Sikshana

The Lesser Known Form of Cruelty on Children

2012-01-19T21:40:00.000+05:30

ASER Report of 2011 is no surprise at all to those who have beenworking with the State run schools in rural India. Just one aspect of the waythe children are treated by the system will be very revealing. Madhav Chavan inhis preface to the Report states the following:

“The increase in enrollment was an intended clear goal of thesystem and the system responded to the signals coming from Delhi and statecapitals. Large centralized systems respond to simple and clear instructions orgoals and not fine print. In a centralized but ill-functioning system with hugegaps of knowledge and skill-sets, a complex message is lost in the game ofChinese whispers. Worse, it may lead to a dysfunctional system becoming worse.A few months ago a senior government official was heard explaining to agathering of head teachers the essence of the Right to Education Act. “Enrollall children. Do not beat them. Promote them to the next class. Make sure theydo not drop out. Once you have done all this, you will have achieved RTE”. Butwill learning happen simply if children stay in school?”

Thecompulsory attendance of children in an ‘age appropriate’ class is perhaps theworst form cruelty that can be foisted on them. Let us take a kid who shouldhave learnt how to do a simple task in Arithmetic like Division of numbers in 4^thStd in the normal course. Somehow he slips through the net and end up notacquiring this skill at the end of the year. For the next year or at the mosttwo, the teacher and the school puts in a half hearted effort to bring this kidon par, which – given the conditions in the classrooms- does not produce theexpected result. As rightly pointed in the above quote, the system keepspushing such students upwards year after year, unmindful of the consequences. Alook at the numbers in the Report shows that the % of children, who do not acquirethis simple skill even after 7^th, is an astonishing 30 in mostStates. This shows that we are not talking about small numbers here.

Thesestudents now end up in a High School, where the syllabus takes on lessons thatare way ahead of their limited ability. Naturally they tend to get alienatedfrom the entire process of education, something that gets far worse as they goon up to 10^th. This gap in the classroom does not apply just to onesubject; those who cannot even read in own language will now be required towrite essays on given subjects. It does not need a lot to imagine the plight ofsuch students having to sit through class sessions day after day for four yearsor more, understanding nothing that is going on while bearing the taunts andinsults from their colleagues and teachers at the same time. This, in my opinion, is the worst form ofcruelty that can ever be imposed on a bunch of children. It would havebeen far more compassionate to let them sit in classes where they are on parwith the rest, providing them with another opportunity to acquire the missedskill.

Thedamage that this inflicts on the other students is significant too. They inevitablyform a group and gravitate towards the last rows, providing the seeds ofdiscontent for the entire class. It is time we started looking at concepts like‘skill appropriate’ grades and progress at one’s own pace for governing theprogress of kids through schooling. Having adopted no detention policy already,there should be no major hurdle in implementing this shift.

Theother signal, which emerges from the ASER Report, is the need for decentralizationof the system and empowerment of the schools. While dealing with the financing issues,Yamini Aiyar brings it out very aptly as follows:

“The shift towards enhancing learning requires that the systemfocus on the needs of individual schools and children. GOI has argued thatimplementing the RTE requires a system that recognizes ‘the need for thecreation of capacity within the education system and the school for addressingthe diversified learning needs of different groups of children who are now inthe school system. School Management Committees hold the keyto implementing such a decentralized structure. The first and most criticalstep therefore in the shift from schooling to learning will be to empowerschool management committees. There are three immediate reform measures thatcould be implemented to achieve this goal. “

Everyoneknows by this time that India ranks among the last of all the countriesassessed by OECD. Not many seem to be keen on looking at Finland occupying theother end of the list at the top. TheFinnish education system was highly centralized and remained centrallycontrolled until 1985. A dense network of rules and orders regulated the dailywork of teachers. The gradual shift toward trusting schools and teachers beganin the 1980s, when major phases of the reform agenda were initiated in theeducation system. In the early 1990s, the era of a trust-based school cultureformally started in Finland. The culture of trust simply means thateducation authorities and political leaders believe that teachers, togetherwith principals, parents and their communities, know how to provide the bestpossible education for their children and youth. Even if this cannot be implemented ‘in-toto’in our country considering the vast cultural differences, I am sure there is stilla lesson in it for us; it is time the Government listened to it.

E SRamamurthy

19 Jan12

Education in Finland

2011-12-24T09:51:00.002+05:30

You may be surprised to see a blog from me on the education system in- of all countries- Finland. This is a country whose success story in evolving an admirable public education system really sets you thinking about all that we are doing here, and more importantly on what we ought to be doing.

A Few Facts:

Morethan 99% of the relevant age group successfully complete compulsory basic education,about 95% continue their education in upper secondary schools or in the 10thgrade of the basic school, and 90% of thosestarting upper secondary school eventually receive their school leavingcertification, providing access to tertiary education. Two thirds of thoseenrol either in academic universities or professionally oriented polytechnics.

Accordingto recent global education indicators, only 2% of Finnish expenditure oneducational institutions is from private sources compared to an OECD average of13%.

Finlandhad one of the smallest performance variations between schools; 5% against a OECD average of 33%. Inthe 2006 PISA survey, Finland maintained its high performance in all assessedareas of student achievement. In science, the main focus of the survey, Finnish students outperformed their peers in all the 56 countries studied.

The Features of the Finnish education system

Explainingeither success or failure of any educational system is difficult. What studentslearn in schools is, in fact, a result of a complex set of factors – most ofthem beyond real control of school or teachers. Finland is not an exception.The culture of Finland and ethnic characteristics of its people play a role inhow education system operates. It is impossible to give a precise answer to thequestion of why Finland is doing well in education. This analysis is hence restrictedto the education policies that Finland has adopted to raise student achievement.

(i)Same comprehensive basic school for all

AllFinnish children start their compulsory nine-year comprehensive basic schoolingonce they become seven years old. Normally, class-based primary school lastssix years followed by three-year lower secondary school, although the new lawallows some variation. Today it is widely recognized that the six-year primaryschool experience provides the cornerstone for high quality education for allFinnish citizens. It is seen that investment in primary education as childrenlearn basic knowledge and skills and adopt attitudes of lifelong learning payoff in later grades through better aptitude and learning skills, as well asthrough positive overall outcomes.

Allbasic school teachers must hold a Masters degree to become permanentlyemployed. Primary school teacher preparation was converted from a three-yearprogram at teachers’ colleges to four- or five-year university programs in thelate 1970s. Hence, most primary school teachers today possess higher universitydegrees.

TheFinnish comprehensive school is a formal and fully publicly financed system andalso, as ‘a matter of pedagogical philosophy and practice’. Well- equippedschools are typically small with class sizes ranging from 20 – 30 students.Primary schools (grades 1 to 6) typically have fewer than 300 pupils and classsizes are, by international standards, average or below.

Becausemost Finnish schools are small, they often forge close educational communitiesof teachers and pupils. Most teachers in primary schools are highly educatedand continually update their professional knowledge and skills. Curriculumreform has made primary schools a place where play and learning are combinedwith alternative pedagogical approaches to help children master basic academicknowledge and skills. Many primary schools therefore have become learning andcaring communities rather than merely instructional institutions that preparepupils for the next level of schooling.

Thefact that all children enroll in identical comprehensive schools regardless oftheir socioeconomic background or personal abilities and characteristics hasresulted a system where schools and classrooms are heterogeneous in terms ofpupil profiles and diverse in terms of educational needs and expectations. Allstudents receive a free, two-course warm meal daily, free health care,transportation, learning materials, and counseling in their own schools.

Finnishchildren start compulsory schooling one to three years later than do childrenin most other nations. This suggests that Finnish pupils learn relativelybetter within a shorter time, compared to their international peers. Finnisheducation policy has never compromised the principle of extended childhood atthe expense of increasing time devoted to formal education.

(ii)Well-trained teachers in primary school

InFinnish society, the teaching profession has always enjoyed great publicrespect and appreciation. Parents trust teachers as professionals who know whatis best for their children. Teachers therefore have considerable classroomindependence in selecting most appropriate pedagogical methods. Consequently,primary schools are quite independent in designing their own curriculum,teaching and learning arrangements, and in using public funds. Classroomteaching is considered an independent, high status profession that attractssome of the best secondary school graduates. Indeed, only about 10 % of some 6000 applicants are accepted annually to the Faculties of Education withinFinnish universities. This implies that university teacher educationdepartments can select some of the nation’s best students from among topscorers on university entrance examinations.

Mostimportantly, however, a Masters degree guarantees access to post-graduatestudies made widely available in most Finnish universities today. Manyteachers, especially in primary schools, seize the opportunity of continuingtheir academic studies. During the past decade, Finnish schools have noted anupsurge in school principals and teachers possessing a PhD in education.

Ininternational comparisons, Finnish teacher education programs are distinguishedby their depth and scope. The balance between the theoretical and practical inthese programs helps young teachers master various teaching methods as well asthe science of effective teaching and learning.

Finnishteachers are conscious, critical consumers of professional development and in-service training services. Just as the professional level of the teaching cadrehas increased over the past two decades, so has the quality of teacherprofessional development support. Most compulsory, traditional in-servicetraining has disappeared. In its place are school- or municipality-basedlonger-term programs and professional development opportunities. Continuousupgrading of teachers’ pedagogical professionalism has become a right ratherthan an obligation.

(iii)Intelligent accountability

Finlandhas not followed the global accountability movement in education that assumesthat making schools and teachers more accountable for their performance is thekey to raising student achievement. Traditionally, evaluation of studentoutcomes has been the responsibility of each Finnish teacher and school. Theonly standardized, high-stakes assessment is the Matriculation Examination atthe end of general upper secondary school, before students enter tertiaryeducation. Prior to this culminating examination, no external tests are eitherrequired or imposed on Finnish classrooms.

Asa consequence of decentralized education management and increased schoolautonomy, education authorities and political leaders have been madeaccountable for their decisions making implementation of policies possible.This has created a practice of reciprocal accountability in education systemmanagement where schools are increasingly accountable for learning outcomes andeducation authorities are held accountable to schools for making expectedoutcomes possible. Flexible accountability has had a major positive impact onteaching and, hence, on student learning. All assessment of student learning isbased on teacher-made tests, rather than standardized external tests. By fifthgrade, Finnish pupils no longer receive numerical grades that would enabledirectly comparing pupils with one another. In fact, grades are prohibited bylaw. Only descriptive assessments and feedback are employed.

Primaryschool, particularly, is, to a large extent, a ‘testing-free zone’ reserved forlearning to know, to do, and to sustain natural curiosity. Teachers alsoexperience more genuine freedom in curriculum planning; they do not need tofocus on annual tests or exams. Increased teacher and school autonomy has ledto a situation where schools can not only arrange teaching according to theiroptimal resources, but allocate teaching time within the national curriculumframework differently from school to school. This is rarely possible in morerigid and test-heavy education systems.

Thefocus of teaching in Finland is typically on learning, rather than on preparingstudents for tests. Different teaching methods are commonly employed throughoutthe school system. New innovations are readily accepted by teachers, if theyare regarded as appropriate for promoting student learning. Stress and anxietyamong pupils and teachers is not as common as it is within education systemshaving comparatively more intensive accountability structures.

(iv)Culture of trust

Muchof what has been previously noted is only possible when parents, students, andauthorities genuinely trust teachers and schools. It is necessary to realizethat the Finnish education system was highly centralized and remained centrallycontrolled until 1985. A dense network of rules and orders regulated the dailywork of teachers. The gradual shift toward trusting schools and teachers beganin the 1980s, when major phases of the reform agenda were initiated in theeducation system. In the early 1990s, the era of a trust-based school cultureformally started in Finland.

Theculture of trust simply means that education authorities and political leadersbelieve that teachers, together with principals, parents and their communities,know how to provide the best possible education for their children and youth.

Theculture of trust can only flourish in an environment that is built upon goodgovernance and close-to-zero corruption. Tellingly, Finland also performs wellin international good-governance rankings by Transparency International. Publicinstitutions generally enjoy high public trust and regard in Finland. Trustingschools and teachers is therefore a natural consequence of a generallywell-functioning civil society.

Schoolimprovement emerged in Finland as a consequence of this new trust. Each schoolcould design its own change strategy with mission statements, vision andimplementation methodologies, and schedules. This dimension of trust has playedthe most significant role in propelling Finland ahead of many other nations.

(v)Distributed moral leadership

Educationreform and development in Finland has been based on the continual adjustment ofschooling to the changing needs of individuals and society. Governments fromthe political left and right have respected education as the key public servicefor all citizens and maintained their belief that only a highly and widelyeducated nation will be successful in world markets.

Sustainableeducational leadership has enabled Finnish schools and teachers to concentrateon developing teaching and learning as they best see it to be needed.Leadership in education sector has increasingly followed the idea ofdistributed leadership, i.e. sharing responsibilities among all actors ineducation to achieve expected results. Rather than allocating financialresources and time to implement new reforms repeatedly, teachers in Finlandhave been given professional freedom to develop pedagogical knowledge andskills related to their individual needs.

Ineducation systems that undergo wave after wave of reforms, frequent emphasisoften is on implementation and consolidation of externally designed changes.The main result is often frustration and resistance to change rather thandesire to improve schools. In Finland, however, education policies haveincreasingly invited schools to design their own development plans andimplementation strategies based on the national curriculum and policyframeworks and oversight systems. These frameworks serve as guiding principlesfor municipalities and schools in delivering education services to theirmembers.

In conclusion, it is not a surprise that a country which has followed the above tenets comes up on the top when assessed for learning outcomes. India is not Finland; and we are way away in the Corruption indices; this precludes many of the steps from being adopted here as they are. However there is a lot that we could still learn from them.

Many of the above steps are outside the scope of Sikshana intervention too; still we have followed strictly, in whatever we do, their basic concept: that teachers, together with principals, parents and their communities, know how to provide the best possible education for their children. We are also proud that the Mission Goal of Sikshana announced in the public domain a decade back states that the Public Education System should be built around this belief.

E S Ramamurthy

(I acknowledge with thanks Mr Pasi Sahlberg for most of the above content that pertains to the Finnish Education System) )

A Matter of Perception

2011-12-20T08:49:00.001+05:30

A Private School that got reported - and Many that go scot-free

I had been writing about Private schools that are no more than 'Teaching Shops'. I also wrote about the manner in which they 'recruit' students and retain them once they get in. Many would not believe me when I said that it is difficult to get away from one, once the kid is admitted. They felt that I ought to be exaggerating; if not, why are parents trooping to these schools? You will find answers to many of these in this Report.

Whoever has read Tooley's "Beautiful Tree" should read this too. Did he not make it all appear to be so 'glamorous and sanitized'? His thesis: In an open system market forces will prevail and the parents can opt for the schools of their choice; if a school is not good enough, parents can always walk off . Or can they? Remember, this school too would have got away but for one case of misbehavior by the Principal- that too detected and acted upon 'unfortunately'. Worse still, the recruiting processes referred to here do not seem to reflect the 'noble' sentiments glorified in the book.

There are enough warning signals here for all of us in the context of the ongoing glorification of the private schooling and the drive towards privatizing the public education system.

Ramamurthy

(Courtesy: Deccan Herald: 20 Dec 11)

Parents pull their wards out of Royal School

The academic future of 246 students hangs in balance as their parents have pulled them out of the Royal English Medium School on Tannery Road, the principal of which was recently caught misbehaving with a sixth standard student.

There was a mad rush among parents on Monday to take away their children from the school. The institution’s owner-cum-principal Mohammed Imtiyaz Pasha had allegedly allured the student on the pretext of awarding good grade in the examination. Ever since the school earned notoriety due to the misdeeds of the impious principal, no parent was willing to send their children there. Some of them even preferred their children to grow without education. With tears in her eyes, a woman, who wished not to be quoted, said the fee structure of Royal School was affordable, which made her send her child there. Having pulled her child out of the school, she is not in a position to afford donations and fees of other schools in the neighbouring area. “I have decided to send my son to a motor garage to work. This is our fate,” lamented the woman. Selvaraj, another parent, said though the entry into the school was easy, exit was a near-Herculean task. “Seven days ago, when I sensed things going wrong in the school with my son coming with one or the other story of the staff in the school, I decided to pull him out. When I approached the principal for transfer certificate (TC), he demanded Rs 2,000. I had to drop my plan as I did not have money. Now that I have got the TC, I’ve no idea where to go next.” Farida too had a similar dilemma. When the Block Education Officer Ashwath Narayana Gowda visited the school, she broke down before him. “I had borrowed money for my child’s education. But all that has gone down the drain due to the dirty deeds of Imtiyaz Pasha,” she said. Most of the students coming to the school are from very poor economic background and almost all of them belong to minority or SC/ST communities. A dungeon than a school The Royal School was more a dungeon than a school. Running in a building spread across a mere 50 ft by 80 ft area, the school does not even have basic facilities. Forget the facilities, there is hardly any space to let fresh air come in. Children said the windows of the schools were never opened. ‘Poor performers’ in the class were often asked to meet the principal for punishments. Parents stated that their wards complained to them that the principal came to the school in inebriated state and would smoke in front of them. Imtiyaz also never bothered about maintaining the attendance register properly. When this reporter visited the school, he found the attendance register of class VI incomplete. Touts make hay To cash in on the situation, marketing agents of neighbouring schools were seen distributing pamphlets to the parents at the entrance of Royal School on Monday. The BEO was seen asking the parents to choose any school and he would see that the school managements admit the students without collecting extra fee. However, when the marketing agents were contacted, they said their schools would charge donations. Advocate Narasimhamurthy, who helped the parents get the transfer certificates from the school, said the Education Department should help the parents get their children admitted in neighbourhood schools without any problem.

Doddahulluru school visit

2011-12-18T19:48:00.009+05:30

The amazing public school at Doddahulluru is a living demonstrator of values that we hold dear in Sikshana. Students in this school talked to us about their pet projects with great enthusiasm. Teachers were relaxed and moved freely with students. When I accompanied ESR to this school, I met children of migrant workers who not only spoke fluent Hindi and Kannada but were also reading and writing in these languages. Their teachers showed the rapid progress these children achieve in their school. The pictures and video clips below tell their own story:

Picture above shows the progress in writing of a new student in fifth standard after about a month of practice and the one below shows the progress to sentence level after about two months:

Apart from writing sheets, the students also practice on workbooks. One teacher showed me the progress of a fifth standard student who joined their school this year from the state of Orissa.

These miraculous progress is not just restricted to copy writing but also speaking and reading as this teacher explains:

One fifth grader who had joined the school last year, stepped up to "interview" his classmate who had just joined this year:

This is not just a one-off case. The teachers assured us that every student will acquired 3Rs by the end of the academic year. The school has been consistently winning trophies in district and state level sports and arts competitions. They also readily stepped up to the challenge of joining hands with teachers in all other five schools in their cluster and ensure that every student gets a solid foundation before joining high school.

It was such a great pleasure to meet teachers so dedicated to equitable and scalable public education..

Amazing School No 3

2011-12-16T16:30:00.000+05:30

There is no end to surprise when one starts visiting Sikshana schools. I got the latest when I took time to go to Doddahulluru in the Hoskote cluster. This is a school that should qualify for being termed as a Model school by any standard; unfortunately the Government norms for such a classification is mostly tied to infrastructure and hence this one may never get through to that level - at least not as yet. That has not demotivated the team from bringing out the best in the Public Education System.

The most amazing thing about this school is the way in which they have handled successfully the problem of children with migratory parents. It draws a whole lot of such kids from the neighborhood thriving on construction industry, which in turn is sustained mostly by labor from Bihar.

A typical child I came across was Moni Kumari Sinha; this kid came along with her parents and her sister to Hoskote from Bihar in June and both got admitted to this school promptly thereafter- in 1st and 3rd Stds respectively. In fact their patents were so shrewd and discriminating that they checked the schools in the vicinity and chose this State run school in preference to others because of its track record in the context of their special needs. In just six months both have mastered Kannada to a level that is astonishing; they could converse with me fluently in Kannada! For those of you who find it difficult to believe this, here are two video clips that will tell their own tale!

The elder Moni Kumari could read and write Kannada too - to a level that equals Level 2 in the ASER Test kit. The significance of this could be gauged from the fact that there are local Kannada speaking kids in 7th Std who are barely able to do so! And there are quite a few kids in her own Std 3 who cannot..

Since migratory parents and kids are problems that many other schools too face in equal measure, there is quite a lot that others can learn from Doddahulluru. What they did was simple; they got each one of these incoming kids to become friends with a local one, a good student at that. The latter became a friend, guardian and a mentor rolled into one. It was not long before the 'Bihari' kids started talking Kannada. Reading and writing followed almost immediately, reflecting the teaching abilities of the staff in the school and the dedication/ commitment of the kids to learn- and excel. It proves the point that challenges always bring about the best in kids; they thrive on them. There are lessons to be learnt here by the schools who are struggling to get their students to acquire the same skills in an environment that is far more positive. The Sinha kids are not just stray cases; the school has a bunch of them in different Grades and the story is the same. To prove the point further, the school has a zero failure rate for the ASER test benchmarks we had set , barring a couple who have come in more recently and spent less than six months here.

Another impressive thing I could see is the co-ordination between the Primary and High schools, situated on either side of the Highway. The teachers in the latter willingly come in and help out the classes in the former! There is an excellent feedback mechanism in position whereby the weaknesses in the 8th Grade kids are addressed well before they pass on to the High School. No wonder the High School routinely scores well above 90% in SSLC examinations every year and got a perfect 100 in the last one.

There are bits and pieces that one gets while talking to the teachers here which, put together, give the secrets behind their amazing success rates. Here are some:

The teachers give the kids a lot of freedom to do things their own way. The school functions are all managed by the students themselves with little direction.
Even in the class room, kids take the lead often voluntarily. When we took out a teacher to talk to, one of the kids went to the Blackboard and started writing a sum for others to work out! It came naturally to them.
The school has a very well organized Science Laboratory equipped with models done by the students themselves over a period of time. These get updated every year. Each kid was competing with the other to get my attention so that he/she can tell me about the exhibit that they had 'constructed'.
To my standard query in the class room about what they would like to become when they grow up, I heard quite a few voices which shouted out: " Scientists!" This amazing conversion to a scientific temper of mind has come up on local initiative and at a cost that can be justifiably called peanuts:)
The teachers said that they had given up voluntarily on home visits; instead they had organized local study groups that are far more effective in bringing about the needed 'collaboration' between the students; and these were not strictly on the basis of Grades- another 'first' to their credit.
The school has a long list of successes in other activities too - prizes and rolling shields in Science competitions, Quiz programs, Sports and Games. For the first time in years, I could get a champion discuss thrower - a 6th Std girl in this case- could give me not only the actual distance she threw but also the distance that would have got her the first place had she matched it!

Every one in the school was expressing their deep appreciation for what Sikshana was doing to them; looking at all that they were doing by themselves, it gave me a sense of humility. Also a thought provoking question: what should we do to replicate Doddahulluru?

E S Ramamurthy

A Humbling Experience

2011-12-02T12:09:00.000+05:30

This publicity leaflet may appear strange to many, especially if one can read Telugu. This one was brought out by a Sikshana school months back- even I did not know about its existence till yesterday.

It is from the Government (ZP) High school in Mukalacheruvu ( Madanapalle Cluster), in which GORD and Sikshana worked together during 10-11. In the SSCLC Examinations of '11, 85 students appeared and all but one passed. Even the failed student scored 60% on the whole but could not get through just one subject - Telugu- since his mother tongue was different. 27 students scored more than 500 out of 600, the highest being 562 (94%). The biggest surprise of all: the average marks of all the students who appeared for the examination was 84%!
These are extremely impressive figures by any standards - Private schools included- but the one that took the cake was what followed in their presentation. 40 Students migrated from Private schools to this Govt school in 8th Std , 20 in 9th and 10 in 10th at the beginning of the current academic year! That is a real shocker for anyone who still doubts that Government schools can deliver on their promises.
This school was scoring 58% and 64% during the years preceding 08-09 when the current HM- Mr Prabhakar- came into the school initiating the upward swing. Of course the credit goes no less to the dedicated set of teachers who needed only this trigger to show their mettle.
That the school is putting in its best efforts to rope in the community through publicizing the improved performance , which incidentally has resulted in the above reverse migration, speaks volumes about their determination to break out of the mold and show the better face of the Public Education System.
My next stop yesterday was the ZP school at Pulikallu. Here there were 29 students last year and all of them passed. The average mark here was 92%! There was very little I could ask for in terms of improved performance in the examinations when the scores are this high already. I did suggest to them that they should focus on two things now onwards. The first is the 'Achilles Heal' of the entire system, which is the learning level in English. Marks apart, the ability of the students to understand and handle the spoken language continues to be poor. The second was to share their experiences and help the other schools in the cluster to emulate their results. We do need badly 'leaders' in the field who can become instruments of change. Maybe we will find some of them in these schools.
It was seen that three out of the seven schools supported by us scored 100% results, something that has never happened in these schools in the past. I came back humbled by the experience; what a pool of talent is lying there waiting to be tapped by someone and how we are still reaching only the fringes with all that we are doing? This is something that both Vibha and Sikshana should ponder - besides hosts of others who could also chip in.
Ramamurthy

The Other Side of the Picture - 1

2011-09-26T09:04:00.003+05:30

On many issues, we are often fed with one side of the picture that becomes the reality for us for two reasons: anything that is repeated again and again assumes the face of truth over a period of time and in any case we do not ever get to hear the other side of it. This is a series on such contradictions in the Public Education System.

Case of the Missing Teacher

It is quite common to find people complaining about the irregular attendance of the teachers in Government schools. I have personally visited hundreds of schools and interacted with thousands of teachers; barring the marginal 10% in any sampling exercise, I found most of them to be reasonably sincere about their work. They did not appear to be the type who would deliberately shirk work; yet late arrivals and early departures were not uncommon even during my cursory inspection. I wanted to get to the bottom of this strange behavior and accordingly started a dialog with a cross section of them. What emerged threw a very different light on the whole issue; the complexity of it and the systemic fault lines can best be brought out by citing a test case, involving Ms R.

R always wanted to be a teacher and studied to become one. When she graduated, she found that it was not all that easy; the competition was intense. She could get a job with one of the local private schools but the salary they offered was too meagre to live a modest life; the good ones elsewhere would have offered her better terms but they will not have her due to her inadequate lingual skill - in English. Getting a job with the Government school is a tedious process and one needed a lot more than merit to get it; still she was willing to go through it.

The way the system works is that the vacancies are announced once in a year on a district wise basis; the selection is done by zonal committees from candidates within that area. It is a good idea in principle. However competition being intense, as always with Government jobs, each candidate tries to find out where he/she stands the best chance and applies accordingly. R was from North Karnataka where applicants were few but the available slots were far fewer. She found that the erstwhile Bangalore Rural District offered the best scope and went for it. The residential criterion was easy to meet ; all that was needed was to get the address of a friend or relative who lived here and give it as hers. Her calculation was correct ; she got selected and was posted to the village A in Kanakapura Taluk.

She was elated but this joy was short-lived. To reach A, she has to take a bus first from the City to Kanakapura; this itself is a 90 minute ride. She had to take another connecting bus from there after a wait of 30 minutes which took 30 more to get to A. It needed a 15 minute walk to reach the school. If everything went off smoothly, which was rare, it took nearly three hours to commute to the school from home. The problem does not end there; the bus from KP runs infrequently making half a dozen trip in a day. The nearest she can get to reach the school was at 1030. This means that even if she was willing to accommodate a three hour commute starting at 7AM, she would be reaching the school late since it starts at 10. You can easily imagine how the reverse in the evening would be; she needed to get out by 345 to be able to reach home by 7PM. The next bus from A will delay this up to 930 PM.

R is a conscientious girl who wants to give her best to the school; how much of it she can really do in practice can easily be seen from the above. She had since induction been trying to get herself shifted to another school nearer City- which is next to impossible- or in the North of the State nearer home. With similar applicants flooding the system and transfers becoming a 'lucrative business' , the State came with an annual computerized counseling session which reduced the scope for such interventions but removed whatever width was available to try and match a demand with a need.

There are many ways by which this anomaly could have been avoided; the school committee or the Panchayath could have been empowered and kept in the loop during induction. A teacher from within the community or the neighborhood would have been the ideal choice - not just in ensuring proper attendance but also the level of commitment and empathy needed between the teacher and the taught. Compare this with a private school: every teacher is selected for the specific school by the Management out of applicants who have opted for it.

If you now find an 'irregular' teacher in a school, whose fault is it? In any case, how fair is it to compare the 'attendance' patterns of teachers in public and private schools- to the disadvantage of the former? The Jury should be out on both.

Ramamurthy

Mr Venkatramaiah R.I.P

2011-08-26T09:46:00.000+05:30

There was a time when Sikshana ran entirely on the participation of volunteers; it was an era which ended by 2005. Mr Venkatramaiah was a pillar of strength to us in those days. He and his wife worked for Sikshana tirelessly covering the City schools, especially the ones in CSandra and Gowdenpalya. He brought his brother Mr Shekhar Rao into our fold , which resulted in one of the first inflows of funds from a source abroad. This phase also resulted in our sending Mr Satish to Madison in USA. . With advancing age, his direct involvement in Sikshana declined ; but he continued to evince interest in our progress and kept in close contact with all our developments till literally the last day.

Mr Vankatramaiah passed away peacefully after a very brief illness at the age of 82. Through this blog, I acknowledge and place on record our deepest appreciation and gratefulness for his contribution to the evolution of Sikshana; also our heartfelt condolences to his family. May his soul rest in peace.

E S Ramamurthy

Kids going to School in Kalghatgi

2011-08-18T10:41:00.001+05:30

These pictures speak volumes about the interest shown by kids to attend school in villages.

It is sad that the State does not have the grace to provide them with free transport in their own buses. Does someone have to file a PIL for it?

E S Ramamurthy

Sikshana’s first solo walk

2011-08-08T23:40:00.000+05:30

An year ago Sikshana got a chance to work with the government schools in one of the most backward taluks in Karnataka called Kalghatgi near Hubli. Thanks to the initial welcome by Deshpande foundation which funded 20 schools and the Yahoo Employee foundation which gave us another 40 schools resulting in a good sample size in the taluk to pilot out the program.

Based on the feedback of the Anekal experiment (http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2010/04/experiment-at-anekal.html) we decided that this is a good chance to take the replication a notch up. Up to this point most of the schools around Bangalore had a good dose of ESR and with myself and Subbu in spurts. The improvement in schools were at some level directly attributed to such interactions. So when we started the program in Kalghatgi there was a deliberate attempt to keep the upper management out and run the program with the mentors leading the charge. So one of our best mentors Sharanappa was moved from Anekal to Kalghatgi and he was given 3 new hires as mentors and was asked to go and run with it.

The initial baseline tests conducted in these 60 schools came out much worse than expected. In the ASER assessment it was below the state average, in the APF testing the scores were far below the minimum 65%, the number of A grade students were just a handful, the student attendance was a major concern and Sikshana did not receive a warm welcome in the schools at first go.

With these challenges in mind a plan was put in place and with the backing of the department administration, the mentors started work in the schools by directly working with the children motivating them to study and provided them with basic needs like writing sheets, diaries, etc. When para-teachers were provided to schools with teacher shortage, spot prize and other Sikshana activities which directly help the teachers were introduced the schools started responding positively to the intervention. By November things were seemingly on track when we suddenly hit what appeared to be a disaster. A well meaning official in the department got his hands on the very poor baseline data that we had generated and decided to shake up the low performing schools with a threat. That did not go well with the schools and this led them to blame Siskhana for all the trouble and I got the first SOS from our mentors. That turned out to be the only one for the year and both me and ESR did not have to make more than a couple of visits to schools.

By the end of the year the mentors reported a sea change in the attitude of the teachers and children towards their school and Sikshana. Such feeling was justified by the year end numbers from the ASER and APF based assessment.

ASER assessment results :

Class	No. of students	Kannada reading skill				2 Digit Division Skill
		July 2010		March 2011		July 2010		March 2011
4	1343	593	44%	1076	80%	80	6%	853	63%
4	Karnataka Rural Average				29%				10%
4	India Rural Average				38%				22%

7	1247	745	60%	1044	84%	341	27%	898	78%
7	Karnataka Rural Average				65%				42%
7	India Rural Average				76%				57%

APF Assessment Results : (click image below to see detail)

Writing Speed Improvement : (click image below to see detail)

I feel that this is one giant step for Sikshana where the baby has taken the first step without adults holding hands. The core concepts of Sikshana has reached the schools via the mentors and dare I say successfully. The schools in turn are going the extra mile to deliver results to satisfy themselves and mentors locally. The same 60 schools for the 2011-12 year will not have a Sikshana mentor but a member of the community whom we call 'community mentor' who will be running the show, which in my opinion will be next big step towards an exit.

Tapping Student Power

2011-07-10T11:07:00.000+05:30

The performance of a group of students is affected by a number of factors that are routinely acknowledged and put to use by the teachers and Sikshana. During my field visits I found that we have not been realizing the full potential of one of them; it is the influence of one on the other. This is no less in the High Schools than at the primary level.

Setting out to tap this, I had some very interesting experiences. The first came up while trying to tackle the age old bugbear of the PES - attendance or rather the lack of it. During a visit to one of the Upper Primary schools in Anekal where a summer camp was being held, I found that there were 20 kids in the room out of a class of 21. A query on why one is missing when it should be fun attending the camp elicited a range of standard responses - not well , busy at home and gone away on a trip. I sought out the best friend of the missing girl who admitted she was at home and had no real excuse for not being present. I told her: " if she is really your friend she should be happy playing with you here rather than spend time alone at home; can you go and get her now ? ". She rushed off and was back in minutes with the other girl; even the teacher was surprised at the promptness. I told the entire group that they are responsible for every kid attending the camp daily; after all, it is being organized against a specific promise that they would all be present. Later I checked and found the Group had kept up its promise; the attendance was total right through the remaining days of the camp.

When the schools resumed after the summer break, I started visiting High Schools to check how attendance was faring in the first few days. I knew from prior experience that it would take a couple of weeks before the strength picks up and regular classes commence. This of course is unacceptable in Tenth Standard where every day counts during the year; the best efforts on the part of the teachers however have had little effect till date. The first school I went to had a strength of nearly 100 in Tenth but the attendance was just 20 on the second day. Obviously these are kids who are serious about studies and could be expected to take a lead in bringing about a change. I talked to them for an hour about the effect of such laxity on the part of the missing students on their studies, lives and future career. If the teachers now take time till Dec or Jan to complete the syllabus leaving little time for revision and tests, they cannot be faulted. I told them in effect: " it is for you to go and get your friends to come and attend classes, because it is you who will suffer if they do not". I asked whether they are willing to take up this challenging task and if yes, how long they will take to get all their missing friends into the class room. To my surprise, they not only accepted it readily but also promised results in three days. I visited three more schools on this trip; the situation in the class room was no different - so too were the responses from the students. To my immense satisfaction, I found that the attendance after the stipulated period was near total in all the four schools. That was my second taste of student power in action.

The first one took place towards the end of last academic year. We were at this time pushing hard towards ensuring that no student fails in the SSLC examinations - a pretty stiff task in most schools. I was there in one of them - Thokasandra- during Jan 11; to my query on the prospects in his school, he categorically affirmed that at least 12 kids would fail in spite of best efforts and nothing can be done about it, since we had only to months left and these kids are way too behind in learning levels. I told him that I would like to talk to them once and see if we could 'save' some. The meeting was held under a tree in the school premises. I found that there were actually 15 kids in the Group waiting for me; possibly the HM did not want to take a chance! I started off by asking them if they knew why have been sent to meet me; prompt came the response that it is possibly because the HM felt that they were all 'dull' - a highly demotivating term used in Public schools which becomes self fulfilling- and would fail in the examinations. When I asked them what they wanted to do about it, there was silence. I told them that they had two options at this point. The first was the easiest - to do nothing and prove that the HM and the teachers were right . The second would be more difficult; they could treat this as a challenge, follow my advice during the remaining days - which would involve considerable additional effort - and go on to prove the prediction to be wrong and they were not 'dull' as claimed. The choice was entirely theirs; I gave them ten minutes to discuss this among themselves and get me their response. As I was walking away, I could already hear heated exchanges in the Group.

When I returned, I could see a distinct change in their mood. One of them got up and said that they were willing to do anything to prove their worth; in effect they said: "tell us what we should do and we will do it". We promptly put them through the standard drill - identify the weak subjects and start writing one model paper a day; this effort which needs 2/3 hours should be over and above their normal workload given in the schools. We organized special coaching sessions and counseling too to hone up their exam skills. The kids put their hearts into it and did a great job. Ultimately, when the results came, it was not a surprise that all except just one had passed ! The same experiment was repeated in Bannikuppe where ten were identified as above; here too all except one passed. More interesting was a subsequent incident : when Muthuraj , our Mentor for High schools, was passing through one of the villages after the results were announced, two boys came running and told him that they had passed the examinations - and they wanted him to inform me that they had won the challenge!

I wish I had started with more such schools to validate this approach; but whatever data I could gather was enough to convince me that we need to do a lot more in the area of tapping student power. Psychologists do tell us that teens do not always perform well under external compulsions but they do rise to meet a challenge when they face one. Looks elementary isn't it? It seems to work too.

Student power in the form of group leadership could also make a big difference; but then the teachers seem to get it all wrong here. The practice seems to be to make the student who scores highest marks the leader of the group or a class. Invariably this kid would be such that he or she would rather be left alone to pursue their studies. It is more likely that the one with the leadership qualities is the kid whose scores are modest or even less. It is easy to pick such boys or girls out in any class; they stand apart from the rest. We need formation of groups around them; the kids in a group do not need to be taught, they need to be managed. It may look like a strange concept; but I am sure it is worth a try.

Maybe, this should provide the basis for a 'Nextgen' initiative under Sikshana.

E S Ramamurthy

The Story of the Water Pump

2011-05-30T08:50:00.000+05:30

It was more than a decade back - in my previous work place - that I came across the real facade of our Planning Process in first person. It was an unforgettable experience that has lessons for what we are doing today in the field of education.

We were told to go ahead and install a solar photovoltaic system in a remote tribal village in Tamilnadu; it was a project conceived and funded by the erstwhile Ministry for Non-conventional Energy Sources. The purpose was very noble; someone felt sad that the poor villagers had to draw water from a well manually and wanted to relieve them of this burden.

The village chosen was a tribal hamlet situated in the Kollimalai hill range and accessible only through a 7 km long narrow pathway up the hill from the nearest road. The well was an open one with water at around 30 feet most of the year. Digging that well was the best thing that the State did for the people of that area; it was in fact shared by many other hamlets in that area since they did not have their own wells. Apparently the generosity of the State had dried up by the time they dug this one. The villagers were happy drawing water from it with the traditional pulley and rope system; the women in the village were more than equal to this task. It is here that someone scented the possibility of new 'business prospects' and came up with a scheme to provide a concrete water tank and a diesel pump to the village. The Headman of the village was even provided with a monthly allowance for buying diesel to keep the pump going. We were informed that they had a gala function for the inauguration of the pump set; this was a few months before we arrived on the scene.

The first problem surfaced within a week: who will go and get the diesel from the nearest town? It was a 14 km trek with a head load, not counting the bus ride. Apparently no one had thought about it; with some coercion at periodic intervals the Headman was able to get this thankless job done by some of the villagers, taking turns. However he soon ran out of 'volunteers' and the scheme came to a dead end. The news trickled up the bureaucratic hierarchy. Soon it reached the top guy who could not allow this to last for long since it was not just an isolated village where this was happening ; there were quite a few in which the State had bestowed this favor. A meeting took place at the Capital where all the concerned Departments were called in to discuss and find a solution. One of the bright guys responsible for popularizing renewable energy systems came up with the idea that the Government could provide Solar Powered pumps in the place of the diesel run ones. The tank could be used as it is but the pump had to be changed to take the Photovoltaic Power system. This will however eliminate the need for the fuel and hence no trudging. He pointed out significantly that the budget for the year for deployment of renewable energy systems has been underutilized and this will get two birds with a single stone.

The State machinery whirred into action; the project for installing and commissioning the solar powered pump was cleared with unusual speed and awarded to us. The necessary work in the factory premises was completed and the commissioning was due when I came to know about this project. To the surprise of the team that normally deals with such field work, I offered to join them on this trip; and to my surprise the Executive Engineer of the Electricity Board in the Salem zone also wanted to accompany us.

It was an uneventful trip to the foothills; the trek uphill was thoroughly enjoyable with the weather helping in. The Village Headman was totally taken aback by this invasion from the officialdom; later he told us that no one from the Government had ever visited his village during the last decade or two- not even the 'lowly' Revenue Inspector. We explained to him the salient features of our Project and how, with the press of a button, they will all be getting water on tap soon. He was very courteous to us - to the extent of getting us coconut water and enquiring about our physical condition after the 'arduous' walk up the hill; but on the project itself, he appeared surprisingly disinterested. It took some real coaxing from us - and a promise that this will not be held against him - before the real issues started tumbling out.

He took us to the water tank and showed us how filthy it was lined with scum and moss; he asked us how the State expects him to keep it clean when you have the all pervasive "why me, let Jack do it" syndrome at work. No provision has been made to maintain the system. Then he showed us the well, the water level was just about 30 feet below; the women of the village can easily draw all the water they want in minutes with a rope and a bucket. Finally he asked us the key question: why are you dumping on us all this stuff that we never wanted? He knew it would have cost a packet of money; then he delivered the punch line: if you had consulted us, we would have told you that we will all be better off if you had used the funds to dig a few more wells so that people from other hamlets will not have to walk miles to fetch water.

We knew then that all the hardware we had just installed would not last even a few days. The Electricity Board Engineer sadly acknowledged that all these schemes had little to do with the 'beneficiaries'; they are being implemented just to meet certain targets set elsewhere, by people who have no touch with ground realities.

That in short is the state of our planning process; we see it in the field of Education too. After decades of independence, taking people into confidence on issues that affect their lives seems to be still a far cry. All the legislation that you need for this is already there on the statute book; what is needed is the will to implement them. Who knows, we may get it one of these days. I am an eternal optimist.

E S Ramamurthy

Two sheets of Paper

2011-05-28T18:49:00.006+05:30

"Will you give me anything I ask?" challenged a fourth grader, with his arms folded across this chest.

"Of course!", I replied reassuringly, "Just ask anything you need to learn in school".

In early January this year, I had accompanied Usha Rao and her friends to a village school in Bannerughatta, well known for its National Park. Usha and her friends conducted a quick test to identify students who were weak in Kannada and Maths. I picked one of the boys and stuck a conversation with him. He clearly didn't like being identified as a 'weak' student. So I offered to give him anything he needs to be able to catch up with the rest of his class. That is when he threw me a challenge.

"Anything? anything at all?", he probed again. "Sure! Go ahead and ask", I goaded him. He hesitated for a moment and then spoke:

"Will you give me two sheets of paper?", raising two fingers of his right hand. "Two sheets?", he reiterated thrusting his right hand for the second time.

I was taken aback. Composing myself quickly, I replied "Done! You will get your two sheets of paper today". His face broke into a broad smile.

"What do you plan to do with it?", I probed him.

"I want to practice writing Kannada on big sheets at home", he offered. His hesitation vanished. He was now speaking freely.

"How many sheets can you write in an evening?", I probed him again.

"I can write five sheets!", he boasted, spreading out all his fingers of his right hand.

"Very good!", I patted him on the back. "Why then did you ask just for two sheets?"

"I wasn't sure if you would give me five sheets. I didn't want to appear greedy", he confessed.

My interactions with students in village schools is peppered with many such moments of truth. Moments that prove the futility of analysis of statistical data on teacher-student ratios, teaching methods and the latest fad - toilets.

I spoke to our mentors and teachers about his need and helped him get ten sheets of legal size ruled paper -- five to write that evening and five more to keep in his bag. Next day, he can take as many sheets as he has written the previous day so that he always has ten blank sheets with him. The boy raced around the class telling everyone about his new found treasure. Soon I was mobbed with requests for sheets from other students too. I reassured everyone that they will all get as many sheets as they can write everyday from their teacher. Some students wanted new books to read. I took them to the library where newly bought books were being catalogued. Each one got a book . They all insisted that I take a photo of them with their new book:

Sikshana has been running a sheet bank program in all our schools where students can take as many sheets they need to practice writing at home. This initiative helped every weak student catch up with the rest in just three months time with no extra effort on the part of teachers. Students were free to use any source, not just their textbook. They could also write anything but only sheets with paragraphs are counted. This has not only triggered a stiff competition amongst students to see who writes the most but also expanded the scope of their reading habit to non-textbook sources. Here is a typical example of the difference in writing capability over a period of three months:

But will not the students waste paper? Will not paper be diverted for other uses? In 2009-10, Sikshana spent Rs. 65/- per student per year towards sheet bank program with an unprecendented outcome in learning levels. The figures for 2010-11 is not yet computed but I expect it to be slightly higher because teachers requested special ruled papers and graph sheets. Trust in students and teachers proved to be much more effective and economical compared to micro monitoring systems.

Performance in Sikshana High Schools

2011-05-14T08:53:00.001+05:30

Flash Results

Sikshana was implemented in 24 of the 34 Government High schools of Kanakapura Taluk. A comparison is given below on the performance of our schools against those in other streams. This shows we are coming out on top on all counts.

Schools with 100 % Pass: Sikshana: 3 (out of 24)/ Private: 3 (out of 17) (Pl See Note * below). Some of the Government schools have one or two kids with serious issues such as migratory parents (leading to loss of attendance), socio-economic problems and learning disabilities( which qualify them for special schools but invariably rejected by the parents). If these students are accounted for, eight schools should be deemed to have acquired 100% pass rate, a phenomenal success by any standards. .

Schools over 90%: 11 out of 24 under Sikshana outscoring clearly private schools which had only 6 out of 17

Lowest score under Sikshana: 73%/ Private: 59 %. A scatter diagram will show the lead better.

Performance of the schools in different streams:

Type of Schools	Number	Students	Passed	Failed	% Pass	Pass Range
Govt Sikshana	24	1166	1015	151	87.5	73.5 - 100
Govt Non-Sikshana	10	784	498	286	63.5	40 – 80.2
Aided	12	1714	1225	489	71.5	54.5 – 86.7
Private	17	838	715	123	85.3	59.6 - 100

A more detailed study along with the processes deployed follows separately.E S Ramamurthy

Note *

A comparison between Government and private schools should take into account the following:

· Admission to Govt schools cannot be denied to anyone, while private schools have and use the option of choosing their students. A study of the profiles of the parents under both streams will show a distinct difference, to the advantage of the latter.

· Students are not detained either at 9th or in 10th from writing the final exams in Govt schools, except of prolonged absence. Private schools use the option of detention/ transfers based on poor academic performance to improve their final scores. In fact, schools under Sikshana routinely take in students at 10th who have been forcibly evicted from private schools with a transfer certificate.

· It is not possible to enforce in Government schools many of the disciplinary measures routinely adopted in the private ones- for the simple reason that the State is keen and also obliged to keep the kids in school under all circumstances.

What makes us tick?

2011-04-13T15:15:00.002+05:30

A Sequel at GGM School, Kanakapura

In one of the blogs earlier, I went through the process of obtaining 'unbelievable' levels of improvement from the students in terms of the basic skills. This was from a large number of schools across different clusters giving it acceptable statistical validity. Notwithstanding this, we were having problems in getting comparable results from a few schools with a specific profile; these were the ones located in relatively larger towns and having student strengths in excess of 60 in a single class room. We were almost about to conclude that we may have to adopt here a strategy different from the one that worked in smaller schools in villages.

In order to understand the factors that made such a big difference, we focused on one such school - GGMS, Kanakapura in which there were 73 students in 7^th Std. When we carried out the ASER based assessment in this school during July 10, 51 of them were unable to read Kannada fluently and 63 to carry out division of simple numbers in Arithmetic. These were unacceptably high numbers compared to our other schools in the cluster and way below the State averages. The program as implemented in other schools was tried out here too but the numbers failed to register any significant improvement. The numbers in this school by the end of Jan 11 after six months of the program stayed at 38 and 39 respectively, showing no significant improvement.

I thought it is time I visited this school and had a chat with the teachers and the students- which I did in the first week of Feb 11. I found the class to be very lively and responsive; on a first look the kids appeared to be quite bright, capable of doing anything given to them well in real life as long as it does not call for these specific 'academic' skills. Interaction with the teachers showed that the school had surplus staff; so shortage of manpower cannot be the reason either for the poor outcome seen. It struck me that this availability of teachers beyond the optimal level could even be the cause of the problem, instead of being an advantage. It did emerge slowly that I was not far off the mark; no single teacher felt that he/ she is accountable for the performance or the lack of it in the case of individual students. The two typical syndromes- "Let Jack do it" and "Why Me" - seemed to be working here.

To break the gridlock, I had a frank chat with the students; I told them bluntly the facts as they are: that they would soon be entering a High School without the basic skills needed to handle the class room work, that no one will bother to fill up their shortfalls once they leave the primary school, that most others in their age group are far ahead of them in terms of learning levels and that includes kids in 'hallis' ( villages) - something about which they ought to be ashamed. I told them that they are all intelligent enough to perform far better but have just not bothered to put in the minimum effort needed; and that if they dont pull themselves up soon enough they will regret it for their lives. Lastly, I pointed out to them that they have just eight weeks to make good their shortfalls and that we are willing to give all the help that is required by them to meet the deadline. The response was electric; unanimously the kids said - give us a dedicated teacher, we will put in extra hours and show that we too can do it - in four weeks! They also promised that they will also help out each other in the process of learning.

Back in the HM's room, we worked out the logistics and went on to organize the classes, not just for the lagging students but the entire group, having in mind the above promise of mutual co-operation. The classes started by the second week of Feb 11 with near 100% attendance and unmatched enthusiasm.

By the time the term came to an end in March, the number of students who could not reach the ASER benchmark for Reading and Arithmetic dropped down to 4; this was amazing by any standard. This compliance level at 95% is on par with other schools if not a shade better.

We could learn a few lessons from this experiment:

The specified ASER skill standards are attainable in two months under normal circumstances in any cluster of schools.

We have not been doing enough to tap the 'student power'; given a challenge they can be expected to rise up to the occasion.

A dedicated teacher and a bunch of kids who are motivated to face a challenge is all that is required.

How does one bring about the conditions shown as pre- requisites under the last Para is a question I would like to leave unanswered for the present. We need more data before definite conclusions can be drawn on this count. Analysis apart, we know for sure now that it works! That the pilot in GGMS was not just a flash in the pan was further proved by a similar feedback from a second school where the same approach was initiated a month later; results from this school are just coming in.

We now have in our radar the above five schools and we plan to sort out their problems based on this experience during the first quarter of the ensuing academic year.

E S Ramamurthy

Imperiling Public Education

2011-03-30T10:01:00.000+05:30

The economics of owning and running a Ration Shop, the familiar name for the outlets in our Public Distribution System (PDS), are such that under normal business terms, the shop-owner could never make a profit. Yet, whenever the government announces that new permits for ration shops will be given out, there is a frenzy in the market to grab one of these. Why? The answer is obvious: the business is not for the honest and if one knows the ropes, there is a fortune to be made.

What are these tricks of this trade?

Getting fake names into the user list is the most obvious option; the State seems to be waging a losing battle against this practice, judging by the endless efforts to weeding out bogus ration cards.

The next is to get the 'right customers' on the list, not just more customers. These are people who are registered but who do not have any interest in drawing on their entitlements. In a system where caste and income certificates are for sale, it is not difficult to 'produce' these documents for mutual benefit. Receipts are duly made in their names, and the rations thus 'drawn' are siphoned off into the open market. The sale price of an item like rice makes clear the underlying economics - it costs Rs.8 in a ration shop while in the latter it is Rs.30 or above. There are also customers who would rather exchange their entitlements for hard cash at the beginning of the month.

As the degradation progresses, the shop keeper, in collusion with the official machinery, manages to withhold effectively the entitlements from even the genuine beneficiaries, and diverts them to the open market. The targeted group is usually not in a position to assert itself to get its due.

And thus one has all the 'ingredients' of a good PDS business. Now let us turn to the public schools. The first thing to notice is that in education too, like in distribution of food grains, the State has devised a piece of legislation, whose course may run very closely to the above - incontrovertible for its intent and equally liable for exploitation at the hands of those who hold the strings.

In education too, like in distribution of food grains, the State has devised a piece of legislation whose course may run very closely to that of the PDS - incontrovertible for its intent and equally liable for exploitation at the hands of those who hold the strings.

To begin with, it is clear in today's societal conditions that running an educational institution could be (and often is) a very remunerative venture, undertaken for profit. There are very honorable exceptions to this rule, and I have the deepest regard for them, but that does not make the above statement any less true. This truth that has set in deeply at the level of college-level education, and in my opinion, is poised to infiltrate primary and high Schools through the Right to Education law.
A windfall for many schools

The Act provides for 25 per cent reservation of seats as State Quota in private schools at the cost of the public exchequer. On the face of it, it does look very attractive; one gets a vision of kids from 'deprived sections of the society' trooping into private schools in the neighborhood to avail of quality education that has so far been denied to them. However the reality is very different. The 'aspirational' school found in many urban settings is in fact in a small minority. Instead, the typical private school is usually a teaching shop that employs grossly unqualified and untrained teachers.

Still, such schools are able to wean away students from the public education system (PES). There are two reasons for this: the packaging/marketing of the product, and the lack of discerning ability on the part of the parents. The latter becomes more relevant in rural areas where parents totally lack the ability to judge a school, and therefore succumb to display of superficial frills, or to peer pressure. A detailed study of the pattern of choice among the High Schools in the School District in which Sikshana operates proves the validity of this assessment. Parents have, more often than not, opted for private schools with a distinctly poorer academic record than government schools in the same vicinity.

We need to examine the implications of the RTE Act in the context of this ground reality. To start with, an announcement that the parents are free to admit their kids in a neighborhood private school can create a rush which is neither justified nor sustainable; this will have serious detrimental impact on the PES in the short term with a major drop in new enrollments. The system can live with this, but not with the distortions that all such public interventions bring in - which is essentially the theme of this article.

Look at the mushrooming 'grey market' private schools to find out the enormous damage that the Act is likely to cause to the PES. The RTE Act provides for reservation of seats as above, with a mandated reimbursement for these admissions at a rate equivalent to that incurred by the PES. In most rural private schools, however, the cost of 'educating' a child is however far less than that incurred by the State.

While good data is hard to come by, I have observed that many of the private schools charge Rs.200 per month or even less. Compare this with the PES, in which the State spends Rs.800 or more per child each month. Inducting students on State Quota into these schools with reimbursements as above will actually prove to be a windfall income for these schools at State expense.

The PDS future for schools

What else will this parallel system do now, apart from availing the above windfall? The answers are not dissimilar to the ration shop scenario. Shady ventures will aggressively market their goods based on aspirational or perceptional choices and draw away students who would otherwise have opted for public schools. The State will in effect be funding the education of these students - and indirectly the private school system - at the cost of the public exchequer and to this extent, its own schools will be deprived of badly needed funds. These private schools will also inevitably increase their sanctioned intake of students over a period of time in order to avail of the state handout.

Further down the road come all the other distortions that afflict the PDS today; fake entries, absentee students and parents cashing in upfront the subsidy offered to the schools. The incentives being what they are, the day will not be far off when the enrollment in the schools increase and the actual number of students in the class room decline. Does it all look familiar now?

The focus is not on the poor kids who rarely occupy the neighbourhood space; it is the bureaucracy and the middle classes who will usurp these seats in premium schools in a metropolitan environment, notwithstanding all the conditional clauses in the Act. In a country where birth and caste certificates are up for sale, the fine print is not going to be a great deterrent.

It is unfortunate that the significant debate about RTE thus far in the public domain has had little to do with the path-breaking recommendations for the PES; instead it is centered on the above proposal to reserve a percentage of seats in private schools for underprivileged kids. The chief argument against it is based on a scenario where the elitist private schools are swamped by the unwashed from the streets.

To get at the truth, one has only to follow the money trail. The cost incurred by a typical premium school is bound to be far in excess of the Rs.800 under the PES and hence any reservation at state expense will be highly unattractive for them; this accounts for much of the furore. As far as educating the children of the country is concerned, this is strictly a non-issue as the number of seats feasible under the scheme will be minuscule compared to the millions of kids knocking at the doors of the system every year.

Over-centralised legislation

We are indeed paying a heavy price for making Education a concurrent subject under the Constitution. The vision of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, who drafted this legislation, does not seem to extend far beyond the Model Schools and the Kendriya Vidyalayas; and the children in Delhi schools. The conditions of the millions of kids under the State Systems do not appear to figure under their radar. Ironically, it is the latter that form the backbone of the educational system in our country.

It would be far wiser, and more practical to allow the States to set the legal and operational norms for educating their children. Different models would emerge, and their successes and failures could be learned from. An overarching, single scheme that is tailored for the Delhi environment is bound to fail in other parts of the country.

How many times have we heard the refrain under the erstwhile SSA, that funds remain unspent year after year because the States are unable to raise their share of the amount needed under the Center/State sharing formula? This is only going to get immensely worse with the huge budgets envisaged under RTE; State governments are already demanding that the Center bear the costs of this law fully. And without the capacity for absorbing these funds in the PES, the chances are that they will now get spent towards funding private schools instead. After all, that is where the action is right now, and the power of the lobbies too.

E S Ramamurthy

Courtesy: India Together

Unlearning the Untruths

2011-03-30T09:54:00.000+05:30

Recently I came across an interesting thesis on the impact of big money on education in the USA. I am reproducing below excerpts from it which have a bearing on the emerging scenario in our country.

The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels.

Private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K-12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children. But three funders working in sync command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don't rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher.

Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three's reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce. Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University's 2009 study of charter schools - the most comprehensive ever done - concluded that 83 per cent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students.

To justify their campaign, education reformers repeat, mantra-like, that US students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that US public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 per cent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. As the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty per cent of all US schools have poverty rates over 75 per cent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.

The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children.

Courtesy: Joanne Baran in DISSENT magazine

You might wonder - why am I raising this here, when in our country charitable or private foundations are very few and far between, and certainly not of a scale enough to influence policies and action? It is because big money is influential, irrespective of its sources. And the strategy used to denigrate the Public Education System in our country is no different either.

Each year, in the budget the Government announces the allotment of huge sums of money for education. Before too long, powerful interests of various hue move in to the center of the stage. And all the arguments highlighted in Joanne Baran's quote above appear in their opinions. Clearly, in India too the debate is coming to the same stage as in the United States, and so are the prescribed solutions. The parallels are too close to be ignored.

Let us take a look at what our own Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) 2009 had to say on the subject: "When various variables such as family background, income and others are controlled for, the difference in learning levels between government and private schools becomes marginal.

Similarly, Education Initiatives, India's largest private sector testing organization, found that any lead that private schools show in their learning outcomes over government schools can be completely explained away by students' socio-economic background, students' initial levels and rote/procedural nature of learning tested. In part of course, the trouble arises on account of the usual assumption in reference to private schools-they are generally seen to be high-end private schools. The reality however, is that a majority of private schools are only marginally different from their counterparts in government".

It appears that the ground realities are the same, whether it is USA or India. Under these circumstances, it is a myth to expect that the much touted PPP model can come to the aid of the PES. It makes even less sense to pump public funds into private schools in the garb of providing access for 'poor students' to quality education - which unfortunately is seen to be a corner stone of the RTE Act.

It is well recognized that private and public schools have their respective roles to play; it is no one's argument that the contributions of the former are to be ignored. They are and will always be the schools of choice for those who afford them and also be the catalysts for excellence in the school system. This sector does not need the munificence of the State to survive; it is best if the government confines its role to regulation here. The thrust and focus of the State - both in physical and financial terms - should be on improving the public education system to an extent that the above gap is substantially bridged.

This will in the long run be the most cost effective approach towards providing this essential service to the common people in the country. Only the 'unbelievably' naive will continue to repose faith in the possibility of private schools coming up in numbers large enough to offer an alternate in the areas where State-run schools are presently functioning. After all, we still have countless small towns and villages with no proper banking services, a decade after this sector was liberalised. Why should education be any different?

Empowering parents and communities

At the macro level the first factor that gets our attention is the commercialisation of the entire sector, resulting in powerful lobbies that thrive on weakening the PES. Naturally such lobbies alone will not be able to achieve much if the PES did not have serious inherent weaknesses that lend itself to such exploitation.

The root cause for most of the ills that plague the system is the enormous distance - both physical and psychological - that separates the power centers within the system and the schools where the actions take place. This is apparent at every stage from policy making to implementation. Critical decisions are made without the participation of the stakeholders, an attitude that can only be descrived as either arrogance or indifference. It is often said in defense of such an approach is poor parents are too ignorant to be partners in a meaningful dialogue; ironically the same people are thought to be very enlightened in choosing private schools over state-run ones.

In reality, every parent decides which school is a good one, based on their own set of values, perceptions and aspirations, and these could easily be very different from yours or mine. This is all the more reason why we should include them during the planning and implementation of the system.

At the micro level, no one - least of all the State - can bring about a change in the schools by diktat. The best one can do is to make a school want to upgrade itself. Alternately, the push for this upward movement could come from the community, to whom the school rightfully belongs. Presently the perception of the latter is that a government school is not worth their attention, as it is a place where 'nothing happens'. Once they see a ray of hope, a process of change in this perception will be set in motion. I have seen this transformation in many communities where the schools have started performing well.

That brings us to the core issues - ensuring accountability for the learning outcome and the empowerment of the stakeholders. The kids belong to the communities and no one can claim to represent their interests more than the latter. The RTE Act rightfully places all the responsibilities at the hands of the stakeholders but falls short in providing them with the powers and resources needed to address them.

Here, we should go back to the basics of the Constitution of the country; it was envisaged that the governance - especially with respect to the delivery of social services at the ground level - will be entrusted to the Local Bodies through appropriate legislations for the Panchayathi Raj Institutions. In a pluralist 'multi-everything' society like ours, there is no other option except to decentralise such processes and empower the communities to handle them.

E S Ramamurthy

Courtesy: India Together

Out of the Box

2011-03-29T07:53:00.018+05:30

The school at Athikuppe is interesting, not just for its academic performance where it scores a perfect 100 in all the four ASER tests , but also for its success in getting the stakeholders involved. Within minutes of our showing up at the school, we were joined by Umashankar , a member of the Panchayath who has been active in promoting the cause of education and the school in the village. He proudly pointed out the various schemes that are in progress with funding from the local body, which included a separate building for the kitchen to prepare mid- day meals and relocating the Computer room in the area vacated with suitable modifications. He was candid enough to admit that he had political affiliations but he would not let that come in the way of seeking assistance for anything that is related to the education of the kids. The HM too was frank in his appraisal of the situation that they faced in the village, which only reflected the dynamics of rural life in their area. The functioning of the school administration is not smooth all the way; neither is it too difficult to handle and get some results. The experiment in social re- engineering here is worth a close study; it may hold interesting possibilities for other communities to emulate.

What interested me most was not any of the above, though they do merit a special mention. In our work with the schools, we have been noticing an alarming decline in the enrollment levels in the 1st Grade- a trend if it persists does not bode well for the healthy evolution of the Public Education System. Some of the contributing factors:

The perception that State run schools do not push study of English adequately at the primary level

Anganwadis which effectively function as the pre- school stage for Government schools are a poor substitute for the Kindergarten schools that function in the private stream. Parents admit their children in the latter - a process that leads to private schools by default

Aggressive 'marketing' by the private schools to attract kids in the age group - 3 to 6; and the inability of the Public Schools to project themselves based on ground realities and merit

We found Umashankar to be surprisingly well sensitized to these issues. He went on to make his own suggestion on what the State should do to promote and utilize the resources that it had created specifically for the benefit of the common people. You can hear this in his own words in the video clip shown alongside.

I feel there is a lot of sense in what he says; if people are really poor enough to claim benefit from the State under the BPL category, how can one justify their action in admitting their kids to a private school paying a 'hefty' amount? Maybe, there is a case for some restrictions here as advocated by Umashankar.

As for me, I am excited at the emergence of this new spirit - of participation and questioning- in the rural environment. Many of us may not agree with the above idea; however i am sure about one thing: we do need more Umashankars...

E S Ramamurthy

The Unbelievable

2011-03-16T22:01:00.003+05:30

I visited the school at Kothavarapalle in the Madanapalle cluster recently. This one looked no different from the others till I saw a box in the office marked 'Life Line'. Curiosity drove me to ask the HM what this so-called life line was about. She told me that it contained small items like pencil, crayons, scale, eraser and stuff like that which the kids need on a daily basis. Anyone who happened to come to the class without one of them - either because they could not buy or they forgot for the day - can help himself/ herself to it from the box. The box is kept open at all times and the kid does not have to ask for permission from anyone to avail this facility. The box is kept stocked at all times by the teachers. It is an ' honor system' that is observed scrupulously by the students; losses are rare if ever!

With Sikshana in the school, the stocking is done from our funding; the teachers do not have to foot this expense. The kids know this - that if they take away one it is not the teachers who would suffer the loss. Even then, the system is functional with the same level of honesty!

It is amazing - and moving too in a way- that you find such a culture amidst kids living in acute poverty. Often I had been asked during my talks elsewhere whether we are doing enough to infuse a sense of values among the students under Sikshana. With such kids, I think it is we who have something to learn from them. If you recall the case studies quoted by Levitt in Freakanomics, I do not have add much.

I thought this school was one of those stray cases that I had seen. However when I reached the next school at Isknothpalle, more surprises were in store for me on this memorable day. This second school happens to be located close to a 'Beggar's Colony' - forgive me for the politically incorrect word since that is the term it is known by in the area- and 110 of 130 kids are from this settlement. This school too had a similar box and the story is the same!

Equally moving is the fact that the HM here is so pro-active that she has managed to convince most parents that they should not take the kids with them while they go on their rounds; this is the standard practice in most such settlements. The school gets near total attendance daily; even the irregular attendance of about five kids missing the school in a day is too much for her! She makes it a point to visit the Colony frequently and meet the parents to make all this happen. Just to think that there are people who write columns on how irresponsible Government school teachers are makes me feel sad.

Incidentally the academic record of this school is no less commendable; every one of the fourth Graders can read Telugu fluently and they know their Arithmetic too! I talked to each one of them; they have their dreams too. Schools like these hit me very hardt; what are our problems compared to theirs?

E S Ramamurthy

Another Milestone for Sikshana - A Prologue

2011-02-28T14:36:00.002+05:30

What Makes Us Tick

Human beings are the same everywhere; if you want to get something done by them, you need to know what makes them tick. It is a simple fact of life but most of us miss it often enough. The poor performance seen in the Public Education System (PES) is one such instance.

I was routinely checking the outcome in terms of the learning levels in some of our award winning schools last year. These are schools that were having amazingly good track records in terms of overall scores under conventional assessments. It struck me as odd that even in such schools there were a significant number of kids, who lacked basic skills - in this case inability to divide numbers in Arithmetic. I found that this was as high as 25% in the Fourth Grade, something unacceptable to me in the School which I was in. I asked the teacher in charge who was a competent person why this should be so; she said that her school will make it up in the next few years before the kids left for the High School. I had a hunch that this may not be borne out by facts; hence I walked into the Seventh Grade to check it out. To my amazement, I found the ratio of kids who lacked this skill was more or less the same in this class too. The teacher here was an equally good one; her initial reaction was that this is due to the influx of kids from single teacher feeder schools at the Sixth Grade. When we started analyzing the profile of the 'failing' kids, to her surprise we found that the ratio was the same in both groups.

I sat down for a chat with the staff of the school. Soon it emerged that most kids who do not acquire a skill at the Grade when it is due get left out thereafter and stay in the same situation till Tenth where they face failure in the examinations and detention. This is in spite of the fact that the Department has instituted a system of remedial education for students who do not acquire the prescribed skills during the academic year. For reasons I will not want to go into at this point, this scheme seems to be a non-starter in most schools. The remediation that ought to occur in the next year does not take place either because the teacher in this class is busy covering the needs of the syllabus of that year, rather than go back to filling up the gaps arising from the previous one. The more I talked to them , the more I realized that the issue is pretty simple : the teacher considers that her/his primary responsibility is to complete the requirements of the syllabus, rather than teaching a skill or a subject.

The obvious question at this stage is - why not do both? The teachers felt that the time available to them is not adequate to do that, given that they have non-teaching work too in addition to the class room work. In this school, the number requiring remediation for the numerical skill under consideration worked out to not more than ten each in 4th/ 7th Grades. I asked the teacher responsible for Mathematics how long it will take her to make these kids acquire this, if that were her only job. Prompt came the reply: not more than a month - irrespective of the state of the student at start. I took up the subject of another skill at this point: reading in own language which is Kannada here. It appeared that the number of students needing attention and the time required for correction were more or less the same.

Not satisfied with the response from one school, I tried this approach out in five more schools. Invariably the message from every one of them was the same: you give us the skill based goals and 4/8/12 weeks, we will do it. Surely there was no way by which I can assure the teachers that they will be given such an undisturbed time slot; nor can I encourage them to stray away from the syllabus based teaching schedule. A fresh idea struck me; how about allowing the school to recruit an extra teacher at our cost dedicated to this specific program. The school can decide how this new inductee should be used in the school.

Initially the school was given a time schedule of three months for acquisition of three basic skills: reading in Kannada, reading in English and Numerical skills up to division. Surprisingly many of the first 50 schools that formed part of the pilot program declined the offer, saying they would rather do this on their own since as it was their primary responsibility. Sikshana however had a provision for engaging local talent as volunteer teachers, many of whom ultimately played a large part in the success of this initiative.

With the goal set and the time available on their hands, the teachers went on to show what they were capable of. We were focusing on the kids lacking these skills in the 4th and 7th Stds. It was not just numbers; they were being tracked by name. Since the skills to be acquired are the same, the kids in both Grades could be combined for common coaching, which makes the job relatively easy. Our mentors were tracking the progress on a weekly basis and soon we found that the number of ‘failing’ kids was dropping dramatically; half way down the allotted time slot, we recognized that we have a winner on hand- and the schools too. The progress was well on target- to reach 90% compliance in the class room in 90% of the schools. Encouraged by a great start, the program was progressively extended to the remaining schools in KP cluster first and then in the schools of the remaining clusters in Anekal, Hoskote. Chikkaballapura and Kalaghatgi.

I do not want to go into the rate of progress in each case with numbers at each stage; suffice to say that by Jan of this year- which was roughly a six month period for the KP cluster – 100 plus schools out of 127 have attained 90% compliance to the targeted skills with 45 of them showing 100% - in both 4^th and 7^thStds! We expect the results to exceed our estimates by the end of the academic year. In order to ensure that these numbers carry credibility, we have voluntarily gone in for a second external audit; this has been systematically validating the numbers so far; we will of course stay the course till it is completed.

Reverting back to the main theme, these results can only be called extra-ordinary in the light of the State averages and the starting number. How is it that the same set of teachers have been churning out year after year kids without these skills so far is a subject that ought to be studied in depth. We cannot even say that it is on account of the intake of the extra teachers since many schools without this input have also achieved the same results! I do have some ideas on what triggered this response from the system; but I would rather wait for a more comprehensive and objective assessment before I venture out with mine.

We have already made a pilot start with writing in Kannada in some schools to check our capability to demonstrate this too to the same level. We plan to make these four skills as a core program of Sikshana in all our 500 schools next year, at the end of which we will have a proven successful program in totality.

There is another way of looking at it: with these amazing results with not an insignificant number of students/ schools, is it worth a wait of one year to prove what looks to me a proven point? I wish I had a platform of 1000 schools tomorrow.

E S Ramamurthy

Another Milestone for Sikshana

2011-02-24T20:37:00.021+05:30

I had the pleasure of attending a function yesterday at the school in Bandigenehalli which marked yet another milestone for Sikshana - and what a memorable one! This school is one of the first in which every student in 4th and 7th Std has managed to acquire two of the basic skills targeted by us this year on a pilot basis across all our schools; these are 'reading in own language' and numerical computation. The enormity of the task and the achievement can be understood only in the light of the published State and National figures available for these skills under the ASER Report of '09; these vary from as low as 11% in 4th Std for computations to 68% in 7th Std for reading in Kannada.

This is not just a stray case of success; our program for acquisition of the above basic skills covers this year as many as 275 schools in four clusters falling in three Districts of the southern part of Karnataka. Of these, the 127 schools in Kanakapura cluster have been exposed to this program for the longest spell of eight months, others having had it for much lesser periods. The analysis of data from this cluster makes impressive reading. Both the overall picture and the KP scenario are given below.

The compliance levels for these skills are seen to vary from 88 to 91%. If however four schools having serious local issues are excluded, the remaining 123 schools show 91, 92, 92 and 93 % respectively for the four skills. More interestingly, nearly 50 schools have reached total compliance at 100% within this short period! The schools are working against a self set goal of achieving 90% plus in all the skills by the end of the academic year; the target seems to be well within the reach of the cluster.

Pilot Program:

Cluster	Schools	Total IV	Total VII	Lack K IV	Lack M IV	Lack K VII	Lack M VII
KP	127	1567	3237	161	165	321	370
HK*	79	1034	1650	145	164	216	252
AK*	30	533	760	111	134	93	108
CK*	39	457	996	102	139	198	249
Total	275	3591	6643	519	602	828	979
Achieved				*86%*	*83%*	*88%*	*85%*
State Av				*32%*	*11.1%*	*67.5%*	*38.7%*

*Figures provisional as they are still subject to second audit, mandatory under Sikshana

At this point, I should point out what a score of 90 means in the context of a Government school. For all practical purposes it is as good as 100 if you consider the following factors:

The school has to take in every kid who comes to them; there is no luxury of a choice as is the case with private schools
An incoming kid is to be placed in the age appropriate Grade irrespective of the history of prior schooling
Most schools have kids with serious deficiencies, including but not confined to learning/ behavioral disorders, nutritional/ hereditary issues and broken families with no visible means of livelihood.
Families are generally unwilling to part with their wards to be placed in special/ residential schools set up for differently abled kids by the State

We decided that the schools that achieve the remarkable goal of 100% under all the four heads will be given a plaque in recognition of their achievement, the award to be received by the Staff of the school from the President of the School Committee and the Elders of the Community. In pursuance of this, a Function was organized at Bandigenehalli yesterday in which the people of the village participated in full strength; the Education Department officials were also present. The occasion proved to be a great success in more way than one; it created awareness of the performance of the school among the people of the village, paving the way for more productive participation of the community in the affairs of the school. A very interesting sequel on the occasion: the representatives of the community demanded setting up of a high school in the premises for which there was adequate justification and the Officials responded with an immediate clearance, effective next academic year. It is not often that a community asks for a school in our environment! And more impressive was the affirmative response on the spot from the bureaucracy. Both of these were developments that bode very well for the future the concept of community ownership of the schools.

The current pilot program comes to an end by the end of the academic year in April. We hope to have some very interesting information to share with everyone in the public domain along with our comprehensive plan for the next year covering all the four essential skills under a time bound program.

E S Ramamurthy

A Road Map for High Schools

2011-02-15T18:10:00.001+05:30

After two years in the field with High Schools, a Road Map is slowly emerging that seems to make a lot of sense. The search for one started in the first year during the crash course we were conducting to get the 'weak' kids to pass the final examinations. The Resource Teacher in charge pointed out that it is nearly impossible to come up with a common course program, where the disparities in skill levels are unduly large. Even among a batch of lagging students, there are some who have the basics right but are struggling to get through the essentials for a pass in the Tenth; while there are others who have not even acquired the former. Typically, the latter consist of kids who are so poor in their academic standards that they cannot perform division of numbers in Maths or be able to write a word in English in cursive style; the number of such kids in many schools is large enough to make one pause.

The constant refrain from most teachers in Tenth is that they can coach the students under them to a level of obtaining a Pass in the examinations, provided the incoming students have a minimum standard for learning levels. This took us back to all the skills that the kids ought to have acquired on the way from 1st to 9th but have not. This list is large; however there are two subjects- English and Maths- that account for more than 80% of the failures and if we could focus on these a good part of the problem could be resolved.

Having seen success under the skill development program in Primary Schools based on ASER listed competencies, we felt that a similar approach could be productive in High Schools too. Accordingly we have initiated a process of identifying the components of the Skill Set in these two subjects that meet the following conditions :

It should be up to the minimum expectations of the teachers in Tenth in High Schools
It should be such that they can be imparted to all the students found to be wanting in these within a reasonable timescale of 4/12 weeks.
We should also be able to identify in our environment suitable resource persons who can take up this task and do the needful at an affordable cost.

We are taking this program forward under the following schedule:

Identification of the required skills in consultation with all concerned: one week
Identification of students who do not possess these skills in each school: one month after the first step
Find suitable resource persons in adequate number to take up the above task: one month after the first step
Commencement of the 'remedial' program: Start of summer holidays
Duration: Four weeks in summer holidays for Phase 1 and 12 weeks for completion

The reaction from the schools and the students for such a program which covers most of the summer holidays and also extends for a few weeks beyond is surprisingly very favorable. There is a demand for covering a third area - lingual skill in Kannada - which according to the schools is affecting the performance of the students, not just in that subject but also others like Social Studies. We are examining the feasibility of covering this too under the same schedule; in the event we find it difficult to accommodate the additional load at this time, we plan to cover it in a separate phase for a period of three months starting from June 11.

It is my personal assessment that this program can make a huge impact on the bottom lines of the schools in the final examinations, subject to its successful implementation. However a word of caution is due here. The poor standard seen is of two distinct types: one where the student is performing badly in all subjects and another where he/ she is lagging one or more specific subjects. The above program addresses by and large the latter group, though it has a large motivational component built in, besides the pedagogy that is of interest to the former too. However these kids need additional care by way of focus on individual issues that are unique to them. The baseline initiatives under Sikshana that are already in progress take care of such needs; they include home visits, use of specialist counselors, reward schemes etc. The present proposal should be seen as an essential supplementary effort in an ongoing program.

PS: For those who are interested in knowing more about what we do in the High Schools under Sikshana, it will be worth the while to go through this blog: http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-on-sikshana-v-20.html

E S Ramamurthy

A Crazy Idea

2011-01-31T06:55:00.002+05:30

Every good idea which is ahead of its time from one appears crazy to others; History is replete with instances. I was just reading a book " Why Not" by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres. You should do it too; that will make it easy for you to understand what follows.

The State spends on a conservative estimate Rs 10,000 plus on every child in school at the primary level. We have now a plethora of problems facing us notwithstanding this munificent gesture. The State feels the kids ought to be thankful to it; but what do they do? They drop out of schools and / or fail their examinations, adding to the woes of the teachers. Those who are a bit better do even worse; they 'run away' to a private school! As for parents, all freebies notwithstanding, it does cost them money to educate a kid well even if it is in a Government school; starting from a few hundred rupees at the primary level, it goes up to a couple of thousands at the High School. This is behind many of the ills today.

With RTE around the corner, private schools are shuddering at the thought of having to admit the 'unwashed' among their midst; worse still with pretty little in terms of compensation.

I have an idea which will rid the System of all these. The State could learn to live with Rs 8800 instead of 10,000 ( if it is only that) and place Rs 100 in the hands of the kid every month - or Rs 4 per day of attendance- as long as he is in a State run school. That is not a tough thing to do. The amount may be deemed to be a stipend - so there is no stigma attached to it. Let us look at all the positive things this will achieve:

Dropouts and absenteeism will drastically come down ; the teachers will not have to visit the homes of the absentee kids any longer.
The enrollment figures in public schools will stop declining. The State may no longer have to worry about closing schools and relocating teachers; both have started happening at an alarming rate and are very unpopular measures to deal with.
The private schools could continue to do they are good at- whatever that is- without fear of the unknown arising from RTE.
Who knows , if the amount is linked to MLL's ( minimum learning levels) and a pass in an examination , we may even have spectacular increases in these areas too

The reason why I quoted the above book is simply this: it is often about the Why Not rather than the Why. Why should we always plan on the basis of children having to pay for education? Why cannot the State pay them for getting educated in their schools? After all, are they not spending a fortune already with pretty little to show? Could this not be taken as an investment for the future? Some may say that this is corrupting the young and education should not be had for such benefits; but then dont scholaships and mid-day meals fall under this category too?

This will naturally be resisted by those who are going to be affected when the budgeted 10k becomes 8.8 k. I am confident about one thing; these guys are smart enough to find 11.2 k when it comes to the crux. That will leave everyone happy.

A Post Script: There is no sanctity about the figure of 100. The results are bound to be even more dramatic if you double it.

E S Ramamurthy

2011-01-23T08:36:00.002+05:30

PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND RTE ACT
Imperiling public education

20 January 2011 - The economics of owning and running a Ration Shop, the familiar name for the outlets in our Public Distribution System (PDS), are such that under normal business terms, the shop-owner could never make a profit. Yet, whenever the government announces that new permits for ration shops will be given out, there is a frenzy in the market to grab one of these. Why? The answer is obvious: the business is not for the honest and if one knows the ropes, there is a fortune to be made.

What are these tricks of this trade?

Getting fake names into the user list is the most obvious option; the State seems to be waging a losing battle against this practice, judging by the endless efforts to weeding out bogus ration cards.

A windfall for many schools

The PDS future for schools

Over-centralised legislation

E S Ramamurthy
20 Jan 2011

Courtesy: India Together

Kaggalahalli Again

2011-01-16T16:21:00.001+05:30

The Kaggalahalli High School saga that began last year still continues; success stories dont fade off so easily. You may recall that this school that had a mediocre past with pass rates of 60's in the SSLC examinations shot to the second spot in a pile of 51 Government and Aided schools in Kanakapura with 89.4 % in May '10. Even when compared with the Private schools in the School District who have the option of selecting and detaining kids, this school ranked a proud fourth- a remarkable achievement indeed.

Right from the beginning of the year, the HM with the support of the staff decided that they will not allow any kid to fail this time, a great way of looking at a 100% pass! Weak students were identified and special coaching classes were conducted through the year, including a fortnight long camp during the mid- term holidays. Most of the teachers were putting in additional hours of hard work for the love of the job.

The first semester tests did show some weak points still; in order to address them they had an internal meet assisted by our Mentor. It was found that these issues can be addressed effectively only in their respective homes with the support of the parents. The kids needed to put in extra hours of effort at home. Keeping aside the tendency to keep blaming the parents for their indifference, they decided to take the bull by the horns. Realizing that mass meets with them never get any results, they took the unusual step of approaching the parents of each student at their homes individually and seek their co- operation.

The class had 49 students in all; one of the teachers along with our Mentor , Muthuraj, called on each between 530 PM and 830 PM. The exercise took just two days and produced amazing reactions from the community; never have they seen something like this from the teachers of a Government school. Some of the typical reactions:

Sir, why should you come all the way to our home; we would have come if you had sent words; after all these are our children

If you are willing to do this much for our kids, we should certainly do a lot more and we will do

We will stop watching TV in the evenings so that our children are not distracted

We will ensure that they are not disturbed in their studies; no more household chores for them

We may not know what they are studying but we will ensure that they do it for the time and during the time slot designated by you

Some of them reminisced about their past; how they missed the opportunities for study earlier on in their life for which they are suffering now and that they should not let that happen to their kids. Six hours of dedicated work with just two participants produced results which hundreds of officially sponsored meets over years could not; it wiped out all the hidden suspicions and hostilities that had separated the community from the school.

I do not know if ultimately every kid will really get through the final examinations in this school this year; but I am sure that day is not far off as far as this school is concerned. They had indeed taken a huge step for the future of the Public Education System with their positive approach.

Hats off to the school at Kaggalahalli.......

E S Ramamurthy

More on Sikshana V 2.0

2011-01-03T09:13:00.001+05:30

The High School Experience

It is nearly a year since we made an entry into High Schools with Sikhana; the first academic year is yet to come to an end for arriving at definite conclusions. However the shape of the template that we ought to consider for adoption here has started emerging from the experiences gained during this period.

The expectations of the parents and the community from a State run High School is that it should enable the student pass the final examinations, the performance being adequate to qualify for further studies or a vocational training stream. The goal for Sikshana can be no different.

My experience over the limited period showed that Sikshana in High Schools should have four essential elements, for the program to be effective.

Element 1: Social Awareness

The few months of interactions with the students during the last academic year showed one major gap between perception and practice among them; while all of them professed a desire to do well and pass the examinations, the efforts being put in were nowhere near what they ought to be to achieve this result. No amount of 'talking' apparently had an impact on bridging this gap, though most of them appeared to be sincere enough in their responses. It took quite a few sessions before some of them loosened enough to give a vital feedback: notwithstanding all that is said and done, they did not consider failing in the examinations to be all that much of a 'catastrophe'. They were seeing their friends of the previous batches who had failed but moving around in their villages without any apparent 'damage'. In many cases, the message from their parents simply is this: try to do your best and pass, and if you do not get through, not to worry we will take care - you can come with us for work wherever we are going. With this proffered safety net, there is naturally no great incentive to take the examinations seriously and put in that badly needed extra effort.

So the first effort to undo the damage done by the environment should be to focus on the ground realities in the rural area, some of which the parents seem to be missing out as well. Even I knew that as recently as five years back, it was a common sight in every village to see the 'tractor' of a labor contractor draw up in the morning to pick up those, who are willing to put in a day's hard manual work in return for a wage 'that can keep one alive'. You may call it the effect of globalization or something else; the 'tractor' is no longer seen in most villages. All types of manual labor - especially those which relate to this catchment area- have progressively disappeared giving way to the new tools of engineering - large earthmoving/ road making/ stone crushing equipment. Even agriculture seems to shun unskilled labor in favor of modern machinery, with traditional jobs in the field shrinking further. Considering that these kids have to look at a forty year time frame for a productive life, the only viable option for them seems to be to acquire a 'marketable' skill which, in turn, needs at the least a Higher Secondary school certificate.

It was not a surprise to me that this message invariably found the mark. Getting these kids to take education seriously involved taking them into confidence on what awaits them if they dont. I developed a capsule - of a couple of hours’ duration- which was very useful I getting the desired impact. With more professional expertise, I am sure this message could be designed to be far more effective.

Element 2: Adoption of the Weak

The Public Education System (PES) was not lacking in competent and qualified teachers. It is their fragmented approach to a student that was causing serious problems. Each teacher seemed to think that his/ her role is to teach a subject within the parameters of the prescribed syllabus under a pre-defined time frame. No one seemed to be concerned about the integrated development of a student even in the academic sense - something that needed individual attention of some sort tailored to meet his/her specific needs. Examples are galore: there were kids who were good at all other subjects except in English in which they did not have enough skill even to write a word in cursive style. The class room work that was assiduously followed still involved teaching ‘long’ lessons that were far above their severe limitations. The situation was similar in Maths where kids who were barely able to divide numbers were being taught logarithms.

Typically, 25% of students in a class - 10 in a class of 40- seemed to have such lopsided development of skills; and these invariably are the ones who fail in the final examinations. Published data show that the public schools score around 70% in the latter , which proves that this assessment is not far off the mark. We also know that almost every one of these schools has five teachers or more. It is hence possible to have a program under which each of these teachers take responsibility for two students and help/ monitor their progress through the year. This concept of adoption should extend beyond the individual subjects that these teachers are responsible for; it should cover seeking inputs from their colleagues wherever needed as well as monitoring the effort/ work put in by the kid at home especially in subjects in which he/ she is weak.

A pilot program on these lines is being tried out in many schools with the co- operation of the staff; based on its success, we plan to extend the scheme to all schools.

Element 3: Focus on Practice

The next element is a fairly simple one. An examination typically tests the ability of a student to respond to a set of questions correctly in a given time slot. The kids from the PES have a major handicap: they had come through a system which has steadfastly denied them the practice of writing an examination under a competitive environment until the last point in X Std. Worse still, 'studying' means - to most of them- having a book in their hands and keep reading it. Shortage of paper and inadequate emphasis on writing as a means of enhancing their learning levels have further contributed to the erosion of their ability to handle an examination. Unlike in the private school stream, they did not have access to 'model papers' or 'work books' with which they could try out their skills. We made good the shortfalls here at two levels: making them understand the importance of practicing writing examinations and providing them with the necessary material in terms of work books. This is already seen to have a major impact on their ability to face the impending final test.

Element 4: Supplementing Teaching

Many schools have the problem of not having ‘subject specific’ teachers, especially for the core ones like English and Maths, for the better part of the academic year. This arises from the appointment and transfer policies of the State. In a few cases the available teachers were also found to need supplemental effort from more competent resources; this made me think about organizing special coaching classes, focused on those who are found to be weak in specific subjects. Accordingly, we arranged for reputed resource persons to take classes for these subjects over the weekend. The response to this scheme was so overwhelming that it surprised me; after all these are kids who are identified as ‘hopeless’ by the schools on account of their lack of performance and hence unlikely to take all that much interest to spare a weekend for attending a coaching class, braving the long commute. The attendance rate, which hovered around 90% over a period of four months last year, is equaling it this year as well. This proves that there are enough kids in the system, who have the urge to excel and are willing to put in the extra effort needed to succeed, given an opportunity. And these kids were tagged laggards so far!

The examinations at the end of the current year can be expected to establish the validity of much of the above. My own hunch is that the above already stand proven; if anything, lack of success to the extent desired may only show the need for additional steps to be taken.

I am keeping my fingers crossed. Four months is not a long time in the life of Sikshana V 2.0

E S Ramamurthy

Sikshana spreads Wings

2011-01-01T21:01:00.009+05:30

First Stop: Bharuch in Gujarat

For Sikshana, 22nd Dec 10 is a milestone in its quest for national validation; that is the day on which the program was inducted into a cluster of schools in Bharuch in Gujarat. The initiative that took shape at the Outreach program organized in July '10 in collaboration with Vibha was formally inaugurated in Talodra, a tribal village on the outskirts of Bharuch, on this day under the auspices of Gram Vikas Trust. I had the privilege to attend the function on behalf of Sikshana and interact with the invitees and participants. The meet was an outstanding success in terms of the quality of interaction, notwithstanding the lingual barriers.

The teachers were exposed to the concepts of Sikshana and the practices under the program. To start with, the schools agreed to carry out a preliminary assessment of learning skills obtained in their class rooms and work towards a set of goals to be achieved by the end of the ensuing academic year. The orientation designed at this stage was to make them realize:

That any effort of this type to be successful should driven by an inner urge to excel, rather than by external forces or influences

The goals accordingly are be determined internally by each school on the basis of a consensus

That they should work towards achieving these goals as a team

The role of a teacher is not so much to teach as to make the student want to learn

The tools to be used in the class room consequently should be motivational

Good primary schooling is about every child acquiring the basic life skills: to be able to read, write and express fluently, backed by optimal computational skill

A second session is being planned during Jan 11 when a comprehensive TQM course as well as an exposure to the program template of preferred activities is proposed. With the completion of this step, the schools will be well on the way to implementing Sikhana.

I could use the opportunity to visit a few schools and get a feel of the environment prevailing in Bharuch, in comparison with that obtained elsewhere in the South. The level of enthusiasm seen both among teachers and students was outstanding. Considering that the communities in this cluster carry the ST tag and consequently carry lower levels of expectation going by the National Data base, the experience is nothing short of amazing. Every class room showed signs of individual initiative on the part of students under the guidance of teachers. A typical example is the quality of project work done by kids during the year - sample shown above; and this was at the level of V Std!!

That these kids got their photos taken on a Cell Phone, went to the nearby town and got them printed for inclusion in the Report showed their determination to do a good job in the Class. This bodes very well for our efforts to take them a notch higher.

An exchange of teachers is also being contemplated for sharing of their respective experiences. I expect the summer annual holidays to be a crucial period for filling up the perceived skill gap at 7th Std this year and then go from there to extend the gains to the lower classes.

A special mention should be made here about GVT which has acquired a reputation for the integrity of their programs in this area , thereby making our job a lot easier. The leadership of Ramesh and the managerial expertise of Hemraj are also expected to become our assets in the implementation of the program.

I have no doubt that GVT will be a stepping stone for Sikshana for entry into other States.

E S Ramamurthy

A New Signature Initiative

2010-12-25T09:05:00.003+05:30

Reduced to the basics:

Isn't this what Sikshana is all about?

Sikshana has always been about kids acquiring the basic life skills - ability to read, write, express and compute- under the Public Education System at the primary level. After a couple of years of introduction, the schools were showing remarkable improvements in many spheres as evidenced by quantified indicators; it looked as if the program is effective after all as planned. Being a dynamic program with zero tolerance for complacency, we have however been constantly looking for slips and weaknesses in the system. It was not long before we got the first major negative blip; and it came this year from our High Schools.

When we started coaching sessions to prepare the High School students for the final examinations- which incidentally happens to be the first real test for the kids ever since they joined the stream ten years back- we found a significant number without the above mentioned basic skills; naturally the teachers entrusted with the responsibility of seeing them through found the task insurmountable, given the short time frame at the fag end of the term. Sikshana, being a statistically validated program, does not rule out this possibility as long as the numbers are minimal and is a consequence of the ongoing process. Unfortunately, this was not so, leading us to a hunt for the fault lines.

The first document which threw some light on this unacceptable situation was the much acclaimed ASER report; it showed that this is something that we should have expected right from the beginning. A simple analysis of the figures presented effectively brought out a simple fact: the students who do not learn to read and write - or multiply and divide numbers- at the level of Stds 3 to 5 which are the appropriate ones to acquire these skills in never get to acquire them during the subsequent years. With no effective system of screening and provision for penalties or detention, they keep sailing through the years in school, with the gap between their knowledge levels and the class room schedules ever widening; a side effect of this is obviously an increasing alienation between the affected students and their schools.

In order to check out the accuracy of the above conclusion, we went to a school considered to be one of our best and did a quick check on two specific skills covered by ASER- fluency in reading and arithmetic- for which National and State level figures were readily available for comparison. Though we found the number of 'failing' kids to be far less than the published ones, they were still disconcerting enough for some soul searching on our part and suitable corrective action. We are after all not in the field for pursuing mediocrity; why should a Sikshana primary school, apart from a few statistical aberrations, be sending out kids who have not acquired the minimal life skills?

A closer study showed that even in the same school, the ratio of kids who fail the simple skill tests is more or less the same - at 4th and 7th Stds. A check on other schools in our clusters further strengthened this conclusion that the drift starts in the age group 10-12. This brought out clearly the area which we have to focus on and the type of targets we have to persuade our schools to adopt and go for. Keeping in view the spirit of this blog that calls for staying away from excessive use of numbers, I would like to dwell on the interactions we had at the schools that led us to an amazing new initiative towards correcting the lacunae in the system under Sikshana.

To start with, we approached the teacher in charge of 7th Grade and asked her how she feels about having kids in her class who cannot read or write in Kannada. She agreed that it is not something to be proud of but she could do pretty little about it; after all she has the whole class to take care of and these kids had come in to hers with little coaching from the prior Grades. Further, she has the responsibility of covering the syllabus prescribed, conducting periodic tests and reporting progress against them for the entire class; this in effect gives her little time to worry about the 'lagging' kids in the class. We asked her: how much time and effort she would need in her opinion to bring these kids on par for the basic skills if she was free of these chores and this was her only responsibility. Prompt came the reply: not more than six weeks.

That gave us an idea; why not bring in an extra teacher for a limited period who can substitute for her - or take this responsibility on her behalf- and focus on these kids? Since number to be taken care of is mostly low in the range of 1 to 10, maybe this resource person could also handle the slow learners in 4th as well, since it is in this Grade that the learning gap starts developing and the process of imparting them is in any case the same for both groups.

We took up a pilot batch of fifty schools in June and asked each one of them whether they are willing to participate in this venture to enhance the compliance levels for the two specified learning skills in Sds 4 and 7 to above 90%; we stipulated two conditions. They should clearly nominate a teacher in each case who will be responsible for this effort and it should be conducted within an agreed time frame. In return, we offered to each school that we will support induction of an extra teacher on a short term basis wherever required in order to achieve this goal. Every single school approached agreed to participate in the program; about half the schools declined the offer of an additional teacher. They committed themselves to the target without any external assistance; the response in their own words was: "is this not our job"?

Within the three months that we agreed upon initially, 43 of the 50 schools reached scores above the targeted 90%; one should bear in mind here for comparison that the State average ranges from 15 in 4th to 77 in 7th depending on the skill that is being monitored. It is heartening to note that the schools are continuing to register further progress beyond the initial three month period; they have also now opted to cover the remaining two skills: writing fluently in Kannada and reading English at the stipulated speed/ fluency.

While this was going on, the word spread around and more and more schools started evincing keen interest to join in; our own internal discussions also led to the inevitable next step: to make this one of the signature initiatives of Sikshana and rope in all our clusters. Accordingly a few weeks later, the venture was expanded to cover all Sikshana schools in stages; the scope of identification of the lack of a skill as well as its acquisition was also upgraded into a professional format that results in a data base, providing an exceptional facility to track students at an individual level on the basis of skills. The new initiative is likely to be under this format in the coming days.

The aim is to ensure that no kid passes on to the 8th STD from a Sikshana primary school without these skills, barring statistical aberrations. Hopefully, the 400 Sikshana schools will accomplish this seemingly impossible task by Sep 11, the middle of the next academic year. The magnitude of this task and the targeted goal can be understood and appreciated only in the light of the current State/ National figures.

The success of this initiative raises some interesting issues. If the same schools have been churning out year after year so far kids who were ill equipped, what is it that made the difference now to an extent that their performance appears amazing? Is it only the act of pointing them in the right direction backed by an appeal to their self esteem and ego? Is this sustainable over multiple clusters and large number of schools? Will the approach be equally successful in the case of the last skill involving reading ability in English which has other overtones extending to the expertise of the teachers themselves? Some of these will be answered by the end if this academic year in March 11; others may have to wait a bit longer. We are truly cautious in reporting successes under this effort since, to our knowledge, there has been numerous 'false starts' in this area - of which many have been despite more vigorous efforts and the best intentions.

None of these can however take away the credit due to the Sikshana schools that have already showed that the 'impossible' can be achieved in Government schools given the right inputs even if it is a one- time 'miracle'. And if it is found to be sustainable over a period, the obvious response is the one liner: is this not what Sikshana us all about?

E S Ramamurthy

A Postscript: All the above need to be supported by numbers. Naturally, we owe you a sequel to this blog

What is in a name?

2010-12-19T14:22:00.000+05:30

Watching the proceedings of the 2010 Sikshana Book Fair led me to wonder on a point that our Subbu often makes ; that we need to be extra extra careful when we name any activity under Sikshana. Now for lack of any other term we stuck with Sikshana Book Fair or Book Mela which loosely translates in kannada as "Pustaka Santhe". Now Fair/Mela/Santhe brings to ones mind a weekend open market typically conducted in small towns or large villages where there is more chaos and noise than a busy Bangalore street. When I walked into one such event, I literally felt like I had entered a Santhe. There was too much noise, the books were not getting the kind of respect they deserve from the kids and the teachers, many were showing book covers to friends and selecting the same and they were doing it in such a hurry as if they were racing against the clock. Very few kids were taking time to browse a few pages of the book before selecting. It made me wonder if the situation would have been different if we had called it by a different name?

Anyway as part of the last leg of the fair, I went to Kalghatgi on 15th and here wanted to experiment with the start of the event to try and bring in a little seriousness into the event. After the usual lamp lighting ceremony and a motivational talk by our guest, we declared that all children, teachers and guests in the hall need to pick up one book and then read the same for the next five minutes. Within less than a minute the whole hall became very quiet literally pin drop quiet. A sense of purpose seemed to emerge in the room and at the end of the exercise 2 children came forward and shared their story with the rest of the audience. For the next couple of hours at least the hall did not resemble a "Santhe" !

This 5 min reading exercise may definitely be worth repeating next year in our Library program. Another issue that was bothering us was the fact that most school teachers got the top ranking children from their schools for the book selection in spite of repeated request to bring along children in mixed groups.

In Kalghatgi we sent the memo to schools specifying that among the children who come to the event, there should be at least one child who is yet to demonstrate the required skills as per our ASER tests. Some schools were given names of specific children identified by our mentors to bring along to the event. I spent an hour talking to children from a few schools observing the reaction and behavior of these children in the groups. I could clearly sense their excitement, anxiety, thrill and happiness all rolled into one hesitant smile. In a particular instance a boy in class 7 who can only recognize kannada alphabets was at the event and he had selected 5 books which covered basic kannada alphabets and simple words. When others told me how many of the books they selected made it to the final list, he too was proud to say that he got in his five. He promised that he will work hard to learn reading kannada and would like to start reading the books his friends had selected. Few of the teachers also made similar positive observations and appreciated the impact it had on the children just by bringing them to the book fair and letting them choose.

Most above average children, especially the girls, were very sensitive to their friends who could not read or perform basic arithmetic. They promised me that they will not fail their friends and will do their best to bring them up to speed. We created group leaders tagged them with our mentors and hope to post a few success stories here in the near future.

Knowing the value of reaching the last kid in the class, we had to figure out how to achieve this in the scale we operate. And one idea that all teachers and children at the fair agreed and committed to implement was to recreate this book fair in their own schools. In the next few days the new books will arrive at their schools. The plan is to setup a mock book fair with all the books in their school library along with the new books at each of the schools with the kids managing the entire show. With this we not only want to reach every child in our system but also get each one of them excited enough to pick up a book and start reading!

Oh and still it wont hurt to have a new name for the event next year, any suggestions?

Postscript Random thoughts: If I go back 3 years and recall the experience when we had 35 kids from 7 kanakapura schools visit Sapna Book store in Bangalore, the kids were very serious in their approach - was it due to the unfamiliar / new environment of the store, presence of other buyers in the store, being in a large city, etc - whatever the reason but even the teachers behaved differently in that situation. Now with the scaling up of Sikshana the challenge will be to make the library program as effective as it used to be and more. The challenge will be to bring in that level of seriousness to the school level book fair. If we can pull that off that will really be something.

Book by Book - Children Building Their School Library

2010-12-03T01:01:00.004+05:30

It is that time of the year when the kids from Sikshana schools get ready to refresh / replenish their school library collection. This is one of the core activities of Sikshana which focus on child empowerment and reading skills. Each year constant improvements are being made with a goal of reaching more children directly through this activity.

This year the book fair is going to more school centers with over 1000 titles where five to ten children from nearby schools can visit and select books for their library and each of the host schools will also allow all children in the school to browse through the collection. The program is scheduled to run from Dec 2 to 17th at various schools in the blocks of Kanakapura, Anekal, Hoskote, Chikballapur, Bangalore and Kalghatgi. When the program is all done, 5000 students representing nearly 50k children from 378 schools supported by Sikshana in Karnataka would have selected books worth nearly 12lak rupees for the year 2010-11 academic year.

Today the program started at Maralavadi School in Kanakapura taluk. Changes for this year - more centers, more children getting a chance to browse the books and schools will get more books as the library budget has been increased to rs. 3k-5k compared to 2k-4k last year.

Children browsing the collection

One kid who got inspired at the book fair decided to write a small poem which is shared below. English Translation: "Sikshana Foundation has come to Maralavadi school to improve our knowledge; It came, It did; I went for a quiz and returned a winner; Sikshana is my book leading light"

Yello Ittu Sikshana Foundation
Bantu namma gnavannu hechisalu Maralavadi library ge
Gnavannu hecchisitu Buddiyannu churuku golisitu
Nanu hode Quiz ige Geddu bande shale ge
Nanna jote Sikshana Foundation pustaka dari deepavagide

Schedule of Sikshana Book Fair

Kanakapura
2nd Dec Maralavadi
3rd Dec Harohalli
4th Dec Kanakapura
6th Dec Sathnuru
7th Dec Kodihalli
8th Dec Doddalahalli

Anekal
9th Dec Bannerugatta
10th Dec Jigani

Hosakote
6th Dec Jadigenahalli
7th Dec Sulibele
8th Dec Devangundi
9th Dec Hosakote

Chikkaballpura
10th Dec Guribidanoor
11th Dec Chikkaballpura

Kalghatgi (near Hubli)
14, 15, 16, 17 Dec

Early Days 1

2010-09-28T20:36:00.010+05:30

The Sikshana Story with a Personal Touch

1.0 Pre-amble

I have been covering my personal experiences during the early days of Sikshana in my talks to various fora and my infrequent writings. I was asked quite often why I have not gone ahead and documented them since some of these could be useful for those who may want to enter into the field of public education system now or in the future; at the least, it will help those who are interested in Sikshana to understand the program and its evolution better. Whether it really serves these goals or not, it would most certainly be a very happy and satisfying exercise for me.
I had two options here - to write about them from the Organizational angle of Sikshana or to do so from my personal view point. Here I have adopted the latter since the narrative is bound to contain my own views on many issues, which in all fairness should not be foisted on Sikshana.
Many of the incidents covered here date as much as eight years back; I could possibly be off the mark in some of the minor details for which I tender my apologies in advance. I can only promise to keep the spirit of the events true to reality in all cases. Regarding the names of persons involved in the narrative, I will give the real ones where those concerned have given their consent or have no reason not to; as for the rest, you will find that I have used abbreviations.
The narrative is intended to cover the period when Sikshana was verily a one person show. That should rather read a one family show since you have to count my wife in here for two reasons: it was her funds with which I started it and she was perhaps as active as I was at that time. The transition to a phase where more people started taking active participation thereby reducing my load - and my worries with sleepless nights- was not sharp; it was pretty gradual. Using the Author's prerogative, I have decided that I will trace the growth till Sikshana extended its coverage for the first time into Kanakapura away from the City with the support of Vibha; this was really a milestone as the program at this point cast away its image finally as one centered around Individuals and became an entity on its own merit.
With all the above pre-amble, here it goes....

2.1 The Birth of Sikshana
The idea of starting something like Sikshana dates well before Nov 2001, when it eventually took off. The origin of my interest can be traced back to mydays with the Industry when I was personally involved with Renewable Energy Systems- their design, manufacture and deployment. Since these systems are invariably deployed in remote rural areas, it gave me an opportunity to get exposed to the needs and aspirations of the really poor and dispossessed in the country. It did not take long for me to realize on a first hand basis that Education is the most needed and vital tool for removal of abject poverty. Surely, that was not a great piece of enlightenment but to get it after an exposure to the gross realities of Rural India is something one has to go through. It is an experience that changes one's views on life as a whole, and it just did that to me.
I quit the assignments in my field at the peak of my career, with a view to doing something that is socially relevant and focussed on the education of the poor. Considering that the kids belonging to these strata invariably go to State run schools, I decided to concentrate on them - to start with at the primary level. A look at the voluntary sector at this time showed that, except for a couple of honorable exceptions, most efforts tended to focus on a few schools which were in their area of influence - the number depending on the extent of available funding. None of them were interested in the systemic issues involved or the sustainability of such ventures over a period of time; most also adopted a top down approach built around the personal preferences of the Founders. One other aspect bothered me : why is it that the conditions continue to be so poor in spite of the 100 plus ventures in Bangalore City alone? Surely it cannot be for want of effort or expertise as most of them involved with these are very dedicated and competent persons committed to a cause. It appeared that there was a need for some one to take a fresh look at the scenario and come up with a few out 'of the box' solutions.

It is this thinking that gave birth to Sikshana.

2.2 The Entry into Schools
Looking back, the year 2001 appears to belong to a different age; information available on almost any issue was pretty scarce. I knew I had to adopt a school to start but I did not know what needs to be done for me to 'enter' a school. Today it appears laughable even to me but it is fact that I went around for almost a year knocking on all doors - real and imaginary- without any success.
Finally, as it always dawns on people pretty late, I adopted the direct and the most obvious route- go to a nearby school and ask them. The first school I approached was the one in Uttarahalli. The staff here were very helpful ; they not only briefed me about the entire process but also gave me a good insight into the workings of a higher primary school. Unfortunately, the school appeared too big for me at this stage with nearly 400 kids; the funding coming solely from my personal resources required that I look at a smaller school with 100-150 children. Very reluctantly and with good grace, the teachers directed me to a nearby school at - which was where Sikshana was ultimately born.
By this time , thanks to the teachers at Utarahalli , I knew that all I had to do to adopt a school was to approach the nearest Block Education Office and make a request. It took less than half an hour to drive down to this office. Ignoring all the beuracratic niceties, I barged into the crowded office of the Mr T , BEO, unannounced and told him of my intentions. The reaction exceeded my most optimistic expectations; he cleared his office of all the other visitors ,offered me a seat- and a cup of coffee- and patiently explained to me the salient features of the scheme for school adoption under the Department. Once I confirmed to him about my decision to go ahead, he was delighted and immediately asked for the necessary documentation to be prepared; in the process he persuaded me to take up two other lower primary schools , ironically taking the total number beyond 400 ! The entire process took less then an hour, with the BEO bearing the expenses of documentation out of his pocket much against my insistence. His reaction still rings in my memory: " you have come forward to do so much with your funds for our schools; if I cant do even this what is the use of my being here?" I got a glimpse of the other side of the much reviled system , offering me lots of hope for the future and convincing me that the step I had taken is the right one. Another interesting bit of information: it was 230PM when I left the school and by 5PM , it was all over!
The official document signed enabled Sikshana to do any of the 20 things that were listed, which was almost everything that we would ever want to. The schools were in Arehalli, Chikkakallasandra and Gowdenpalya- all within walking distance from where I lived.
It was 23rd Nov 2001 and I was the proud ' friend , guide and philosopher' for three schools with 500 kids; it was really an exhilarating feeling!

2.3. First lesson from Arehalli
I was in the school at Arehalli promptly the next morning. Mr Prahlad, the HM of the school came in a bit late and to his surprise found a visitor waiting in his 'office' , which was essentially a partitioned area of the 7th grade class room. He was even more surprised to hear I have adopted his school and I am raring to get started on the job. He did not however look like being impressed a lot by my approach, the reason for which I found a lot later. At this point, I should have appeared the more nervous of the two.

I told him of my interest to help the school to improve itself, provided of course the school really wants it. Looking at me and the car in which I came, Prahlad should have come to the conclusion: here is a guy who has money and wants to give it to the school, so why not tap for the limit? He came to the point rather bluntly: how much money does your Trust have to spare for us? I was prepared for this and told him that we have as much as is required to improve the learning outcome in the school. That floored him since this probably was the first time in his life when he heard money and learning levels being linked together. There was some verbal sparring at this time ; then I came to the point for which I had gone prepared.
By this time the other teachers all joined in , seeing something interesting is going on in the HM's room. The exchange thereafter went more or less like this:
Me: How would you rate your school?
Staff: very good , better than others
Me: How do you say this ?
Staff: Our pass percentage is very good in the open examinations for 7th
Me: How much would that be?
Staff: Last year we got 70% , this year too we will get it. We have 17 students in the class and we are confident that 13 of them will pass.
Me: In that case let us take a common pledge to make the lagging four also to pass. That will give us a 100% result which is uncommon among Government schools.
There was veritably an uproar at this stage. These kids can never be made to pass because:
They have been lagging for the last six years
Their parents are illiterate
None from their communities have ever gone beyond 7th
They are just dumb- cannot even read or write Kannada; with just four months to go, it is impossible to make up for all the lost time
I told them that is where we come in; we will provide whatever resources are needed to make them pass but they do not have the option for shooting at a goal less than that. This led to a stalemate that lasted a full week; every day I used to go to the school with the same message and I was getting the same response. Finally, the school blinked; they gave a list of items they needed - teaching aids, workbooks, paper and a few more. I gave them enough money to buy all these on the spot; to be fair,they got all of them the same day. I was there in the school again the next day to check whether they needed anything more. Prahlad asked me for time ,saying they needed a week to discuss among themselves and come to a decision.

I gave them a break, during which I used to go to the school and talk to the kids but not engage the teachers in any manner. Prahlad came to me sheepishly before the deadline and told me that they need my help and guidance to decide on what else is needed to produce the desired result. We had the first meaningful interaction at last in which all the teachers participate. They agreed that with whatever they had, they could have achieved better results if only they had set their sights on such a target; and that the four lagging kids had no reason to fail. The only shortfall they could come up with was that they were short of teachers; they could have managed with one more but with the limited time available, they would need two. I gave them enough funds to recruit locally two teachers and that sealed my end of the bargain.

What followed was really amazing. The teachers put in a lot of effort, working late in the evenings and holidays, focussing on each of the identified 'weak' kids. Come March, the teachers accompanied the kids to the Examination Center and briefed them right unto their entrance into the hall. Mark you, these were the same persons who were denigrated as ' 10 to 4 workers' who would demand overtime wages beyond this. It did not surprise me that when the results came in May every one of the kids has passed, the school scoring a perfect 100. True to form, they invited me to come and distribute the certificates to the students; and in an impromptu function, praised me to the skies - reflecting the all pervasive feudal mindset. I told them bluntly that the credit goes to every one of the teachers in the school, just as the blame would have come to them if they had not succeeded; they should learn to shoulder the responsibilities entrusted to them and not pass the buck on to others. I got the impression that the message finally went home.

2.4. A Hard Lesson from the Kids
As is the case with most ' well intentioned reformers' , I too wanted my school to appear the best to anyone who cares to take a look. I made some provision for expenses for making the environment in the class room less shabby and if possible, a bit more aesthetically acceptable. A few low cost interventions were tried out; these include patching up chipped walls and floor, touching up wall paint, hanging attractive posters and a few well placed pots with artificial flowers. A few hundred rupees were enough in each school and the rooms did appear more attractive even to me. Mind you , the leads in all this were taken by the teachers who did a commendable job on their own.
When it came to the kids, I invariably found them to be shabby especially in their attire - and this after a few futile attempts to correct them. I wanted to take this problem head- on. As I used to do often, I called a few kids together and sat down with them for a chat session. I told them I had always found them to be responsive to whatever I had asked of them but in this one case of personal cleanliness I am not finding the same degree of acceptance even after repeated reminders. I asked them bluntly whether they would go to a temple in such a condition- unwashed and poorly dressed; and if not , how is it that they come to school in such a state. The kids were all looking at each other but none would come forward with a response. It took quite a bit if prodding before one of them took up enough courage to tell what they face everyday, that too coming in bits.
The area in which they live - which incidentally is typical of most parts of Bangalore City- gets water supply only once in three days and for the limited quantity that they can get they had to get up at midnight to collect theirs. This has to be used very judiciously till the next supply day comes up. It is not uncommon that even this is interrupted, forcing them to buy water at exorbitant rates. Under these conditions every one in the family understands that the first priority is for cooking and drinking; then comes personal hygiene, followed by bathing and washing of clothes at the end. Everything thing going well, they can hope to do the last twice a week! Worse still, they dont afford and are not allowed to use soap liberally as it is a high cost commodity. And to think, people like me go and lecture to them about hygiene and the need fir cleanliness.. I was really put to shame before them - I the representative of a Society which is unable to provide the basic minimum necessities of life to the poor but yet have the gall to look down on them , and even pontificate!
I decided once for all at that instant that never again will I ever look at things from a high pedestal but try to understand and learn things from the point of view of these kids and the strata of society they represent. This one lesson learnt the hard way from a bunch of Fifth Graders in CKSandra has stood by me till today; I would like this to be the distinguishing characteristic of any and every one who would like to be part of Sikshana.
PS: To press the point, I asked the Commissioner for Public Instruction in one of our meets why the State should not provide soap every alternate year instead if clothes for uniforms; he laughed and asked me whether I am serious. He reminded me that I too at some point of time was in the Government and should know this is impossible. I agree but then that is where the problem lies...

2.5 Straying into Balawadis
This is one of those chapters in the history of Sikshana in which I do not come up with flying colors. Right at start, I realized that the problem with the Lower Primary school in the Public Education System (PES) is that the kid entering the first Grade comes without the benefit of the kindergarten exposure. The equivalents in the Public System , Anganwadis , that were supposed to take care of the needs of kids between the age of 3 and 6 were few at that time and totally inadequate to meet the needs of the communities in which the LP schools were located. To make things worse, these Centers came under a different Ministry; that means a lot in our country where the bureaucracy runs the show in most fields.
One of the leading NGOs - which I would rather not name- had started a parallel system with similar centers in a different name ; they had a large presence in this segment in and around the City. I talked to them and entered into an arrangement whereby Sikshana could manage the Centers falling within our school 'catchment area' . Soon we had 20 Centers in our net and I was delighted to have some degree of control over the input quality for our schools. Our help to start with included provision of a nutritional supplement - fortified milk - and some guidance through our volunteers, who have just started coming in. The women in charge of the Centers were compensated through a centrally funded scheme and the above NGO. I was uncomfortable right from start with the setup since we had no loco standi in it and we were there by sufferance of the other Organization.

Soon the first pin prick came. We wanted to introduce some play material in the Centers since the kids had pretty little to do during their stay; worse still many of the women had started teaching stuff in the traditional manner. Thinking that these Centers were ours, I went ahead with some minor changes in the program. This brought instant reaction from our partner through their field workers that these are not permissible, proving that NGOs can sometimes be as rule bound as the Government. I had a meet with the person in charge - Mr M - trying to explain to him the rationale for our intervention with no effect; nothing can be done in these 20 that were not done in the others under them. More were to come.
I went to the school at GPalya to take a close look at how this system works. This LP school had a strength of about 20 in the First Std of which half appeared to be first timers in a school environment; in fact the teacher in charge told me that the first six months of Std 1 is spent in just trying to keep the kid in the school and not run away! The school had 3 Child Care Centers adjoining it , which I was personally visiting time to time; each had ten or more kids. It struck me that the numbers were not adding up; how is that that in spite of this the LP school gets uninitiated kids in 1st Std , or alternately where are the CC kids going once they reach the age of six. When I started looking at the numbers over a wider area, the real situation emerged. The kids going through these Centers actually go on to private schools as their parents are reasonably well off; the latter use them in lieu of other private day care centers which cost a lot more. They were not catering to the really poor kids who apparently tended to keep away till they reach the age of six. I thought that this is a serious enough situation that warrants some study analysis and correction as the goal was a positive impact on the PES.
I got thoroughly disillusioned when I met Mr M next. He said that he is not interested in studies like that ; he does not care where these kids come from or where they go. His job is to run these Centers and keep increasing their number as he goes along. Of course, that is one way of looking at things - i dont blame him - but certainly it is not mine. We parted ways as friends but unfortunately that ended our short run with the pre-school kids program. I dont know whether in retrospect I did the right thing; maybe I should have stayed on and tried to make it work. I could gave gone up the Organizational structure for a working model ; it looks now that I gave up far too easily. But then 2003 was very different for me.
These days, whenever I give a talk, people ask me whether we should not be doing some thing with preschool kids too under Sikshana. I have always found that to be a very difficult question to respond to.

E S Ramamurthy

To be Continued

Tour of select government schools in Madanpalle, AP : Mixed bag / mixed reaction

2010-08-18T12:25:00.000+05:30

The last 2 days saw Subbu (key member of Sikshana) and I visiting a number of schools that we've adopted in the Madanapalle area of AP. While, for Subbu, this was a follow up meeting, it was a "brand-new" experience for me. Given my lack of local language (Telegu) skills, my role was more of an observer than a real player.

I came back with mixed feelings : Some good / positive outcomes where we (Sikshana) seems to have made a dent and some real worrying points. The worrying points first....

a. In 4 of the 7 schools (particular area), we found a couple of students (typically boys !) being classified as MR ie. euphemism for Mentally Retarded by the local teachers. These were all for class 4 students. While it is certainly not rare to find these in government schools, what was shocking for me was....
   - The ratio of such classification ie > 15% in some of the schools
   - The "casual" manner in which these kids were being discussed in front of the other students. Esp. the usage of words like "duffer" etc.
   - Resignation / acceptance on the part of the teachers that they (the students) were in some way beyond redemption and hence the need to exclude them in counts of any kind for literacy levels.

There is a definite need for some kind of an independent survey and support structure in these schools. Given that the classifications I saw were already at class 4 (typically 8-10 age group), I'm afraid that some of these branding would have already settled into the psyche of the kid in question ?

b. There seems to be growing resignation on the part of the government teacher (maybe as a result of years of non-involvement) that they have NO SAY in the structure of pedagogy / testing process etc. Driving to a distinct lack of ownership. Case in point :the new "benchmark" tests

    - There has been a new introduction of something called the "Benchmark" test for class 4 that seems to have almost ZERO relevance to the field situation. In this test, a class 4 student is "benchmarked" on class 4 syllabus !. The baseline is not even class 3 where I'd see some logic to the process ?
    - The marks / questions and gradation all are not linked to each other ?
    - The teachers, when questioned, state that they've raised this at their internal meetings, but, have not got a remedial message. All are busy either administrating these tests (one more in the series) or justifying the results !

More importantly, there seemed to be a certain level of resignation on the part of teachers to the fact that the government would eventually "privatize" the whole primary education process and hence there was no real incentive to "voice" their opinions ?

There were however, some silver linings. We were thrilled to find a school which had ALL (100% of the students in class 4), capable of reading / writing Telugu fluently.

As Subbu commented : this was a real Independence celebration for the class ie 100% literacy

Perfect Score at Shivanahalli

2010-08-13T21:08:00.008+05:30

Last week, I visited Shivanahalli primary school along with Usha Rao and her friends. Usha and her friends has been visiting all our schools to assess basic literacy and numeracy levels of every student in 4th and 7th standard for a baseline check.

The school is located along the Sathnur Road in Kanakapura. It is a typical village school with the typical litany of problems - small cramped classrooms, indigent and illiterate parents. It has around 57 students in 7th, 11 in 4th and 10 students in 3rd standard. The latter two standards share a single room with free-style seating on the floor. Students from nearly lower primary schools join them in 5th or 6th swelling the numbers in higher classes.

It is common to find about ten to twelve students with poor literacy and numeracy skills in such schools. But the results of the 4th standard assessment blew us away. Every student could read Kannada fluently and write very prettily. They scored perfectly in arithmetic. They not only solved 3-digit divisions easily and quickly but also did a multiply check to verify their answers. They could also read simple English words. They took the tests with great enthusiasm and showed no stress or fear with strangers.

I walked into their class, the students were engaged in Kannada writing exercises. So intense was their concentration that they hardly paid me any attention. As I gingerly picked my way around the kids to record their concentration, they would look up at me and resume their writing exercises! A few students were moving around trying to help others. The teacher stood in one corner relaxed and happy. She has been teaching students for 15 years and gave up high school positions to be with young children - a rare gesture in these parts.

What a sea change in less than two years! The teaching staff are doing a commendable job in reaching out to all the students. Here was Sikshana's vision coming alive in this school. I had Usha do a quick interview with the teacher and captured it on video:

So who really runs Sikshana?

2010-08-07T23:56:00.001+05:30

Three events on three consecutive Saturdays at three blocks of Sikshana has put a wide grin on my face and has gotten me to start blogging again after a long time. Let me first share the three events in the reverse chronological order.

Today (7th Aug) we had the annual Delhi quiz competition across all our rural blocks in Karnataka and I decided to visit our newest and second largest block Hoskote. Each of the 65 schools in this block under Sikshana had their own school level quiz competition for class 6 & 7 and the toppers from all these schools totaling 697 had assembled in Hoskote town for the finals. The format of the quiz is a written exam of 60 questions covering general knowledge, academics, current affairs and for the first time this year five simple questions in English to be answered in English. This exam was scheduled in two schools with a total of 22 rooms allocated for the purpose. I was greeted with a notice board listing the children’s names along with the room allocation. Each room had a sealed packet of question paper along with an invigilator. The kids came in a line and took their seats and soon a bell sounded and the kids got into action. After 1.5hrs the papers were collected back and the kids headed out for a nice lunch before heading back to their schools with their teachers.

A week before this on 31st of July, I was part of the new school inauguration ceremony at Chikballapur. Teachers from 40 schools in Chikballapur district had gathered to mark the expansion of Sikshana in that block. It was a large gathering of about 200 teachers along with the guests from the donor side. The program started exactly at 10:30 as planned and went on till 1pm followed by a nice lunch for all. The whole program went very smoothly with clockwork precision and with active participation from the audience.

A week prior to this on the 24th of July, Kanakapura schools celebrated its annual day program which turned out to be the largest event ever for Sikshana with nearly 900 teachers from 168 schools taking part in the event. Here again the program execution was almost perfect with most people appreciating the way the program was conducted and the hospitality they received.

Now a common point with all the above events is that they all are events involving hundreds of people, meaning the logistics involved to pull off such events successfully needs good planning and a lot of people to execute it. Now with Sikshana yet to hit the 20 employee mark and the need to manage nearly 375 schools in 7 blocks a question that naturally comes to ones mind is how is Sikshana able to conduct such large events in addition to mentoring all the schools.

In Kanakapura with 7 of our staff members acting as facilitators, the whole program right from inviting guests to the event, all pre-event preparation, the conducting of the program and post event work was all handled by a team of teachers from various schools. In Chikballapur with just 2 Sikshana staff members to facilitate the event, the event was again handled by a group of teachers. The teachers were so involved that representatives from the donor company who were there mistook the teachers to be Sikshana staff.

In the case of Hoskote, the Block Education Officer gave us 22 of his staff members (the CRP’s and other office staff) for the event. They took total responsibility for conducting the exams and they did so with all seriousness and purpose. The impact of that attitude could be seen in the children who took the competition as if it was a graduate common entrance test. In an environment where nothing is taken seriously it was heartening to see this in all the folks involved. On the same day same time the Delhi tour quiz was held in Kanakapura, Anekal, Chikballapur and Hubli. This was the largest of the type Sikshana has ever pulled off with nearly 3500 children taking part in the quiz and it probably deserves a separate blog.

So in summary, the reason I am grinning is because I am seeing increasing signs of the teachers and the department taking ownership of Sikshana. All the blocks now have Sikshana Teachers committee who essentially run the Sikshana program in their blocks. They have started to come out with new ideas and suggestions on how to improve the existing programs and more importantly an increasing number of teachers have started to believe in themselves.

The icing on the cake this week was when I took a friend of mine visiting from Austin to a school two days ago. Towards the end of the visit my friend felt a need to do something for that school and asked the headmaster how he can help them. The headmaster started off saying “anything that will improve the learning level of the children ....”. I almost said “what you don’t want to ask for a compound wall?”. As I finish typing this blog I am left wondering if I need to update my resume :)

Light chip update

2010-05-25T14:39:00.006+05:30

Back in March, Sikshana distributed over 80 lanterns to struggling 10th standard students to help them prepare them for their SSLC exams. Their names were proposed by their schools as students needing extra attention in English and Maths. So Sikshana had arranged for special tuition classes for them in Kanakapura on every Sunday. Students travelled as far as 20kms away to attend these classes.

Frequent power cuts was cutting into their evening study time and battery-backed emergency lamps were not affordable for many of them. They used kerosene lamps reluctantly. Sikshana lent them modern solar lanterns this year. The lanterns used a bright white LEDs instead of the common bluish white LED allowing students to read without fatigue.

Now the exams are over and the results have been announced. Out of 84 students, 69 students (82%) earned their certificate and only 15 (18%) did not make the cut. The overall pass rate for Ramanagara district is 67%. The combined intervention of special tuitions and solar lanterns helped the students break the jinx.

A quick poll amongst the students gave a big thumbs up to the lantern. They reported increasing their study time by two to three hours every day. More than half of them would not have studied in their evenings but for the lantern.

Last month, when visiting a school in Anekal, a villager related a story of his visit to his relative's home in Kanakapura. He found his son preparing for his board exams with the help of a solar lantern late into the night, thanks to a "Sikshana Foundation". He was thrilled to learn that the same foundation had also adopted his village school this year.

So here is a golden opportunity for a green NGO to make a point. This year, around 1800 students appeared for SSLC exams from Kanakapura and the number may remain the same next year too. For a one-time seed investment of around Rs. 6 lakhs, about 1200 of them may be provisioned with solar lanterns for their exam preparation. For students, there is no additional monthly expense. Seeding an entire cluster of villages around towns with such lanterns will teach students about renewable sources of energy much more than any curriculum can.

Personal chip usage update

2010-05-25T11:41:00.002+05:30

The second year of personal chip experiment saw the expansion of coverage from around 1000 students to about 6000 students across all 120 higher primary (middle) schools in Kanakapura. Three mentors - Vishwa, Roopa, Asha - stepped up to help out students and guide new mentors in the usage of the chip. The guidelines were reduced to two:

Each student will use the chip on the school's computer one at a time. Others will not crowd around or do "back seat" driving.
Students will work on their own personal ideas and not blindly copy projects from books or others.

The first guideline was to break away from the practice of doing projects in groups where some students tend to dominate over others. Students had to operate a computer independently with a specific goal of authoring a project. From previous year's experience, we knew that such usage boosts their levels of confidence and motivation.

The second guildeline was put in place to encourage individual expression. Not that curricular exercises were banned. They could be used to practice computing skills, but such projects were not counted. Our appeal "If you don't work on your own ideas, who else will?" went down well with students.

The guidelines appear simple but were tough to follow in newer schools. For the first few weeks, teachers had a tough time holding back students from crowding around the notebook computer and seizing keyboard and mouse. They would lock it up fearing damage. The curiosity factor was very high and students were afraid that they may not get a chance later. Mentors rushed from school to school to help teachers and assured everyone of their chance at the keyboard. After a couple of months, it subsided and students settled down to taking turns in using the computer for their projects.

There were also instances where the computer was kept locked in a cupboard and not issued to students for months at end or reloaded with unlicensed software and games. We had to halt our experiment and pull back the chips and computers for the whole academic year. It was a hard decision because the penalty impacted all the students but some discipline had to be enforced in field operations. Of the 120 schools, 10 schools (8%) could not participate fully because their computer was withdrawn, lost, locked or under repair so the chips in these schools remained unused.

In all 5453 students were given memory chip. Of these, 501 (9%) are yet to file a project on their chip. 4188 (77%) authored between one to five projects, 444 (8%) students created five to ten projects. 320 (6%) completed more than 10 projects. 10 schools had students who created more than 20 projects. Schools in Arekattadoddi, P. Rampura and Sasalapura stood out from the rest in terms of student output.

Last year, only Kadushivanahalli school had allowed its students to take home the computer. This year, this practice spread to over 15 schools. Teachers, in these schools, reported increased levels of motivation and performance amongst their students. New schools near Halasuru arranged their own mini-conference to showcase their students' projects and learn from each other.

For Sikshana, the personal chip and computer are just catalysts. Inspite of decreasing costs, computers and personal chips are not (yet!) affordable for wide scale deployment in rural areas. They make sense only if they can impact the performance of marginal students in ways that cannot be done through other affordable means.

In Aralalu, a teacher related the case of a boy who had lost all interest in studies in 5th standard and played truant often. He hesitated to even touch the computer. One day, he took the notebook computer to a couple of his girl classmaters and requested them to teach him how to use his chip on it. From someone who did not even know the English alphabets, he quickly became adept at using the keyboard and creating projects. Now, he attends school regularly, seeks out books from the library and tries to use pictures as a guide to learn new words. He has made his teacher proud.

Sasalapura HM reported three students whose grades in English and Kannada jumped from B+ to A+ after a few months of working on projects. He expressed that he would not have believed the transformation if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. A few of its alumni, who now attend high school, take classes on LaTeX for others during evenings and weekends.

Students who have using the memory chip for two years now have moved beyond graphics and text onto scripting and animation. Recently, I had to field a question from a school about "how to simluate a player kicking a football".

There are just early results from the experiment. This year is the first year of extending coverage to all higher primary schools. We need more time to see if the initial enthusiasm translates to sustained impact in the long term.