Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 2

Note: This piece is in continuation of Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 1

What are the challenges?

            One of the biggest challenges I can see is to take all stakeholders on board, help everyone see what the problem is, and how the proposed solution (policy reform) addresses it. For example, looking at the national level enrollment data by gender, policymakers prescribe schools to “engage with their local community and emphasize on education for girls”. What if the state administrators, teachers, parents or community members in a particular social context do not even see lower enrollment of girls as a problem? How do you ensure buy-in from all stakeholders? If the change agents (people at different administrative levels, teachers and school staff) do not believe in what they are asked to do, the policy intervention fails.

            In addition, this one small piece of information (less girls enrolled on average) could be due to a broader social issue of gender equality, school infrastructure, safe commute to school, or even skewed ratio of boys to girls. While the intent of the policymaker could be correct, the proposed solution is too simplistic, vague (terms like engage, local community, emphasize remain undefined), and loaded with assumption of gender bias. Moreover, the causes for fewer enrollments of girls could vary across social contexts. This brings me to the second challenge: generalization of proposed policy intervention. One-size-fits-all way of policy intervention may not work at macro-level. The intervention needs to be sensitive to the local social context.  

            Continuing with the same example, several studies in India have indicated that access to toilets for girls in schools is significantly related to high dropouts in girls. Accordingly, building separate toilets for girls in schools could be more effective than asking teachers to spread awareness about gender-equality for raising enrollments of girls. This point highlights the importance of systematic empirical research across various social contexts prior to policy formulation. Unfortunately, India’s educational sector is highly understudied empirically. There are too few educational research institutes and very little interaction between researchers and the policymakers.

            Fourth challenge deals with highly centralized decision making structure. Because, the proposed policy interventions often lack grass-root level buy-in (due to reasons mentioned above), the state/centre administrators use their position of higher authority to muscle down implementation. Rather than the system supporting the teachers and school staff in serving children, the entire system has to support the administrators to implement their proposed interventions. In the educational administrative hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices from below. The IASs often do the same and cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.

            Finally, the macro-level policy reports talk a lot about all-round development of children, but the focus has been limited to the literacy-rates, enrollment and dropout rates, physical infrastructure of school, and reading and math outcomes (that too very recently). The challenge is to expand this policy focus and to include physical and mental health outcomes of children. Sports, music, performing arts, social cohesion, prevalence of bullying and teasing, relations between teachers and students and among students, psychological support to students, and many vital interventions have remained side-notes in policy drafts and have not found their worthy place in the grass-root level practices. One big reason for their neglect could be that these interventions may not have direct relations with the academic outcomes. However, these interventions are more likely to have positive effects on children’s physical health (e.g., age-level benchmarking of stamina, muscle strength, and flexibility by gender; and medical screening) and/or mental health (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety, and screening for more prevalent disorders). If we can integrate clearly defined health outcomes (physical and mental) as an integral part of national educational policy and develop measures for their systematic evaluation, the field practitioners (administrators at various levels, teachers and school staff) would employ interventions which are important for children’s overall wellbeing and not just for their academics. Perhaps, we may provide our children a more fulfilling school experience.   

            Current government’s emphasis on decentralization of policymaking is encouraging. The fourteenth finance commission gives relatively more economic autonomy to the states than before. However, the states do not have any premier research-driven think tanks to guide their policies. There are SCERTs, but one cannot find any link between production of policy relevant empirical research and policy formulation across states. The central government states that the Niti Aayog will assist states with policy formulation. However, India is too big and complex for any single institution. Also, Niti Aayog, at best, could assist with economic policies, because it does not have any human resource of researchers from the fields of education, psychology, psychometrics, or sociology. Perhaps a more apt approach would be for all states to develop their own multi-disciplinary Niti Aayogs (or make sure SCERTs play that role), and Niti Aayog in Delhi could then coordinate policies across state-level Niti Aayogs. I share some ideas regarding the functioning of these state-level research bodies HERE-Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution. 

I welcome your comments/questions/rebuttals...

Educational Ecology of Memorization

It was January 2000. I received my class 10 preliminary exam results. Vividly remember getting 71 marks out of 100 in science. My teacher was very disappointed. She said –“Kathan, you don’t cover all points in your responses. Also, you write very slow and don’t finish exam within time-limits. You need a lot of writing practice”.

I learnt an important lesson. Simply understanding the content was not sufficient. If I wanted to score high, I needed to memorize each and every point mentioned in the textbook and reproduce the text in my answer-sheet without spending time on thinking. I practiced just that for the following two month. As a result, I scored 98% in Science in the Board exams.    

In India, when a student is preparing for school/university exam, it is most likely that s/he is

·         preparing model responses for all possible questions across subject content

·         practicing reproduction of available “model” responses through repeatedly reading and/or writing

A lot of policymakers/educators and people who “think they are educationists” label this learning approach as “Rote-Learning” and blame students and teachers. I would like to clarify that memorization is not necessarily rote-learning, but memorization without conceptual understanding is rote-learning. Nonetheless, the blame game is widely prevalent within policy circles and in media and the broader context is ignored. In this piece, I discuss the educational ecology that encourages memorization.

Assessment Practices

With exceptions of some of the elite K-12 schools and premier higher education institutions (e.g., IITs, IIMs), educational assessment in-general is based on the questions listed in the textbooks, previous exam papers (available to students) and/or practice-books at all levels (from primary to university-level). Even the state administered board examinations that are of extremely high stake follow the same trend. (Read: Unscientific assessment practices of Educational Boards) Note that the 12^th standard board exam result serves as a criterion (in most cases, a sole criterion) for the choice of career as well as admission to the higher education institution. These exams focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely see test items that measure higher levels of cognition (i.e., application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. Overall, key to academic success is reproduction of “model” responses (or textbook responses) in timely manner. Now, you see why students practice reproduction of model responses.

Before discussing what teachers do, it is important to understand the context in which they function. For this, let us see the administrative setup.

State-Administrators: Educational policy is mainly a state-level issue. Undisputedly, India’s state administrative setup is highly centralized and extremely hierarchical. On a side note, the Chinese system is much more decentralized. The state administrators decide and allocate resources to all public schools. States micro-manage, for example: hire/fire school staff, develop annual-activity calendars for schools, design curriculum, print textbooks, teaching tools, administer board exams, and conduct professional development programmes. Of course, this is extremely burdensome for the state-level officers, but the system has been like this since Nehru’s time and there has been no public debate on decentralization and capacity building at lower administrative-levels. If you observe the functioning of these state-administrators, you get a feeling that India basically has only one school per state with classes spread across that entire state.  

   

District/Block/Cluster Administrators

Accordingly, the district/block/cluster level administers function as eyes and hands of the state. They have very little autonomy, and are there to execute state-orders and monitor all schools within their purview.

Principal

The principal is basically a teacher with additional administrative duties like: taking responsibility of financial accounts and resource inventories, supervising teachers, keeping up with all state mandated year-round activities and submitting an incredible amount of paper work routinely, attending meetings whenever the higher authorities call on (meetings may be called on the same day and one is expected to be present). But, s/he does not have much say in teacher recruitment, or acquiring funding or resources.

Teachers

Teachers may or may not face problems on personal level, but this profession has been the biggest loser in India’s rapid educational-infrastructural expansion. Some of the big challenges include: Extremely poor pre-service and in-service training, harsh working condition (close to 30-40 hours of lecturing per week with average class-size of 40), little access to teaching aids, and no time allocation for lesson planning, test development, or homework assessment. Average entry-level pay can be 10-15 times lesser for teachers than that for engineers. Note that there is no tenure-track and hardly any pipeline leading to professional growth. Teacher can at the most be a principal if luck favours (but that may not have any monetary benefit). No reward/recognition for good teaching, and pay increases are solely based on seniority.   

            In this educational hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. I have seen principals sit on the floor while the state administrators sit at a dais and get an emperor like treatment. It’s difficult to imagine a government school teacher arguing on a policy issue with the state-administrators. The entire social context is set up to make teachers feel they are subservient to all higher-level administers. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices coming from below. The IASs often do the same. They cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.   

            In this tradition of catering to the bosses amid demoralizing social context, teachers do what it takes to keep things going. The dutiful ones cover their syllabus. It should be noted that the Indian curricula across various educational boards cover incredible breadth of subject content. To give an illustration, things that I studied in 8^th grade physics (e.g., Newtonian Mechanics) are taught at the undergraduate-level in the US. The only way this great breadth of curriculum can be covered is through the use of lecture method. Ideally, a teacher would be able to spend some time introducing a concept and then demonstrate solutions for some textbook questions before moving on to new content. There is little time for experimentation or critical classroom discussions and to go in-depth of the subject. And let’s not forget, the exams do not care for depth. It is very common for teachers to ask students to write responses for the textbook questions more than once for homework.

Parents

Parents in-general are concerned about the results and not the process. Unfortunately, the social context is set up where memorization is considered as a sign of being genius. I have an untested hypothesis that children whose parents are more involved with their studies memorize more content.  

Private Tutoring

The prime purpose of private tutoring is to get access to model responses and to drill and practice more memorization. It is very common for the tutors to share their own version of “model” responses with their students.

            Today as I look back to my 10^th standard board exam preparation, I wonder what if the exams had significant amount of test items at application level. I spent more than two months almost memorizing the entire textbook. What if I had spent that time designing some experiments, visiting museums, reading popular science magazines or watching sci-fi movies? I had this sort of question on my board exam:

What is Environmental Degradation? Mention the measures to control Environmental Degradation. (5 marks)

One definition and all eight points on ‘Measures to control Environmental Degradation’ mentioned in the textbook. Of course, I nailed it. But, what if I was asked the following question (which had no readily available model response):

Based on your knowledge of the science textbook, prepare a detailed plan of action to cope up with the Environmental Degradation in your home town/village/city. (5 marks)

What if we prepare a social context where students need to tap into their deeper levels of learning? This cannot happen overnight. It is a gradual process: increasing weightage of application level questions on exams, high quality teachers who are as professionally competent and as well-paid as any engineer, doctor, or scientist on average, more experimentation and higher order discussions in classrooms, entire administrative structure which caters to the students and not the bosses, and….

[Note: This piece sheds light on common patterns. There are always exceptions. A lot of administrators, principals, teachers and parents are putting incredible amount of efforts keeping the students at the centre; and there’s always a Rancho in every classroom.] 

I welcome your comments.

Indian Education: Macro-level Systemic Problems

After independence, India has significantly expanded its educational infrastructure. Gross enrolment rates are near universal in most states. However, the quality of education remains a major concern as many large scale educational assessments indicate overall poor academic outcomes of students (ASER 2005-14; Education Initiatives, 2010; NCERT, 2008). Most academicians, media, and people in and around policy circles acknowledge this dire state of education. However, the discussion on “the way out of this mess” only revolves around school, teacher and/or student level interventions. While micro-level (i.e., school or teacher-level) reforms are essential for qualitative improvement, there are some systematic macro-level problems which are more critical yet they remain unaddressed.  

Lack of Policy-relevant Knowledge

Suppose you are the educational secretary of a state and have to invest hundred crore rupees in primary education. What will be your investment priority? School infrastructure, hiring more teachers, performance pay for teachers, psychological support for children, improving quality of school-meal, subsidized text-books and school uniforms for the poor, celebrations of numerous festivals in schools, or organizing sports and cultural events across state? Will you distribute this money uniformly across all districts or in certain priority? What proportion should you spend on the least developed regions? All of these questions are extremely important and only empirical research can provide answers. Unfortunately, India has neglected empirical research for so long that it cannot provide answers for effective investment priority and policy formulation even for one state. There exists very little empirical work on educational issues.

Moreover, whatever little empirical studies that are conducted, are often not accessible to policymakers, fellow researchers, and practitioners. In most cases, one copy of the study is submitted to the funding agency and the other one could be lying somewhere in the college/department library. Unfortunately, universities do not even keep doctoral dissertations and theses accessible to wider audience. Intervention studies in Indian context, which are available on the internet, are mostly conducted by the researchers outside of India or funded by International agencies. Muralidharan (2013) provides a nice summary of major works in Indian education and their policy relevance, but not one study was conducted by an Indian institution. In total, one gets a feeling that the centre and state governments are not serious about generating indigenous pool of policy relevant knowledge in education sector. Accordingly, most debates and discussions around educational issues are dominated by "expert opinions" and not by empirical work. 

Arbitrary approach to Policy Formulation

Apathy for indigenous knowledge is a problem, but I am more concerned about the process of policy formulation. State officials and policymakers are not formally trained to consume research literature. Empirical research, especially field experiments and causal inference, is a highly developed field which demands technical expertise. It is highly likely that a state government does not have a single competent educational researcher in its policymaking-team. In such scenario, policy formulation is often based on a mixture of subjective factors like majoritarian view, administrative ease, and policymakers’ intuitions, world-views and/or personal-experiences. This is extremely dangerous way of policymaking given that lives and careers of future citizens are at stake.

Absence of Valid & Reliable Academic Outcomes

Another major issue pertains to the absence of standardized grade-level outcomes across various educational settings, from vernacular religious schools to elite English medium private schools. Everyone talks about poor quality, but there is no standard definition of “educational quality”. Without standardized assessment of a representative sample, a state may not be able to evaluate the effectiveness of educational interventions and policies. In other words, everyone, including the policymakers, are clueless about whether their actions are producing any good. In addition, teachers, parents and students remain unclear of the expected knowledge and skills for a particular standard.

Lack of Understanding of Human Resource Required in Educational Sector

Yes, there is a  great dearth of education specialists across the country. But, more frustratingly one gets a feeling that the policymakers only seem to understand two job profiles: teachers and teacher-trainers. There has been little attention on developing human resource for educational administration at state, district, clusters or schools, curriculum and instruction design, testing and measurement, educational research, psychological support in schools, and policy making. 

As a result of above discussion, India has not been able to establish consistency between national human-resource requirement, knowledge-base, policy design and implementation, and educational practices in the field (Figure 1). 

I present a potential mechanism for establishing these linkages in blog post entitled, Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution 

Do share your thoughts...