Initiatives in Education

One of the most exciting organizations working in the area of Education in India is the Ahmedabad based Educational Initiatives (EI).

I have had the pleasure to meeting and discussing education with two of its three founders Sridhar Rajagopalan and Sudhir Ghodke who (along with Venkat Krishan) left MNC jobs to work in the area of Education. before EI three co-founded, with Sunil Handa, entrepreneur and popular speaker on management and education, the Eklavya School in Ahmedabad. This school set in 22 acres in the outskirts of Ahmedabad is interesting in many ways: it is one of the few schools that has fields and open spaces commensurate with the number of children being schooled, makes effective use of the research thrown up by Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory and has a good Teacher Education programme on its premises.

Sridhar and Sudhir are both bright and passionate about Education. Its difficult not to come away inspired from a conversation with them.

Their organization, Educational Initiatives, runs India’s leading standardized testing service, ASSET. I have seen several standardized tests; the other leading test provider in India is Macmillan (in association with the University of NSW) but the ASSET rest is remarkably superior. It is authentic – contextualized to the lives of Indian students, clear in its questioning and responses expected, inexpensive, and throws up fantastic action-oriented data for teachers and administrators.

In the past few years, EI has quietly been doing a host of other good work. There is work with the government of Andhra Pradhesh and Harvard Universtiy, Teacher Training, School Camps and a new offering called Mindspark, an after-school prgramme that teaches kids Math and Science. What I like is that the team seems to be getting a balance correct- doing great work on its flagship offering (ASSET), doing good and meaningful research and still capitalizing on opportunities like the After-School space through programmes like Mindspark.

I caught up with Sudhir Ghodke and Sridhar Rajagopalan for a candid chat.

EI now spans a gamut of spaces: teacher development, curriculum development, Science & Math Training through franchisees, Test Administration and of-course ASSET. What would you say is your core competency and going forward, what would your company like to be known as? In terms of 'product mix' how different in would EI be 5 years from now?

Sudhir Ghodke (SG): : EI's core competency is understanding learning in the context of a school and using assessment as a tool for improving learning. EI would like to be recognised as an organisation that contributed significantly in improving the quality of school education in "school-going" children in India. In 5 years EI should consolidate its expertise in Assessment and use it leadership position to impact decisions that eventually impact learning in schools. In terms of its product mix it would aim to bring ASSET and Assessment at the center of all its activities and work on other spaces by leveraging the insights received from Assessments.

Sridhar Ragagopalan (SRR): It is important to realize that EI’s various gamuts are built around the common theme of improving student learning. So while it is true that we do teacher development, the way it is done and the types of teacher development are focused towards those aspects that will help students learn better. A second common criterion is the clarity that we do not want to simply be a me-too player, rather we want to solve real problems innovatively and share those solutions with the larger system. We hope that these would continue to be the core theme of EI’s work always.

How many "unique children" (i.e. counting multiple papers per child as one) take the ASSET every year? I believe you do pro-bono work with an equal number of government schoolchildren. Is that corrrect?

SG: Around 125,000 children will take ASSET this year (2006). This is being done across 650 schools in India, Middle East and Nepal. The schools are from different boards - CBSE, ICSE, State and other International Boards too. The fundamental value proposition is a clear benchmark of student learning with respect to concepts underlying all the above curricula. We also are involved in large scale assessment studies as the primary agency responsible for design and implementation of the testing tools. This is done through various agencies like the World Bank, Azim Premji Foundation, Naandi Foundation and Unicef to name a few.

SRR: The costs of doing the work with government kids is almost the same as with the private kids - what is not spent in marketing is spent in access, translations, specialized research and analysis (since these papers are not multiple-choice). So the work is not pro-bono, but supported by different types of organisations as mentioned above.

You are at a vantage point for assessing learning outcome across the country through data from ASSET. Give us a sense of some of the regional differences you found? Are you planning to relase a Nation-wide, ASER type report based on your findings?

SG: Currently the population sizes in ASSET are not representative enough to bring out regional or board wise differences. But we did conduct a Metro-Study of Learning levels in leading schools across the country. The data emerging from this study is very interesting. It will be published shortly in a leading publication.

SRR: Yes, we will gradually start using both our reach and our data to push for positive change. It will be through a combination of scientific studies and surveys, possibly services for parents as well as information that will be shared freely through the website.

Math is traditionally seen as a bugbear with both a loss of interest and loss of understanding as a student moves froma lower grade to a higher grade. What does your reserach throw up on this? What do you prescribe as solutions?

SG: Math is traditionally taught as an subject focussing primarily of "procedural fluency" with less emphasis given on the other strands of Maths such as conceptual understanding and adaptive reasoning. As the content strands are clearly linked to each other a weakness in a strand like say "Number Sense" would make it difficult for a student to grasp the essense of arithmetic operations, fractions, decimals at a later stage creating a phobia for the subject as a whole. Early identification of some skills that are problem areas and addressing them early on is one of the ways that can prevent the student from abhoring the whole subject. Other suggestions are to encourage and value different solution paths. Linking learning with real world experiences also is useful.

SRR: Yes. In two words - bad teaching. Bad teaching is culturally built into us and *very* (emphasis of the interviewee) difficult to change. Yet some countries - China, to some extent - have done this. It will not be an easy task and it will require a concerted effort, but the cost of not doing it will be more. The NCERT and many educational thinkers realize this and we think some steps are being taken in the current direction. The potential of organisations like EI and others to help in this process is also very high.

I believe that English, unfortunately, is tied to social mobility in this country. How far do you think we are from Universal Access & Learning in English based on your findings. ASER says that almost 60% of children between 7-14 can’t read at Grade 2 difficulty. Your comment?

SRR: The question is mixing 2 aspects - English and language learning. ASER does not (correctly and fortunately) deal with the issue of English - it is referring to learning in the mother tongue. That children are not learning properly even in their mother tongue is purely a reflection on poor quality schooling.

The question of English is more disturbing. All research, unequivocally shows that:

1. Early learning should be in the language the child is most familiar with - mostly the mother tongue, sometimes the state language, in rare cases, if this language is English, only then English-medium education is okay at the primary level.

2. Multilingualism is the way to go in tomorrow’s world. Multilingualism is positively correlated to cognitive learning and scholastic achievement.

While our policy documents reflect this, few seem to seriously believe this. Just because most schools opening up are English medium, just because virtually everybody chooses to go to an English-medium school, it is assumed that the theory must be in some way, incorrect, and English medium is the right thing to do. Our research indicates clearly that students in top English schools are learning poorly and we believe that one reason could be in our universal acceptance of English as the learning medium even in the primary classes.

We believe this has to and will change, though this is only one part of the problem.

SG: We have recently done a project for a regional language school which wanted to explore the possibility of converting to an English medium school. Preliminary findings show that children taught at the early levels (pre primary and primary) in their mother tongue would be more equipped to acquire English rather than their counterparts who are exposed to English as the primary medium of instruction right from the beginning. This is in context of homes that are primarily regional language focussed - the first and second language is NOT English.

We have seen that the scores for skills such as grammar are higher than skills of comprehension and analysis. Again reinforcing the fact that memorisation is the primary mode of learning even in language learning.

Without naming the big boys: Doon, Sanawar, Mayo, Dhirubhai Ambani, Cathedral, DPS RKP- do you see achievement levels in these school substantially higher than in other schools? I have a hunch that they outperform the national average on English and take a beating on the other subjects. Would this be correct?

SRR: Our sense is that some big name schools outperform the national average in all subjects. Some do it only in some subjects and a few don’t even fare that well. Schools that do the right things turn in great performances (just like people and companies, one may add) In some cases, the reputation outlives the actual quality being produced. I do not think there is a pattern that big name schools outperform in English but not, say, Maths-Science. We have a little more specific data on this, but will not be able to share it, for obvious reasons.

SG: The big name schools as compared to the other schools does not show a clear pattern today because some of the big name schools do not make it compulsory for their students to participate in ASSET. The data therefore for a school with its "top" students might be compared to another school with "all" its students. If we compare the data for statistically significant schools as the population the pattern is not completely clear that all classes of leading schools are performing better than national average. The variation across subjects does not show that these schools are doing "better" in English but they would be doing well in areas which they claim expertise - like cracking questions which test rote memory!!

Your reports are action-oriented. Do you see many schools using this data constructively, as evinced maybe from a subsequent year's performance?

SG: As on date 20 - 30% of schools use the data for focussing on specific areas emerging as concern areas from the analysis. We are aiming to increase this number by proactively engaging with more schools and helping the teacher take the analysis right down to the classroom level and use it.

SRR: Also we probably need more time (more years) to be able to clearly see such patterns if they exist. ASSET is actually a great tool to get teachers and school leaders to start thinking about things in a different way - that is its greatest value.

What are the differences in achievement levels across English and Math between Private, Aided, Government Schools?

SRR: The data is too little to say for sure but our hunch is something like this:

	Mechanical Learning	Learning with understanding
Private	7/10	4/10
Aided	6/10	3/10
Government	2/10	1/10

Note that the good or bad scores themselves are as much due to the parental and family background as what the school does. If we transferred all the teachers of a private school to a rural school and they were somehow equipped with all the language skills, their performance will drop much closer to the current government school levels. So the little good learning that is happening is due to some concerned, enlightened principals and many more concerned, enlightened parents. Many, many (maybe 80%) of teachers and parents - we estimate - feel, ‘rote learning is fine’ and that is the crux of the problem.

SG: Today the test items that we run through these three sets of populations are different - primarily because they are indexed on the level of difficulty of the average student in each of the three groups. Therefore an absolute comparison is not possible. We wish ASSET were taken by all students in the country - today it is primarily the Private schools that take ASSET. In a research study we did compare the performance of Private Urban Schools with Government and Aided Rural schools. The data was quite amazing with children on rural schools scoring higher than students of private urban schools on some items (where they had a better contextual familiarity).

What are the 3 top changes you'd like to see the the government making. Are you in favour of vouchers?

SRR: Frankly, much more soft than hard measures are needed from the government - except for the one hard measure - more funds! The soft measures are:

1. Public education - a much more active effort to explain to parents and teachers why education, what type of education, why, for example, mother tongue education is good; why tests - in a limited way - are good, etc. etc.

2. The second is greater commitment to high quality research. Today government makes policies - whether it is a decision to start a chain of Navodaya Vidyalayas or to reserve seats in higher education - without systematic (time-bound) research. This culture must change and can easilty be changed. We believe that NCERT was at one time a high quality organization, but will have to work hard to reclaim that title today.

3. Transparency in many forms. For example, we would recommend a national assessment test and the results to be freely available with only *student* (not school) personal identifiers removed - on the net in multiple languages. The text of textbooks will be available on the net and experts and teachers can both comment and edit them. We see the underlying process here as one of bringing in more transparency driven by the belief that when the problem is clearly understood and recognized, more minds will work (sometimes partly independently) to solve them.

SG: 1. Increasing accountability of teachers and schools - output based incentives (we are running a study which is researching if this works - currently underway in AP)

2. Having higher levels of transparency in the use of funds allocated for Education - and tracking the return on investment through regular studies which are published in the public domain - something akin to the RTI.

3. Reforming Board Exams - to reduce the component of rote and rote related skills in the curriculum and increasing understanding and application oriented skills.

Do you have a pet project in Education (even one you may not have started) that really gets you excited? Who are the few people (in Government or Private institutions) who are doing good work in Education?

SRR: One is to digitize regional language textbooks. Another is to develop scientifically-developed reading and writing tests in regional languages. A third is a digital, assessment self-learning programme, there are many.

SG: Some organisations who are doing good work are (in no particular order) HBCSE (Homi Bhabha Center, Mumbai), Prof Arvind Gupta, Pune, Azim Premji Foundation, Eklavya Bhopal, Rohit Dhankar - Digantar, Prof Jose Paul, Delhi, iDiscoveri, Delhi and many others

Tell me more about the motivation to start yet another After-school programme. Cashing in on the boom? :)

SG: Not really - aiming to get a clearer understanding of the teaching - learning process which fundamentally focusses on concept clarification and internalisation as a goal. The program is our own proof of concept that it is possible to really improve learning through a structured approach delivered through high quality people and a well designed curriculum. The objective is to remove the obstacles that decelerate the progress of a formal schooling system and systematically identify and support those systems that foster self learning and enquiry.

SRR: Yes. Just our way of saying - ‘we’re sure things can be taught better to ensure better learning - okay we’ll try and demonstrate what we mean.”

Sudhir, Shridhar and I would love to hear from you! Leave a comment or send me an e-mail and we'll get them to respond. Next week we have a talk with two leading career consultants: Usha Albuquerque and Dr. Amrita Dass who answer questions on a range of macro issues regarding manpower quality in India.