Listen to the audio recording (above) of a talk by Vipin Narang, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, analysing the nuclear acquisition strategies of states. Based on his research on typologies of acquisition strategies, he explores how states pursued the bomb as opposed to simply why, which has dominated scholarship thus far.
The place you live in has a huge impact on your life. Why are some places in the world, and indeed even within the same country, characterised by better social service provision and welfare outcomes than others? Why have Indian states remained worlds apart in their social development, especially if they started at a similar point in history, if their trajectories were to be traced, such as in the case of Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.
Drawing on a multi-method study, from the late nineteenth century to the present of the stark variations in educational and health outcomes within a large, federal, multi-ethnic developing country like India, Dr Prerna Singh’s book ‘How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India’ develops an argument for the power of collective identity, or subnationalism, as a driver of social welfare.
Singh discusses her book at CPR, explaining the central argument by comparing the different states of India, through:
Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies and Fellow at the Watson Institute, Brown University. Her book is a winner of the Woodrow Wilson Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in politics and international relations in 2015, and Barrington Moore prize awarded by the American Sociological Association for the best book published in comparative historical sociology in 2015.
Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Olga Chepelianskaia, where she discusses the potential of built heritage to address urban development challenges, through selected Asian cities’ cases, highlighting how these learnings could apply to the Indian context.
Indian cities face an unprecedented urbanisation pressure (50% of India’s population will reside in cities by 2050, UN), which reflects in a rapid and uncontrolled built infrastructure development. Such development often takes place at the expense of natural eco-systems, human scale and cultural distinctiveness, which in turn significantly compromises sustainability, resilience, social cohesion, inclusiveness and economic opportunities. Climate change and extreme weather events further exacerbate negative effects of this unsustainable urbanisation process and further deepen poverty and vulnerability in cities.
In this context, achieving the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda targets imperatively comes to reviving and harnessing on cities’ unique natural and cultural assets. Yet, the potential of built heritage to address urban development challenges in India has hardly been explored and tapped into.
Olga Chepelianskaia is an international sustainable urban development consultant, Founder of UNICITI and Program Manager of SEHER INTACH. She specialises in sustainable and climate resilient urban development in Asian cities, natural eco-systems and heritage revival, climate change and clean energy.
The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.
The Regional Centre for Sanitation (RCS) hosted a regional conference in Sri Lanka to facilitate a knowledge sharing platform on Sustainable Sanitation Solutions. It was co-organized by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), the Freshwater Action Network South Asia (FANSA) and the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). The RCS invited professionals and researchers from the South Asian Countries to share their experiences and best practices at a three-day conference held from 21st to 23rd February 2019. Experts and practitioners from Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Maldives enriched the conference by sharing their solutions and best practices which strengthen the knowledge and practice towards addressing the current and foreseeable challenges to achieve sustainable sanitation. Participants from India included Shubhagato Dasgupta, Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research; Anil Mehta, Principal, VB Polytechnic, Udaipur; Arun Vyas, Additional Chief Engineer, Udaipur Municipal Corporation; Tanvi Tomar, Research Associate, Centre for Policy Research.
The conference had four thematic sessions. The first session held on the first day focused on ‘Improving Sectoral Governance through Policy and Program Monitoring, Reporting and Accountability Instruments’. Speakers from Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan threw light on the importance of aligning the policies to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and improving tracking mechanisms and accountability mechanisms required at all levels for better ownership. They further elaborated on integrating the policies to the practice through awareness and sensitisation programmes, the need for aligning the scalable solutions with government programmes and also the desired coordination and collaboration between implementing agencies. A total of eight speakers presented in the first session.
The second day covered the second and third thematic sessions followed by two panel discussions towards the end of each session. The second session was on ‘Scalable Faecal Sludge and Septage Management Solutions’ and covered pilot projects being implemented in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. The presenters spoke about circular economy model, treatment of waste water, Faecal Sludge Treatment Plants (FSTPs), operations & maintenance (O&M) and capacity building needed to establish the FSTPs and business models of FSM (Faecal Sludge Management). Following this, the panel discussion revolved around best practice documentation and finding shareable models on reaching the poor, sanitation worker safety etc. along with RSC’s role as a sharing learning platform. The third session titled ‘Environmentally Sustainable and Climate Resilient Sanitation Solutions’, enabled the presenters to share views on increasing awareness on the need for climate resilient sanitation solutions and innovations such as solar bio energy using waste water and waste, GroSan toilets and climate change resilient waste water treatment.
The fourth session on the third day titled ‘Building Blocks for Achieving Inclusive and Equitable Sanitation’ focused on an inclusive approach to ensure sanitation for children in government schools and engaging them as ambassadors of sanitation. It also threw light on an integrated approach at the national level in Sri Lanka, addressing the issues of child faeces disposal and sanitation enterprise to respond to the sanitation needs of the urban poor.
Improving learning outcomes are the principal focus of contemporary education policy in India. There are numerous ways to achieve these outcomes, many of which were identified in the Right to Education Act (2009). With the implementation of the Right to Education, the inputs supplied to schools such as teachers, space, meals, and educational materials have increased. Yet, several concerns have been raised over efficiently allocating resources to improve access for students and quality teaching.
In the context of weak state capacity and limited resources, school consolidation has emerged as a policy tool with a view to improve the efficiency of school functioning. This refers to the ‘closure’ of one or more schools and integration with another, usually bigger school. Students and teachers are transferred to the consolidated school, if space permits. The schools that are closed no longer exist as independent administrative units.
School Consolidation in Rajasthan
While schools have been consolidated over the years across many countries including China, Canada, and the US, this policy tool is relatively new to India. Faced with poor learning outcomes, declining enrolment in government schools, and the proliferation of small schools with poor facilities, the Rajasthan government was one of the first Indian states to consolidate schools. At the same time, the Rajasthan government launched other programmes such as the State Initiative for Quality Education, and programme to create Adarsh schools with grades 1-12 or 1-10. Something similar to the latter has been mentioned in the hotly contested National Education Policy as well, which talks about the creation of school complexes or multiple schools together as a single administrative units. These Adarsh schools or complexes can be created by consolidating schools.
Around 19,500 government schools were consolidated between 2014 and 2018 in Rajasthan, and other states such as Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra followed suit. In 2018-19, the Accountability Initiative analysed secondary data to understand the implementation and short-term effects of consolidation in Rajasthan.
To create Adarsh schools or large schools, the bulk of consolidation, especially in 2014-15, typically involved the closure of elementary schools (grades 1 to 5, grades 1 to 8, or grades 6 to 8) and their consolidation with secondary schools (with any grades from 9 to 12). However, elementary schools were consolidated with other elementary schools as well, especially in 2016-17.
The reorganisation of schools in this manner can impact the education system in the long run – it can change the number of teachers available, administrative and monitoring structures, resource-use, etc. In short, at scale, school consolidation can shake things up. From our study, we found that schools were reorganised quite substantially, with the number of schools with all grades increasing significantly as can be seen in the graph below.
The RTE clearly states that schools need to be easily accessible. Specifically, primary schools need to be within 1 km radius of the child, and upper primary schools need to be within 3 kms. The Rajasthan government too followed this norm.
Therefore, we asked two primary questions. First, has consolidation changed the availability of teachers, school facilities, monitoring, etc.? Has it made the system smoother in any way, eventually benefitting children? Second, did this make a basic service guaranteed by law, inaccessible to certain people? Has it led to people having to drop out of government schools and shift to private schools which are more accessible for them?
The availability of teachers and facilities improved, but elementary schools lag behind
Before consolidation, the teacher-grade ratio (TGR) or the number of teachers divided by the number of grades was low (3 teachers for 5 grades, on average), despite a healthy pupil-teacher ratio. For example, in a school with 30 students, 5 grades, and 2 teachers, the pupil-teacher ratio is 15, well within norms. Yet, 2 teachers have to work with 5 different grades, which results in multi-grade teaching. Often, students of different grades are seated in the same class and taught together and students receive less attention and care than needed. Furthermore, 16 per cent of all government elementary schools in Rajasthan had only one teacher.
Ideally, a school with 5 grades should have at least 5 teachers, or a teacher-grade ratio of at least one. After consolidation, secondary schools had more teachers for every grade. We can see that for schools consolidated with elementary schools, the improvements were small. In fact, the TGR for these schools was around the state average, while secondary schools pulled ahead.
In terms of facilities like a playground or a boundary wall, access improved for students whose schools were consolidated with secondary schools. However, elementary schools lagged behind again.
Did school consolidation lead to dropouts?
We looked at the combined enrolment of schools prior to consolidation, and the enrolment after schools were consolidated. Enrolment in Rajasthan did not change much over the years, but enrolment declined in consolidated schools, across all social groups. Did enrolment decline due to consolidation? Were people excluded? Certain reports definitely argue that this is the case. However, since we looked at the short-term effects, further inquiry is merited to understand the specifics of this decline in enrolment.
Particularly hard hit were students with disabilities, likely due to increased distances to schools. When elementary schools were consolidated with secondary schools, the enrolment of students with disabilities declined far more than other groups. Did parents of other students feel that their children should go to secondary school with potentially more teachers and better facilities, even if further away? It is possible that increased distances for students were mitigated by the expectation of higher quality.
On the other hand, when schools were consolidated with elementary schools, the decline for all groups is the same. Perhaps elementary schools lagged behind, and an increase in school distance was not compensated by an increase in quality, explaining the decline in enrolment.
Given that enrolment declined, a natural question is – was the way these schools were chosen for consolidation a factor behind the drop? Broadly, the following process was followed. Officials at blocks selected schools, which were aggregated at the district level, and verified by the state departments. Subsequently, after verification, the state passed orders to districts and blocks to consolidate schools. Teachers, parents or guardians, and local leaders were not consulted. Top-down or non-participatory planning is nothing new. However, the consolidation of schools was reversed in several instances due to various reasons, including high SC/ST enrolment in the schools shut, adequate enrolment in the schools shut, political pressure, and so on.
What next?
To the extent that more teachers are available, consolidation can set the stage for improvements in learnings. Nonetheless, it is too soon to say that consolidation improves teaching and learning practices. Questions of equity remain. School consolidation seems to have had a different effect across elementary and secondary schools, and students in the former could get left behind. At a time when over 40 per cent students in government schools in Rajasthan are enrolled in elementary schools, there is a need to improve teacher availability and facilities in these schools too. Consolidation has the potential to bring about substantial changes in the way the school system is organised and administered, but community participation, equity, and access to all should underpin any such transformation as we move forward.
This blog is based on Accountability Intiative’s working paper, ‘School Consolidation in Rajasthan: Implementation and Short Term Effects‘ by Mridusmita Bordoloi and Ritwik Shukla. Read the working paper here.
By Yamini Aiyar
“At the current time, there is a severe learning crisis in India, where children are enrolled in primary school but are failing to attain even basic skills such as foundational literacy and numeracy.” This one sentence in the recently released Draft National Education Policy, 2019 (NEP) encapsulates the most critical challenge India facing education policy in India today. The NEP clearly articulates the goal for the new government: “ensuring every child in grade 5 and beyond has achieved foundational literacy and numeracy”. Adopting this goal and ensuring universal acquisition of foundational skills in mission mode is the new government’s primary challenge.
Understanding the problem
India’s learning crisis is a widely acknowledged fact. Since 2005, the Annual Survey of Education Rural (ASER) has served as a repeated reminder that barely 50 per cent of students in Standard 5 in India can read a Standard 2 text. Several other studies including the government’s own, recently conducted National Assessment Survey (NAS) 2017, point to low levels of learning. According to NAS, the proportion of Standard 5 students who scored more than 75 per cent in Mathematics ranged from 12% to 40 % in18 major states in country. The range for Standard 8 students was between 2% and 23 %.
But underlying these low levels of learning is an even bigger crisis. Learning gaps emerge in the early years of schooling and learning profiles – the relationship between years of schooling and measures of student mastery – are flat. In other words, if a child falls behind expected learning levels in early years of schooling, sitting in classrooms, year after year and progressing to higher grades, does not ensure that the child catches up. Drawing on a series of rigorous studies of learning profiles in India, Economists Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty estimate that even with the simplest skills like reading a simple passage, 4 out of 5 children who go into a grade not able to read will finish the grade still unable to read1. Even as children struggle to basics, the curriculum and associated textbooks are designed in the expectation that children have acquired grade-level skills and can progress onwards. Pritchett and Beatty refer to the phenomenon as the “negative consequence of an overambitious curriculum”.
Moreover, several studies highlight that there are wide variations in student learning levels within a classroom. In the 2018 ASER survey, in the average standard 3 classroom in Himachal Pradesh 15.5% students could read words but not sentences; another 24% could read a standard 1 text while 47.4% could read a standard 2 text2. The result is a significant divergence between rates of learning and curriculum expectations. A recent study by Muralidharan and Singh of 5000 students spanning grades 1-8 in four districts of Rajasthan finds that the average rate of learning progress across grades is substantially lower (about half) than envisaged in the syllabus and curricula. As a result, the vast majority of students struggle to cope and in the process learn very little3.
This learning crisis has persisted even as India has made significant gains in achieving the goal of universal elementary education through the expansion of schooling infrastructure. As the NEP states “India now has near universal enrolment of children in primary schools. Gender parity has been achieved and the most disadvantaged groups have access to primary schools.” The harsh reality is this: Schooling is not Learning.
Against this background the focused, goal oriented push for achieving foundational literacy and numeracy in elementary schools strikes at the heart of the problem. As the NEP emphasizes, “the rest of the Policy will be largely irrelevant for such a large portion of our students if this most basic learning (reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is not first achieved”.
Moving from Policy to Action
The NEP offers important starting point to develop a mission mode, goal oriented approach to improving foundational skills in India. It also offers a fairly detailed set of powerful policy ideas from re-designing curriculum, to national tutors program, teacher training and community participation. But achieving this goal is not just about policy direction. Rather it is about shifting mind-sets and changing institutional culture. This can only be achieved through a fundamental re-haul of how elementary education is financed and governed.
The reality is that in its current architecture, the education system is designed and incentivized to cohere around the goal of schooling inputs (enrollment, access, infrastructure) rather than learning. All planning, financing and decision-making systems are aligned to this goal. To illustrate, annual plans, targets and budgets are delinked from the articulation of learning goals. Rather they are based on infrastructure goals determined through U-DISE (Unified District Information on School Education), a specifically created data-base on critical education indicators, except learning. Recent efforts to measure learning outcomes at the district level such as the National Assessment Survey, are not integrated in to the planning and budgeting cycle. As a result, plans have little to do with learning needs and interventions specific to improving learning outcomes command a relatively money. In 2018-19, quality specific interventions accounted for a mere19% of the total Government of India budget for elementary education (Accountability Initiative, 2019)4.
Schooling goals inevitably privilege hierarchical, top-down delivery systems that seek to demand accountable through easily verifiable, logistical targets (# classrooms built, #teacher qualifications). This is precisely what has happened to our classrooms. Easy to measure metrics, ‘syllabus completion’ and ‘pass percentages’ have held our classrooms hostage. The result has been a deeply centralised education system that in which central government determined priorities, rather than school/ student specific learning needs are privileged, leaving the entire education bureaucracy busy collecting information and monitoring targets relevant to New Delhi rather than schools and children.
Shifting this schooling culture is not a simple matter of changing syllabus and textbooks, introducing new pedagogy and improving training. Rather it requires a complete re-haul of the organizational structure and associated incentive systems in which education stakeholders from bureaucrats to teachers and parents are embedded. Education architecture needs to move towards a bottom-up, decentralized delivery system, which privileges the classroom and it’s specific learning needs. This will make the implementation of NEP specific recommendations a reality. The path to this transition to a decentralized system can be achieved through three key reforms.
Financing Education
Despite being on the concurrent list, elementary education financing is disproportionately dependent on Government of India programs. This is because the bulk of State’s use the bulk of their own finances (up to 90% in some cases) toward payment of wages and liabilities. Government of India schemes (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan now renamed Samagra Shiksha) are thus the only source of funds available to states for non-wage expenditure. These schemes privilege an extremely centralized, on-size fit all, schooling focused planning, budgeting and decision-making system. States, in this architecture, have little room for orienting spending to their specific learning needs.
From tied line item funding to block grants
The first step toward shifting to an education system that prioritizes foundational learning is to re-haul the Government of India (GoI) financing system. This can be achieved by putting States in the drivers seat, and providing them with flexible financing aligned to the achievement of clearly articulated learning goals. Specifically, the government should create a new funding window for foundational learning that funds states two untied grants.
The first untied grant an annual grant for states to meet school infrastructure requirements. The RTE mandates that all states meet a set of infrastructure and teacher norms. States should estimate their infrastructure requirements over a three-year period, which the centre can fund annually.
The second grant should be a formula-based, untied learning grant financed over a 3-5 year period. Funding through this window should be based on a long-term learning strategy articulated by state governments and linked to clearly articulated annual learning goals. Since this is an untied grant, the centre will no longer need to busy itself with negotiating line-item expenditure. Rather, it can focus on providing technical support and guidance to states.
Shifting from an annual to 3 year planning and funding cycle
In the current annual government financial and administrative cycle, it takes a minimum of 6 months – usually till November (well in to the school year) for money to move and new programs to be implemented. This is a result of long administrative processes linked to getting plans and projects approved, procuring materials and finally ensuring funds reach their final destination. Studies by the Centre for Policy Research’s Accountability Initiative (PAISA) point out that the bulk of money usually reaches schools and districts mid way (and often at the end) of the annual financial year. Consequently, programs have a late start and an early end, to meet end of year financial needs. This needs to change. The planning cycle needs to move away from an annual cycle to a 3 year cycle (with annual financial approvals) so states, districts and schools can plan better and ensure continuity in implementation.
Improving the assessment system
To institutionalize a culture of accountability and ensure that states have available and utilize regular, reliable data on learning outcomes, a significant effort will need to be made to improve the quality of data collection on learning related indicators. An important start has been made through the restructured National Assessment Survey implemented in 2017 and the NITI Aayog’s School Education Quality Index. However , there are several gaps. The current tools are linked to the achievement of grade level competencies. However, to be useful what they need to capture are gaps in foundational literacy and numeracy and how far students are from these basic skills. Data is analysed on the basis of grade level outcomes rather than specific foundational learning outcomes. Absent this critical data point, states are unable to determine the level at which to orient their learning levels. For assessments to be useful in addressing the learning crisis, they need to be aligned to foundational learning skills and not grade level learning outcomes. Further, the quality of data collection improved. The NEP has recommended setting up a Central Education Statistics Division. This recommendation must be implemented urgently.
Moving beyond states to districts and schools
An education system decentralized to states is simply too large to effectively respond to the diversity of learning needs in school and classrooms. In recognition of this, education policy has, on paper, made the district the unit of planning. However, traditionally, districts have little flexibility in making plans or control over budget. If the education system has to genuinely move toward a focus on classrooms and students, this has to change. Just like states, districts too ought to articulate learning goals over a 3-5 year period and have the flexibility to develop plans to meet these goals. To incentivize districts, GoI and States could create a learning improvement fund that interested districts could compete for5. However, doing this will require a massive capacity building effort by the state and center to empower districts to make plans. An interesting parallel is the Kerala People’s Plan of 1996 in which the state planning board launched a yearlong campaign to work with the Panchayati Raj system to develop the first ever people’s plan. The Central government could create a small capacity building fund for states to develop a similar plan campaign. Of course, an effort such as this must not be restricted to districts and should be extended to schools and parent led school committee’s as well.
Teaching at the Right Level
Indi’s learning crisis has two challenges. The first is to ensure that students entering the school system do not fall behind in the first place. An important suggestion in the NEP, that must be implemented is to integrate pre-school learning with the formal elementary school system. Further reforms relate to curricula and teacher recruitment, training and performance management will likely help redress problems encountered within schools.
However, the second and arguably greater challenge relates to students already in school, many of whom desperately need to catch up. For this cohort of students, there is today a significant body of evidence that suggests the efforts to match classroom instruction to student learning level (rather than the traditional age-grade matrix) or “teaching at the right level” implemented in mission mode can result in significant and relatively speedy gains in foundational learning levels. Many state governments and even individual districts today are beginning to experiment with implementing versions of teaching at the right level (TARL) in their schools. These efforts need to be supported and scaled both with technical and financial resources. To do this, it is proposed to create a specific FLN fund and technical partners at the Government of India level that districts can draw on to implement TARL initiative in mission mode. This could be linked to the Niti Aayog’s aspirational districts program to ensure high level buy in and institutional convergence at the GoI level. Effort to assess foundational learning levels, using ASER like tools are already underway. These now need to be scaled.
From Assessments to Learning and doing
One of the most damaging consequences of a centralized, schooling focused implementation system is that it has undermined the professional roles of teachers and school level administrators, casting them as passive rule followers, collecting data and implementing orders from the top. It isn’t uncommon for teachers in schools to describe themselves as mere clerks in an administrative system, taking them away from their primary teaching responsibilities. This view is reinforced by the fact that the career ladder for teachers – as they move to becoming head masters, cluster and block level officers and finally district education officers – is primarily about more administration rather than supporting teaching – learning. Recognizing this problem, the NEP pushes for reducing administrative work and improve teacher training and support infrastructure.
But these reforms will only work if they are accompanied by significant cultural shift in how education reforms are debated and implemented. This shift must place teachers and frontline officers at the center of attempt to reshape classroom pedagogy. Consider this. In the last three years, significant efforts have been underway to move the needle on measuring learning outcomes. These include the NAS and SEQI referred to earlier. However, none of these assessments are geared toward the teacher or frontline administrators – particularly the cluster resource center coordinators and block resource persons charged with providing mentoring and academic support to teachers. These assessments thus merely function as tools for monitoring performance rather than diagnostic tools that can aid teachers and their pedagogical support structure, to motivate teachers and assist them in improving teaching practices. For teachers and frontline administrators, this merely reinforces the view that they are no more than disempowered cogs in the wheel expected to follow orders and complete administrative tasks.
Yet, evidence from a number of experiments, most recently in Uttar Pradesh6 where teachers are using mobile apps to review and track progress on student outcomes on a regular basis, suggests that the most effective way of moving the needle on teacher motivation and re-asserting their primary professional identity as teachers charged with imparting learning to students, is by empowering them with data and enabling them to use this data in their classrooms. It also ensures that academic support staff have the tools to engage in a meaningful discussion with teachers on how to improve learning in schools. Building on these experiments to use technology and empower teachers with student assessment data in meaningful ways can go a long way in addressing this challenge. Shifting the needle on learning outcomes assessment away from being a mere tool in the hands of the central and state governments to becoming a diagnostic tool that teachers can and should use is an urgent and arguably most important reform that must be institutionalized if India is too move toward the goal of universal acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the next five years.
Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:
By Yamini Aiyar
“At the current time, there is a severe learning crisis in India, where children are enrolled in primary school but are failing to attain even basic skills such as foundational literacy and numeracy.” This one sentence in the recently released Draft National Education Policy, 2019 (NEP) encapsulates the most critical challenge India facing education policy in India today. The NEP clearly articulates the goal for the new government: “ensuring every child in grade 5 and beyond has achieved foundational literacy and numeracy”. Adopting this goal and ensuring universal acquisition of foundational skills in mission mode is the new government’s primary challenge.
Understanding the problem
India’s learning crisis is a widely acknowledged fact. Since 2005, the Annual Survey of Education Rural (ASER) has served as a repeated reminder that barely 50 per cent of students in Standard 5 in India can read a Standard 2 text. Several other studies including the government’s own, recently conducted National Assessment Survey (NAS) 2017, point to low levels of learning. According to NAS, the proportion of Standard 5 students who scored more than 75 per cent in Mathematics ranged from 12% to 40 % in18 major states in country. The range for Standard 8 students was between 2% and 23 %.
But underlying these low levels of learning is an even bigger crisis. Learning gaps emerge in the early years of schooling and learning profiles – the relationship between years of schooling and measures of student mastery – are flat. In other words, if a child falls behind expected learning levels in early years of schooling, sitting in classrooms, year after year and progressing to higher grades, does not ensure that the child catches up. Drawing on a series of rigorous studies of learning profiles in India, Economists Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty estimate that even with the simplest skills like reading a simple passage, 4 out of 5 children who go into a grade not able to read will finish the grade still unable to read1. Even as children struggle to basics, the curriculum and associated textbooks are designed in the expectation that children have acquired grade-level skills and can progress onwards. Pritchett and Beatty refer to the phenomenon as the “negative consequence of an overambitious curriculum”.
Moreover, several studies highlight that there are wide variations in student learning levels within a classroom. In the 2018 ASER survey, in the average standard 3 classroom in Himachal Pradesh 15.5% students could read words but not sentences; another 24% could read a standard 1 text while 47.4% could read a standard 2 text2. The result is a significant divergence between rates of learning and curriculum expectations. A recent study by Muralidharan and Singh of 5000 students spanning grades 1-8 in four districts of Rajasthan finds that the average rate of learning progress across grades is substantially lower (about half) than envisaged in the syllabus and curricula. As a result, the vast majority of students struggle to cope and in the process learn very little3.
This learning crisis has persisted even as India has made significant gains in achieving the goal of universal elementary education through the expansion of schooling infrastructure. As the NEP states “India now has near universal enrolment of children in primary schools. Gender parity has been achieved and the most disadvantaged groups have access to primary schools.” The harsh reality is this: Schooling is not Learning.
Against this background the focused, goal oriented push for achieving foundational literacy and numeracy in elementary schools strikes at the heart of the problem. As the NEP emphasizes, “the rest of the Policy will be largely irrelevant for such a large portion of our students if this most basic learning (reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is not first achieved”.
Moving from Policy to Action
The NEP offers important starting point to develop a mission mode, goal oriented approach to improving foundational skills in India. It also offers a fairly detailed set of powerful policy ideas from re-designing curriculum, to national tutors program, teacher training and community participation. But achieving this goal is not just about policy direction. Rather it is about shifting mind-sets and changing institutional culture. This can only be achieved through a fundamental re-haul of how elementary education is financed and governed.
The reality is that in its current architecture, the education system is designed and incentivized to cohere around the goal of schooling inputs (enrollment, access, infrastructure) rather than learning. All planning, financing and decision-making systems are aligned to this goal. To illustrate, annual plans, targets and budgets are delinked from the articulation of learning goals. Rather they are based on infrastructure goals determined through U-DISE (Unified District Information on School Education), a specifically created data-base on critical education indicators, except learning. Recent efforts to measure learning outcomes at the district level such as the National Assessment Survey, are not integrated in to the planning and budgeting cycle. As a result, plans have little to do with learning needs and interventions specific to improving learning outcomes command a relatively money. In 2018-19, quality specific interventions accounted for a mere19% of the total Government of India budget for elementary education (Accountability Initiative, 2019)4.
Schooling goals inevitably privilege hierarchical, top-down delivery systems that seek to demand accountable through easily verifiable, logistical targets (# classrooms built, #teacher qualifications). This is precisely what has happened to our classrooms. Easy to measure metrics, ‘syllabus completion’ and ‘pass percentages’ have held our classrooms hostage. The result has been a deeply centralised education system that in which central government determined priorities, rather than school/ student specific learning needs are privileged, leaving the entire education bureaucracy busy collecting information and monitoring targets relevant to New Delhi rather than schools and children.
Shifting this schooling culture is not a simple matter of changing syllabus and textbooks, introducing new pedagogy and improving training. Rather it requires a complete re-haul of the organizational structure and associated incentive systems in which education stakeholders from bureaucrats to teachers and parents are embedded. Education architecture needs to move towards a bottom-up, decentralized delivery system, which privileges the classroom and it’s specific learning needs. This will make the implementation of NEP specific recommendations a reality. The path to this transition to a decentralized system can be achieved through three key reforms.
Financing Education
Despite being on the concurrent list, elementary education financing is disproportionately dependent on Government of India programs. This is because the bulk of State’s use the bulk of their own finances (up to 90% in some cases) toward payment of wages and liabilities. Government of India schemes (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan now renamed Samagra Shiksha) are thus the only source of funds available to states for non-wage expenditure. These schemes privilege an extremely centralized, on-size fit all, schooling focused planning, budgeting and decision-making system. States, in this architecture, have little room for orienting spending to their specific learning needs.
From tied line item funding to block grants
The first step toward shifting to an education system that prioritizes foundational learning is to re-haul the Government of India (GoI) financing system. This can be achieved by putting States in the drivers seat, and providing them with flexible financing aligned to the achievement of clearly articulated learning goals. Specifically, the government should create a new funding window for foundational learning that funds states two untied grants.
The first untied grant an annual grant for states to meet school infrastructure requirements. The RTE mandates that all states meet a set of infrastructure and teacher norms. States should estimate their infrastructure requirements over a three-year period, which the centre can fund annually.
The second grant should be a formula-based, untied learning grant financed over a 3-5 year period. Funding through this window should be based on a long-term learning strategy articulated by state governments and linked to clearly articulated annual learning goals. Since this is an untied grant, the centre will no longer need to busy itself with negotiating line-item expenditure. Rather, it can focus on providing technical support and guidance to states.
Shifting from an annual to 3 year planning and funding cycle
In the current annual government financial and administrative cycle, it takes a minimum of 6 months – usually till November (well in to the school year) for money to move and new programs to be implemented. This is a result of long administrative processes linked to getting plans and projects approved, procuring materials and finally ensuring funds reach their final destination. Studies by the Centre for Policy Research’s Accountability Initiative (PAISA) point out that the bulk of money usually reaches schools and districts mid way (and often at the end) of the annual financial year. Consequently, programs have a late start and an early end, to meet end of year financial needs. This needs to change. The planning cycle needs to move away from an annual cycle to a 3 year cycle (with annual financial approvals) so states, districts and schools can plan better and ensure continuity in implementation.
Improving the assessment system
To institutionalize a culture of accountability and ensure that states have available and utilize regular, reliable data on learning outcomes, a significant effort will need to be made to improve the quality of data collection on learning related indicators. An important start has been made through the restructured National Assessment Survey implemented in 2017 and the NITI Aayog’s School Education Quality Index. However , there are several gaps. The current tools are linked to the achievement of grade level competencies. However, to be useful what they need to capture are gaps in foundational literacy and numeracy and how far students are from these basic skills. Data is analysed on the basis of grade level outcomes rather than specific foundational learning outcomes. Absent this critical data point, states are unable to determine the level at which to orient their learning levels. For assessments to be useful in addressing the learning crisis, they need to be aligned to foundational learning skills and not grade level learning outcomes. Further, the quality of data collection improved. The NEP has recommended setting up a Central Education Statistics Division. This recommendation must be implemented urgently.
Moving beyond states to districts and schools
An education system decentralized to states is simply too large to effectively respond to the diversity of learning needs in school and classrooms. In recognition of this, education policy has, on paper, made the district the unit of planning. However, traditionally, districts have little flexibility in making plans or control over budget. If the education system has to genuinely move toward a focus on classrooms and students, this has to change. Just like states, districts too ought to articulate learning goals over a 3-5 year period and have the flexibility to develop plans to meet these goals. To incentivize districts, GoI and States could create a learning improvement fund that interested districts could compete for5. However, doing this will require a massive capacity building effort by the state and center to empower districts to make plans. An interesting parallel is the Kerala People’s Plan of 1996 in which the state planning board launched a yearlong campaign to work with the Panchayati Raj system to develop the first ever people’s plan. The Central government could create a small capacity building fund for states to develop a similar plan campaign. Of course, an effort such as this must not be restricted to districts and should be extended to schools and parent led school committee’s as well.
Teaching at the Right Level
Indi’s learning crisis has two challenges. The first is to ensure that students entering the school system do not fall behind in the first place. An important suggestion in the NEP, that must be implemented is to integrate pre-school learning with the formal elementary school system. Further reforms relate to curricula and teacher recruitment, training and performance management will likely help redress problems encountered within schools.
However, the second and arguably greater challenge relates to students already in school, many of whom desperately need to catch up. For this cohort of students, there is today a significant body of evidence that suggests the efforts to match classroom instruction to student learning level (rather than the traditional age-grade matrix) or “teaching at the right level” implemented in mission mode can result in significant and relatively speedy gains in foundational learning levels. Many state governments and even individual districts today are beginning to experiment with implementing versions of teaching at the right level (TARL) in their schools. These efforts need to be supported and scaled both with technical and financial resources. To do this, it is proposed to create a specific FLN fund and technical partners at the Government of India level that districts can draw on to implement TARL initiative in mission mode. This could be linked to the Niti Aayog’s aspirational districts program to ensure high level buy in and institutional convergence at the GoI level. Effort to assess foundational learning levels, using ASER like tools are already underway. These now need to be scaled.
From Assessments to Learning and doing
One of the most damaging consequences of a centralized, schooling focused implementation system is that it has undermined the professional roles of teachers and school level administrators, casting them as passive rule followers, collecting data and implementing orders from the top. It isn’t uncommon for teachers in schools to describe themselves as mere clerks in an administrative system, taking them away from their primary teaching responsibilities. This view is reinforced by the fact that the career ladder for teachers – as they move to becoming head masters, cluster and block level officers and finally district education officers – is primarily about more administration rather than supporting teaching – learning. Recognizing this problem, the NEP pushes for reducing administrative work and improve teacher training and support infrastructure.
But these reforms will only work if they are accompanied by significant cultural shift in how education reforms are debated and implemented. This shift must place teachers and frontline officers at the center of attempt to reshape classroom pedagogy. Consider this. In the last three years, significant efforts have been underway to move the needle on measuring learning outcomes. These include the NAS and SEQI referred to earlier. However, none of these assessments are geared toward the teacher or frontline administrators – particularly the cluster resource center coordinators and block resource persons charged with providing mentoring and academic support to teachers. These assessments thus merely function as tools for monitoring performance rather than diagnostic tools that can aid teachers and their pedagogical support structure, to motivate teachers and assist them in improving teaching practices. For teachers and frontline administrators, this merely reinforces the view that they are no more than disempowered cogs in the wheel expected to follow orders and complete administrative tasks.
Yet, evidence from a number of experiments, most recently in Uttar Pradesh6 where teachers are using mobile apps to review and track progress on student outcomes on a regular basis, suggests that the most effective way of moving the needle on teacher motivation and re-asserting their primary professional identity as teachers charged with imparting learning to students, is by empowering them with data and enabling them to use this data in their classrooms. It also ensures that academic support staff have the tools to engage in a meaningful discussion with teachers on how to improve learning in schools. Building on these experiments to use technology and empower teachers with student assessment data in meaningful ways can go a long way in addressing this challenge. Shifting the needle on learning outcomes assessment away from being a mere tool in the hands of the central and state governments to becoming a diagnostic tool that teachers can and should use is an urgent and arguably most important reform that must be institutionalized if India is too move toward the goal of universal acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the next five years.
Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:
1 https://www.cgdev.org/publication/negative-consequences-overambitious-cu…
2 http://www.asercentre.org/Keywords/p/337.html and https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/learning-levels-will-not-improve-…
3 https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/learning-levels-will-not-improve-…
4 https://accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/pdf_files/SS%202019-2…
5 See also https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/improving-children…
6 https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/a-quiet-revolution…
FULL VIDEOS OF PRESENTATIONS AND SUBSEQUENT DISCUSSION
SANITATION
NITI Aayog and CPR held their second open seminar on June 29 addressing the possibilities and challenges of achieving zero waste in India by 2019. Watch the full video above of the three presentations on i) policy questions pertaining to zero waste in India, ii) Pune’s strategy for ensuring a ‘zero garbage city’, and iii) pathways to achieve zero waste.
A rich discussion followed with questions on the effectiveness of the ban on plastic bags; provisions and guidelines for safe solid waste management methods; protection of rag pickers; and accountability of urban local bodies and municipal solid waste management methods, answered, among others. Watch the full discussion here: Q&A
Additionally, for more details, access to complete presentations and the full report, visit the dedicated page.
A number of major cities (Mumbai, Chennai, Sao Paolo, Hanoi, HCM City, Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta etc.) of the world have been hit hard over the past few years with severe flooding events. How can policy makers ensure improved disaster preparedness in the future continues to be a key concern.
The talk (full video above) explores options for forward-looking operational assistance to policy makers and technical specialists in the rapidly expanding cities and towns of the developing world on how best to manage the risk of floods.
It takes a strategic approach, in which appropriate risk management measures are assessed, selected and integrated in a process that both informs and involves the full range of stakeholders. The speakers Abhas Jha and Kamal Kishore are senior experts in this field.
Access the question and answer session that followed the presentation here.
More details about the talk can be accessed at the dedicated event listing here.
Listen to Akhila Sivadas (above) talk about activism on sanitation, focusing on interventions by Mahila Pragati Manch, a community based organisation in Delhi, which advocated for basic sanitation services for the Jhuggi Jhopri slum clusters of the city with decision makers, not only catching the attention of those in power but also sensitising them. Sivadas is a founder member of Centre For Advocacy and Research (CFAR).