The Annual Status of Education Report (rural) for 2013 serves as a reminder of the persistent disconnect between action and outcomes in basic education in India. Consistent with previous reports, the 2013 survey highlights that school inputs are improving, steadily reducing the shortfalls with respect to Right to Education norms. But learning outcomes remain stuck at a dismally low level. Only 41 per cent of children in government schools could read a Class II text in 2013, about the same as 2012, but down from 50 per cent in 2009. Learning outcomes in private schools are slightly better (albeit still dismal) and as government school performance has deteriorated, the gap in learning levels between private and public school attendees is widening.
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The 12th Five Year Plan adopted in December 2012 and recent policy documents of the ministry of human resource development recognise the outcomes problem and explicitly articulate learning improvements as the stated goal for education policy.

Now, as the goal has shifted and state governments are gearing for action, the country faces the even bigger challenge of how to build a service delivery system that genuinely seeks to improve outcomes, responding to problems as they exist today.

Much of the current debate has focused on the vexed question of “what works”. There is now a carefully developed body of evidence, ranging from curriculum reform that shifts pedagogical strategies away from the current age-grade matrix to one aligned with children’s learning capability, to performance-based pay for teachers. But while the evidence offers an array of specific policies, the real challenge, as Pratham’s Rukmini Banerji has argued, lies in sustaining and scaling them up and ensuring they are embedded in the day-to-day functioning of the local bureaucracy. This requires us to engage with questions of bureaucratic behaviour across the delivery chain — from the state level to the frontline bureaucracy and teachers. It involves wrestling not just with technical issues of curricula and pedagogy, but also with questions of local politics and civil society behaviour.

The good news is that there is much to be learnt from India itself. Take two cases where local bureaucracies have behaved differently. First, take Himachal Pradesh, which has had better education performance for some time (though still way below international norms). Research by Harvard professor Akshay Mangla on the behaviour of Himachal’s education bureaucrats — in comparison with those of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh — finds a striking difference. In Himachal, the bureaucratic culture is embedded in norms that encourage problem-solving. Remarkably for India, Mangla found that senior Himachal bureaucrats have willingly worked with frontline education bureaucrats and teachers, reinterpreting policies to make them locally relevant and forming alliances with civil society groups and politicians to get the job done.
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Interestingly, Himachal is one of the few states in India to seek community inputs in plans. Uttarakhand and UP stand in sharp contrast to Himachal, where bureaucrats follow traditional hierarchies and stick to guidelines in ways that have constrained them from adopting appropriate strategies to address education challenges.

Himachal’s bureaucratic norms are long-term products of its political formation and social history. But they show that India’s bureaucracies can operate with very different professional norms, which yield better results. And we believe this is a more constructive aspiration than the current emphasis on holding bureaucrats to account through varieties of punitive action.

This takes us to our second case. Bihar is hardly known as a domain of “deliberative bureaucracy”. But a different kind of exploration was undertaken last year, when a district magistrate (DM) sought solutions to the learning challenge. The DM experimented with alternative approaches through a partnership with an NGO. The key to the experiment was putting the much maligned frontline bureaucrats (cluster coordinators in charge of 10-15 schools), at the centre of the action. This cadre was trained and empowered to adopt an alternative pedagogical strategy — for an hour and a half a day, to teach children by their learning level rather than according to their grade. What began as an experiment resulted in a significant shift in bureaucratic behaviour. Instead of blaming schools, teachers and the system, in this intervention, the district administration catalysed the team to lead from the front. Over time, the coordinators gained confidence to take charge and scale up these alternative teaching strategies in their schools. The results are impressive. At the start of the intervention, 40 per cent of students in Class III, IV and V had basic reading skills. Six months later, this improved to 60 per cent.

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Building an outcomes-focused delivery system requires substantial shifts in the everyday behaviour of our bureaucracy. These shifts can be enabled through a combination of political pressure and civil society demand. But for this to happen, education outcomes must become genuinely salient in public and political debate.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-new-lesson-from-school/99/

India’s leading stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange, conducts many initiatives in different parts of the country to empower the youth and professionals with financial education so that they can take good financial decisions.

One such initiative is being carried out in 200 schools across 15 cities. This financial education drive in schools is addressed at students of classes 8 and 9, through which they are familiarised with basic concepts of finance like needs and wants, inflation, interest rate, value of money etc.

This is the second year that this initiative is being conducted. This year, more than 40,000 students is being covered in cities like Ahmedabad, Indore, Raipur, Dehradun, Lucknow, Nagpur, apart from some metros and tier II and tier III cities.

The initiative includes multiple programmes to sensitise students on the basics of finance as an essential life skill.

The workshop for students focuses on the concepts of financial planning, called the “The Three Jars: Spend, Save and Grow.”

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As a part of this initiative, NSE also conducts special two-hour movie screenings for the students on inspiring global business leaders like Bill Gates to motivate young peopleto follow their dreams. This is followed by a project, in which students choose a career option of their choice and plan running a simulated business, in which they will have to work out logistics like where will they get the finance, capital and resources from, where will they get labour from etc. This will help in training children to think about how businesses are run, and the kind of challenges that are faced in the course of running a business.

The next workshop called Junior Economist focuses on economics where students are taught about trade, demand- supply and are given a brief on banking.

NSE has also introduced a website for educating India’s young on financial basics, called www.nsefunancialquest.com. This interactive website is designed in such a way that it reaches out to educate a large number of students and explains the basics of finance to them at an early stage.

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/education/20140125286193.htm

Standards of education in rural India have declined almost every year since 2009 despite huge government investments, one of the organizers of a major new study said on Thursday.

The annual survey by Indian education research group Pratham showed that the proportion of children aged about 10 who are able to perform a basic reading task dropped from 52.8 per cent in 2009 to 47 per cent in 2013.

A Right to Education Act passed in 2009 guarantees state schooling for children from six to 14 years of age and enrolment levels reached 96 per cent in this age category in 2013, little changed from 2012, the study said.

“This decade has been good for schooling, for improving infrastructure and development. But learning for all is only just beginning and it really needs to pick up momentum,” Banerji told AFP.

The survey showed 52.8 per cent of children in standard five (children aged about 10) across government and private schools were able to read a text from standard two (children aged about six) in 2009.

This fell to 47 percent in 2013, according to the report released on Wednesday.

In maths, 33.2 per cent of children in standard three in government schools (children aged about eight) were able to solve a simple two-digit subtraction problem in 2010. This fell to 18.9 per cent in 2013.

The drop was smaller in private schools, with 47.8 per cent of children able to solve the same problem in 2010, compared to 44.6 percent in 2013.

“The guarantee of education is meaningless without satisfactory learning. There are serious implications for India’s equity and growth if basic learning outcomes do not improve soon,” the report.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2014-01-16/news/46263579_1_private-schools-rukmini-banerji-education-act