadu promote education in government schools

"People pay taxes of many kinds to the Tamil Nadu Government and should therefore enthusiastically admit their children in government schools and benefit from the free education provided in the government schools," says the Tamil Nadu Primary Teachers Association (TNPTA).

In a press release, Abdul Majeed, an office bearer of the Association said, "Parents must come forward to admit their children in government schools offering free education. All these schools have excellent teachers. In addition to providing free education to all students, the Tamil Nadu State Government also provides 4 pairs of free uniforms every year, a nutritious meal with an egg and a banana every day, free text books and notebooks, a free cycle and also a free laptop computer. Parents must make full use of all these benefits available to them."

To drive this message home to parents, 100,000 leaflets emphasising the necessity and the benefits of admitting children in government schools are being distributed to the public by the Tamil Nadu Primary Teachers Association.

This is the gist of a report that appeared in the Tamil daily newspaper Dinamalar (Nov 23, 2012). None of the English media seem to have carried this news.

The way the statements have been phrased by the TNPTA suggests that the government school teachers know something that the rest of the public are unaware of. But the actions of the government school teachers speak much louder than their words and the people are only too well aware of the implications.

Over 73% of these very same government school teachers in Tamil Nadu have chosen to send their own children to private schools and not the 'excellent' government schools that they themselves teach in. This data has been painstakingly collected by Mr. T.K. Chandrasekaran by filing RTI applications with the District Education Officers in each of the districts in Tamil Nadu.

The initiative by the teachers to promote education in government schools is probably arising out of a fear of losing their jobs if the exodus to private schools continues unabated*. The teachers need to ask themselves why parents are shunning the free education in government schools despite the attendant benefits of free uniforms, free books, notebooks, a free cycle, a free laptop etc.. When people perceive that the quality of education is poor, all the other freebies are irrelevant.

But the teachers know this only too well. By choosing to pay out of their pocket and educate their own children in private schools, the teachers are clearly acting in their self-interest. Nothing wrong with that - in fact, they are doing the right thing by their children. There is no way they can prevent the rest of the people from acting in their own self-interest - the teachers are fighting a losing battle.

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* The 2011 ASER Report provides data on the trend of increasing enrollment in private schools in rural Tamil Nadu.The corresponding figures for urban Tamil Nadu are likely to be much higher.

Periscope 6 - MHRD on PISA Results, Inequity in education, Finland's schools

• The education establishment reacts to the PISA results for Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh. [Indian Express]
  

  Rattled over the dismal performance of Indian schools on a reputed international ranking system, the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has asked the National Council of Education Research & Training (NCERT) to probe reasons for this poor show and submit a report to Minister Kapil Sibal.
  There was a random selection of schools from the two states for PISA with a large number of government and rural area schools in the sample size, sources said. This was also a factor to be considered in view of the nature of PISA questions, officials pointed out.
  

  The MHRD officials (in a Freudian slip?) suggest that the results are bad because a large number of government and rural schools were included in the sample! The Indian Express reporter smartly checked with Dr. Ratna Dhamija, the PISA Co-ordinator at ACER India, the organisation that conducted the test, and she busted that theory.

  “It is important for you to know that the schools who participated in the PISA 2009+ were randomly selected by the PISA consortium and were selected from all eligible educational institutions of the two states where 15-year-old students were studying,” said Dr Ratna Dhamija, manager India, Australian Council for Educational Research (India) that helped in conducting PISA for India, in an emailed response to this newspaper.

• Lant Pritchett analyses the PISA results in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh and says "They confirm the worst of what anyone has been saying about the levels of learning in India elementary education."

• Teach for India Fellow, Rahul Panda bemoans our tolerance and forbearance with the poor quality of elementary education

How has the free, compulsory and nearly meaningless (if not entirely useless) education provided in government schools failed to stir the collective conscience? Perhaps because the establishment has done just about enough to string people along. The midday meal scheme is, to put it mildly, a devious masterstroke. For (the government may argue) what use is teaching a kid who doesn’t even get two square meals a day? Fair point, I concede. But a counter to that would be: what use is feeding a kid once a day without teaching him anything and eventually leaving him to fend for himself with little education and no skills to find meaningful employment? A classic case of feed a fish or teach to fish. In the case of government schools however, even the quality of the fish is suspect.  .....

Why does this not  fail to incite the youth’s ire? It is because educational inequity has always been a subliminal issue. And that could be attributed to the fact that its effect cannot be readily quantified.  .....

The scale of the problem of educational inequity in the country is too immense to wrap one’s wits around. To say the least, and at the risk of sounding tedious, it’s a no brainer that it has now become imperative for the country’s top bananas (if I may be allowed that expression) to come forth to try and solve it. We need more people teaching in classrooms than the ill-informed yet enthusiastic crowd that spilled onto the streets during the anti-graft campaign. And even then we’d fall short by a huge margin

The country's top bananas are unlikely to react unless the educational inequality is made a burning political issue. They know there is no simple solution, but don't want to grapple with the problem head on and take tough decisions. So they have resorted to stringing people along by passing flawed legislation like the Right to Education Act, to give people the feeling that they are doing something that nobody had done for 60 years to address the growing inequality of opportunity in education in India.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it bluntly by saying,

Nobody in the political system realises that the historical window of opportunity for putting in lasting changes is very small. In our case, it is 10 to 15 years given our demography. If we don’t lay the foundation for wealth and prosperity in the next 15 years, then the India story is gone forever. You will then grow old, before you grow rich.

• Coincidentally, an article in The Atlantic looks at why Finland's schools are successful and points to their focus on addressing inequity.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

There is an interesting quote in The Atlantic story attributed to Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?. In response to the question he encounters in America - How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers, he says

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

 

Conference Announcement: School Choice National Conference 2011

Catalysing Education for All: Intention, Innovation, and Implementation

2011 SCHOOL CHOICE NATIONAL CONFERENCE

Wednesday, 21 December 2011, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

The Centre for Civil Society and the School Choice Campaign invite you to the third annual School Choice National Conference which will bring together top-level academics, policy makers and education experts to discuss, debate and formulate innovative policy ideas to achieve quality education for all. The conference starts at 9am and closes with cocktails.

CONFERENCE AGENDA

• Implementation of RTE: One year after
• Public Private Partnership: Building sustainable models
• Secondary Education: Renewed objectives
• Disruptive innovation in education: Looking to technology

REGISTER NOW! at www.schoolchoice.in/scnc2011/

Registration fee:

• Rs 1,500 (US$ 30) per person
• Rs 750 (US$ 15) per person for NGO leaders, research scholars and school principals
• Free registration for students
• Registration closes on 12 Dec 2011.
• Registration fee of Rs 5,000 (US$ 100) per person is applicable after December 12th

This is the third annual conference. Check out the proceedings of the 2010 and the 2009 conferences. I attended the earlier conferences and I will be attending this year too. I had written up a post in 2009 on the 2009 conference based on my notes. The past conferences have been highly informative and insightful and based on the speaker list, this year's conference promises to be so too.

Anil Swarup, the Director General, (Labour Welfare) in the Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India, who has been driving the RSBY project and Prof. Sugata Mitra of Hole-in-the-Wall fame are amongst the speakers.

I had earlier looked at the possibility of an RSBY model for school education.

 

Progress Report on the Implementation of the Right to Education Act

The Right To Education is now justiciable in India with the coming into effect of the Right To Education Action on April 1, 2010. If the State does not do all that it must do as per the Act, within the stipulated timeframe, any citizen can take the State to court. The justiciability of the RTE Act will be tested sooner than later after March 2013. It will be interesting to see when, where and on what grounds the first such cases are filed and how the State responds to the cases.

A clear picture of the current status of implementation of the Right To Education Act as well as the timeframe for implementation of the various provisions of the RTE Act is now available thanks to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha by the MP, H.K. Dua.

Rajya sabha Question No. 568, Answered on November 25th, 2011

568  SHRI H.K. DUA: Will the Minister of HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT be pleased to state:-

(a) the progress on the implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act providing for universal education up to 14 years of age, State-wise;
(b) the States that have not notified the rules for implementation of the law;
(c) the steps Government is going to take in this connection so that these States fall in the line with the rest of the country; and
(d) how long will it take for complete implementation of the Act?

ANSWER:
MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT  (DR. D. PURANDESWARI)

(a) The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 has come into force with effect from April 1, 2010. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) Framework of Implementation and norms for interventions have been revised to correspond with the provisions of the RTE Act. This includes interventions, inter alia for

1. opening new primary and upper primary schools as per the neighbourhood norms notified by State Governments in the RTE Rules,
2. support for residential schools for children in areas which are sparsely populated, or hilly or densely forested with difficult terrain, and for urban deprived homeless and street children in difficult circumstances,
3. special training for admission of out-of-school children in age appropriate classes,
4. additional teachers as per norms specified in the RTE Act,
5. two sets of uniforms for all girls, and children belonging to SC/ST/BPL families,
6. strengthening of academic support through block and cluster resource centres, schools, etc.

Since RTE Act came into force, 50,672 new schools, 4.98 lakh additional classrooms, 6.31 lakh teachers, etc have been sanctioned to States and UTs under SSA. The fund sharing pattern between the Central and State Governments has also been revised to a sharing ratio which is more favourable to States Governments.

(b) to (d) So far, 27 States have notified the State Rules under the RTE Act, including five Union Territories which have adopted the Central RTE Rules. These States are:

1. Andhra Pradesh
2. Arunachal Pradesh
3. Assam
4. Bihar
5. Chhattisgarh
6. Haryana
7. Himachal Pradesh
8. Jharkhand
9. Kerala
10. Orissa
11. Madhya Pradesh
12. Maharashtra
13. Manipur
14. Meghalaya
15. Mizoram
16. Nagaland
17. Punjab
18. Rajasthan
19. Sikkim
20. Tripura
21. Tamil Nadu
22. Uttar Pradesh
23. Daman and Diu
24. Chandigarh
25. Dadra and Nagar Haveli
26. Andaman and Nicobar Island, and
27. Lakshadweep.

The States of Karnataka, Gujarat, West Bengal, Goa, Delhi, Puducherry, Uttarakhand have not yet notified the RTE Rules, and these States have been reminded to expedite the notification of the State RTE Rules.

The RTE Act mandates the following timeframe for implementation of its provisions:

Activity	Timeframe
Establishment of neighbourhood schools	3 years (by 31st March, 2013)
Provision of school infrastructure All weather school buildings One-classroom-one-teacher Head Teacher-cum-Office room Library Toilets, drinking water Barrier free access Playground, fencing, boundary walls	3 years (by 31st March, 2013)
Provision of teachers as per prescribed Pupil Teacher Ratio	3 years (by 31st March, 2013)
Training of untrained teachers	5 years (by 31st March 2015)
Quality interventions and other provisions	With immediate effect

There are a whole host of issues that will crop up for the Government to address by March 31st, 2013.

• What will the State do if it has not been able to set up the necessary schools, and hire the necessary qualified teachers to provide an education to every single child in the country? In particular, in densely populated urban areas where there is very little land available for constructing new schools, how will the State construct new schools with playgrounds and buildings of the size specified in the RTE Act?
• What will the State do with all the private, unaided schools, that do not measure up to the standards set out in the RTE Act for buildings and playgrounds by March 2013? Will all such schools be de-recognised and forced to close down? How will the Government protect the interests of the parents who are currently sending their children to such private unaided schools?
• How will the State respond to those Government schools that are not able to measure up to the standards of the RTE Act by March 2013?

If things don't work out as envisaged, we will need a Plan B. We need to anticipate potential problems and begin thinking right now about possible ways of addressing them rather than starting to think about it 3 years from now when we may be mired in litigation, or stuck with lack of funding, structural issues in implementation and myriad other problems.

The Standing Committee on Human Resource Development, headed by Rajya Sabha MP, Oscar Fernandes, has invited suggestions on "Implementation of the Right To Education Act". Comments and suggestions may be emailed to [email protected] by December 5, 2011.

Note: For a good overview of how Parliamentary Standing Committees work in India and the role they play, listen to this talk by Chaksu Roy of PRS Legislative Research at the recently held Takshashila Shala in Chennai.

 

 

Incentives in school education in India

There were two talks on education, both focussing on incentives in school education, at the recently held Takshashila Shala in Chennai.

In the first talk, I spoke on what we can do differently to try and achieve the goal of providing a quality education for all children in India within the next ten years, something we haven't been able to do for the past 60 years.

I presented three ideas on what we could do differently. One of the ideas is a policy change for the Government to think about and the other two are something that we as civil society need to think about.

 

 

In the other very interesting talk, Gautam John of Akshara Foundation described the findings from recent research  on incentives in public primary education.

 

 

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.