18 January, 2010

In this tussle between private and government schools, we overlook the most devastating truth: That our children, irrespective of school, are simply not learning

Education Outlook | Nachiket Mor and Vidhya Muthuram

The epitaph for government schools is busily being written, even if they aren’t quite dead yet. Did you know, for instance, that they outperform their private counterparts in reading and arithmetic across a number of states? If you didn’t, neither do the parents who spend a fortune (over 30% of their income) to send their children to the neighbourhood St Mary’s English-Medium Academy, where the child is made to recite “Come back Peter, come back Paul” just before she goes home, the parents thus lulled into the false belief that their child is learning English.

In this tussle between private and government schools, we overlook the most devastating truth: That our children, irrespective of school, are simply not learning. Fewer than half of the fifh-graders who wrote an exam designed for the second grade got more than 30% of the questions right.

The great debate in education should not revolve, therefore, around scrapping the Class X board exams, as recently proposed by the human resource development minister Kapil Sibal; that pertains, in any case, only to a small percentage of Indian school students. Instead, the debate should wrestle with appropriate methods to test the students who leave our schools without learning how to read or write. Without such testing, there is little way of knowing what is going awry in Indian schools.

Why do these students get their fundamentals wrong? A key reason is that many households do not know the school quality that is on offer. We expect parents to pick the best schools for their child, but in reality, the school-level information and outcome measures to support an informed choice are not available. There is more information available, in fact, to those who are choosing a new television or cell phone than those choosing a school.

Also, unlike urban educated, middle-class parents; our rural counterparts, many of whom are not literate; are unable to gauge if their child has learnt anything at all and are unaware that better education is indeed possible. Our politicians, for their part, cannot see their efforts to improve schools translating into votes; they cannot claim credit and be rewarded for any attention that they pay to this issue, unlike say large-scale loan waivers or other benefits distribution programmes.

How do we address this then? In our view, as in the case of any other service, if something does not get measured, it does not get done. We acknowledge this when we run complex train systems across the country or when we provide healthcare services, but for some reason, when it comes to education, we run into a blind spot. We need good information systems to manage our schools, and this is impossible to achieve without proper measurement.

As a first step, our students need to be tested annually on nationally administered standardized exams. These exams, unlike the one currently being discussed by the ministry of human resource development, are meant to assess those students in the left-tail of the distribution—those struggling to read and write. We should begin by ensuring minimum proficiency in basic skills for every child.

These exams must start early (say Class III) and cover three or four classes, so that they periodically assess a child’s learning. They should test basic mathematics and language, and at a level that is two to three grades below the relevant grade that students are in. They should be used to evaluate not children or teachers but individual schools, blocks and districts. High-performing districts should be able to distinguish themselves easily, and politicians associated with low-performing districts should feel the pressure to identify and correct problems. They should also be allowed to take credit in front of their electorate if a similar exam next year reveals an improvement in performance as a result of their interventions.

Information alone may not be enough to improve our schools, but data on which schools are failing to educate our children is necessary for parents to demand more effective options and for our politicians to respond to them. We need to shift the discourse from marks-versus-grades (a question for statisticians to resolve, not educationists) and optional board exams to the quality of the exams being used to test our children. Can we design more objective tests of learning than the ones currently used? Organizations such as Educational Initiatives in Ahmedabad are showing that this is indeed possible. Such well-designed exams can truly enhance the equity in our schooling system.

Nachiket Mor and Vidhya Muthuram are with the ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth.

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Times Of India Bangalore; Date: Jan 14, 2010; Section: Times City; Page: 9

To provide students with more learning opportunities, the Educational Initiative tested teachers’ question-making capabilities. Winners of the third Question Making Competition (QMC) were felicitated on Wednesday. Of the 3,700 teachers who participated in the nation-wide competition, 30 were awarded. Educational Initiative focuses on assessment and learningoutcome measurement in school education. The QMC aims to create a platform where teachers’ innovation can be shared and recognized. A workshop on questionmaking skills was held by ASSET; it was attended by teachers and principals of schools in and around Bangalore.“This concept has proved to be quite effective. Framing an intelligent question on the part of teachers becomes important as it alerts children and makes them attentive,” said one of the winners, Gowri Mirlay Achanta of St Joseph’s Boys’ High School. The organizers felt questions should be effective in fostering better learning among children, and not be used only for evaluation. “A good question challenges and stimulates the child to think deeper. If framed correctly, it can help the teacher understand the thought process of a student while solving the problem,” said Sridhar Rajagopalan, managing director, Educational Initiative.

WHO KNOWS THE ANSWER? Teachers participate in a workshop on question-making skills in Bangalore on Wednesday

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Times Of India, 5 January, 2010, Kolkata

KOLKATA: Watching Aamir Khan come up with a simplistic definition of a machine and getting thrown out of class for not following the textbook description in 3 Idiots turned Sridhar Rajgopalan nostalgic. The former IITian could identify with Rancho — the character played by Aamir in the film — when he sought to argue with his teacher that even a trouser zip was a machine and an example like that could help explain things better than tongue-twisting bookish terminology “There is a big lesson that engineering institutions across the country need to learn from the film. Teaching in technical colleges has turned mechanical and students memorize lessons rather than learn them,” said Rajgopalan, who has designed modules for schoolchildren that discourage rote learning. The engineering fraternity in Kolkata accepts that ‘aal izz not well’ with them and that it is time to break the mould.

Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) vice-chancellor Ajoy Ray believes there is a lot of substance in the message that the film seeks to deliver. “We need to change our teaching methodology and evaluation process. Students should enjoy attending classes and learning lessons. They shouldn’t just be driven towards scoring good marks in semester exams,” said Ray.

Thousands of engineering students switch to management or change streams since they don’t have the aptitude to excel in hard-core engineering, say teachers. “This is probably more true for Kolkata than many other cities. Every year, I come across scores of students who would have excelled in basic sciences or in some completely different stream. But they are forced by parental and peer pressure to take up engineering and struggle to complete the course,” added Ray. He cited the example of one of his former students, an IIT graduate, who couldn’t follow his heart and pursue mathematics.

Rote learning is a major reason why colleges are churning out money-spinning professionals rather than innovative thinkers, say teachers. Even the IITs are guilty of driving students towards plum jobs, they admit. “Over the last decade, the focus has shifted from excellence in studies to landing a job with a five-figure salary. The system is geared towards that and this has somewhat undermined the importance of learning. As a result, aptitude has become secondary and everyone has joined the rat race,” said R V Rajakumar, professor, IIT-Kharagpur.

3 Idiots urges students to follow their heart and do what they love doing. “This may sound idealistic but nothing could be more true. An engineering degree might land you a job but won’t ensure success. Only with passion can you inspire students to think like Rancho and design innovative tools like he did for his students in the film. From the teaching point of view, projects and exercises need to be more realistic and interesting to encourage free thinking,” said Rajgopalan.

But nothing could substitute strong infrastructure and a sound teaching system. “You cannot overhaul a system that has been successful. But we need to look beyond the conventional and change with the times,” said Partha Pratim Biswas, professor, Jadavpur University.

Besu has realized the importance of innovative teaching and introduced discussion sessions that review the lessons taught in the course of a week. “We also enact dramas over engineering problems that help to hold students’ interest and teaches them to apply what they have learnt,” said Ray.

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July 8, 2008
Entrepreneurs Ghodke and Rajagopalan help schools move students away from a system of rote learning
Ahmedabad: Their office is not air-conditioned, the stairways are betel-stained and lunch amounts to a Rs60 a thali. But as entrepreneurs Sridhar Rajagopalan and Sudhir Ghodke know all too well from their work with private schools across the country that looks can be deceiving.

They, for example, are graduates of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. And their company turned profitable by its second year.

That company, Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd, is holding the hands of hundreds of stressed-out students — ironically, by testing them — and using results to help schools move away from a system of rote learning.

Though experts in education wonder how long it will take before such efforts overhaul an assembly-line education system that encourages mugging, the company has grown to assess half-a-million children, and one government school examination board has contacted it to begin discussions on how to improve quality of learning in middle school.

“We want to create a system where children are learning with understanding. Can we show schools and parents that what children are learning is something they cannot be happy about?” said Rajagopalan, 39, the more talkative of the two.

A third partner, Venkat Krishnan, also an alumnus of IIM-A, is based in Mumbai.

To hold up a mirror to schools, the firm devises tests and sends them to schools. Once students complete tests, the data is collected and sent back to schools, showing teachers exactly where students are going wrong.

The findings are not surprising — students can memorize, but don’t comprehend. Nine-year-olds had trouble calculating the length of a pencil whose starting point is 1cm on a ruler, with the end point at 6cm.

The most common answer is that the length of the pencil is 6cm, instead of 5cm, which is the correct answer. Interviews with children yield why they made this mistake. Most thought that 1cm was the point on the ruler showing the 1cm mark and not the length between zero and 1.

It is this lack of understanding of basic concepts that lays bare the problem in India’s schools. This problem is spoken about anecdotally — often by the time students enter colleges or even the workplace. But Educational Initiatives, because of its tests, has hard data at its disposal, and intends to do something about it before it’s too late.

Driven by data
The tests use multiple choice questions to test a student’s understanding of concepts. A thin, inverted triangle, a cone, a figure with four points, and an open, three-sided maze-like figure are among the multiple choices to the question — which of these is a triangle. Of the 3,811 students tested, only 40% got the right answer. That’s because most students think the inverted, and thin triangle does not look like a triangle at all.

Such findings are mapped on to spreadsheets telling the school how its students performed in concepts in geometry compared with schools tested in the rest of India.

Schools such as Ryan International School in Mayur Vihar, Delhi; Amity International School in Saket, Delhi; Arya Vidya Mandir in Bandra (West), Mumbai; La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata; and Presidency School, Bangalore, have subscribed to these tests.

Schools — and more importantly, teachers — then get help and training to change their method of teaching.

Ghodke, 38, has a group of school principals whom he regularly taps for discussions. The latest input: Teachers need help on an almost daily basis.

So Ghodke, who began teaching an 11-year-old neighbour math after knowing her fear of the subject, has devised teacher sheets, each explaining why students chose the wrong answer, and how to teach concepts such as geometrical shapes.

For example, in the triangle question, students choose the maze-like figure simply because its three sides are equal. Teachers are advised to give cardboard cut-outs of various triangles, thin, fat, equilateral, or obtuse, so that children can feel these shapes.

Teacher sheets

The teacher sheets have begun reaching nearly 300 schools, which have registered in advance for the assessment, at the rate of four or five a week, explaining concepts, clearing misconceptions.

Ghodke and his team are converting principals. “I think they have put their finger on the pulse of what is wrong with schools,” said Jyotsna Brar, principal of Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, who journeyed to Ahmedabad earlier this year to attend a forum of 40 principals organized by the company.

“Lot of teaching that is happening is that teachers are teaching to a test. When kids say they have cracked an exam, it means they have understood the pattern. They mug and reproduce according to the pattern. Ask a question not on the pattern and they cannot answer it,” said Brar.

Welham, a residential school where students pay an annual fee of Rs1.85 lakh not including the cost of uniforms and books, has recently joined Educational Initiatives’ flock, which now includes half-a-million students in 3,000 private schools. It has asked the company to assess 421 middle school students in August this year, at the cost of Rs300-500 per student; depending on how many subjects they are tested for. The cost will be passed on to parents.

The school will get detailed data on where students are going wrong, backed by teacher training as part of the package. Schools that want more specialized subject-wise training are charged.

It is teacher training that experts such as Krishna Kumar, child advocate and director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, or NCERT, consider vital to any educational reform.

“Teacher training is the cow dung no one wants to touch,” said Kumar, who changed school curriculum to make it more application-oriented in 2005 and feels that “a big assessment market” is opening-up in India, and merely concentrating there will not make a difference to education.

Others say there is no dearth of teacher training institutes due to a recent relaxation of rules by the government-run statutory body which oversees them; but many of them offer dubious quality of training.

“A large number of these are running out of one room,” said Amit Kaushik, director at SRF Foundation, which runs the well-known Shri Ram Schools in Delhi. The foundation has recently introduced a course for pre-primary teachers.

NCERT’s Kumar wants elite institutes such as Indian Institutes of Management to get into teacher education. He also wants companies to empower teachers to devise their own tests.

Educational Initiatives says it is stepping in that direction. It wants to start a teacher helpline where any teacher can send a question to the company’s research team, asking for help in how to explain the concept behind it. Ultimately, the company is aiming that teachers can help each other by posting their questions online and how they explain it. Its teacher sheets will also include views on how to teach a particular concept or lesson.

Venture funding
The company is getting serious venture capital to help its efforts. In March, it received funding from venture capital firms Bangalore-based Footprint Ventures, and Maryland, US-headquartered Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Chennai-based IFMR Trust, a private trust, invested in the firm through a dedicated fund. Gautam Thapar, chairman of the publically traded Ballarpur Industries Ltd, a paper manufacturer, also invested in his personal capacity. Details of amounts invested were not disclosed.

“We want to make an impact. We always felt money will follow, and it did,” said Rajagopalan, who says he gains strength from an annual 10-day session in Vipasana, or looking inward, a Buddhist way of meditation that seeks silence from practitioners.

Educational Initiatives, a privately held company, has made a profit since 2002. Rajagopalan did not disclose sales or revenue figures, or any other financial details of the company. However, a simple calculation of the amount charged per assessment multiplied by the number of students who have been tested puts the number at Rs20 crore.

This is not the first venture in which the trio have collaborated. Rajagopalan, Ghodke and Krishnan left high-paying jobs in Tata IBM, ITW Signode India Ltd and Sony Entertainment Television, respectively, to start Eklavya, a school in Ahmedabad in 1996, backed by an entrepreneur.

But they soon realized that opening one “model” school will not make even a small dent in the life of an average school-going child.

Still, Educational Initiatives faces a number of challenges in its quest to make an impact on education in India. One is reaching poor schools, another involves making a difference in the ultimate evaluation in a school student’s life: the board examinations.

Board exams
The Central Board of Secondary Education prodded by reformers such as Krishna Kumar, changed a portion of its assessment this year for 8,000 schools to include problems involving higher-order thinking. Predictably, scores have come down.

Earlier this year, the board invited Rajagopalan to discuss how students can learn better in middle school, especially in math and science. He gave them a summary of the company’s findings which it sends to schools. Nothing will move in a hurry, but it was a first step, says Rajagopalan.

The other challenge is equally tough: to assess government-run schools, which cater largely to children of poor parents, have little voice and a low quality of education.

For this, Educational Initiatives, which draws 30-35% of its revenue from its work in government schools, or what it calls large-scale assessment, signs contracts with organizations such as United Nations Children’s Fund, Azim Premji Foundation (named for the founder of Wipro Ltd), and more recently, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc.

In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, Educational Initiatives is involved in a random evaluation study which assesses the efficiency of school inputs and teacher incentives in improving quality of education.

Most of the funds for the study are from the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India’s scheme to put every child in school.

In May, Educational Initiatives signed a Rs6.2 crore contract with Google to conduct a study to gauge levels of student learning in classes IV, VI and VIII in 21 states to identify learning gaps.

Experts generally laud Educational Initiatives’ assessments as well-designed. On Mint’s request, Jishnu Das, a World Bank economist who co-authored and released a study in June this year testing secondary school students in Orissa and Rajasthan on math achievements, evaluated an Educational Initiatives’ assessment of students in 142 private schools in five metros in 2006. He said Educational Initiatives has performed the task of showing that India cannot be complacent about quality of schooling in either private or government-run schools. But what the country needs to debate is whether to further improve the quality of schooling in private schools, or whether to focus on the 18 million 14-year-olds who are either not enrolled or failing to meet the lowest international benchmark if in school.

“Whichever way the debate goes, it is clear that more studies of this sort and careful benchmarking of our performance on a global scale are critical to any reform of our educational system,” said Das, whose study showed that students in Orissa and Rajasthan rank below 43 of the 51 countries for which internationally comparable data exists.

Rajagopalan and his associates are keen to be part of any reforms. These days they find themselves turning down a lot of work — devising questions for Shah Rukh Khan’s new show, Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hai, was one such job.

The company says it has its hands full and its quest is a continuing one, to understand student understanding based on these assessments. “Student learning is a complicated affair,” said Rajagopalan.

“It is not easy to teach fractions to a class VI student.”

June 25, 2008
The ideology

Sridhar Rajagopalan, 38

Education: Mechanical Engineering, IIT Chennai; PGDBM, IIM Ahmedabad

Previous work experience: IBM; co-founder, Eklavya Education Foundation

Last salary: Rs 20,000 a month

Time spent as an employee: 7 years

Age at starting business: 30 years

No. of years as entrepreneur: 8 years

Initial investment: Rs 7.5 lakh

Source of funding: Equal contribution by the three co-founders

Company: Educational Initiatives

No. of employees: 110

Dressed in a check shirt and much-worn sandals, Sridhar Rajagopalan could easily be mistaken for a genial professor. But behind this simple façade is a determined entrepreneur.

For, at an age when most of his batchmates from IIT Chennai and IIM Ahmedabad were looking forward to working with the best business houses across the globe, Rajagopalan wanted to take on assignments that would benefit the masses. At 25, Rajagopalan’s career plan was not limited to fancy salaries and impressive designations. Which is why he didn’t think twice about quitting as a technical specialist at IBM and joining a nonprofit education foundation.

Today, as a co-founder and managing director of Educational Initiatives (EI), a company focused on improving the quality of learning and education in schools, the 38-year-old has come closer to achieving his altruistic goals.

Early Start

The idea for a non-profit educational institute was floated by Sunil Handa, a guest faculty at the IIM and managing director, Core Emballage, an Ahmedabad-based packaging solutions company. The implementation was taken up by Rajagopalan and his two batchmates from the IIM, Venkat Krishnan and Sudhir Godke. “Handa met some of us in September 1995 to give shape to his vision and the three of us decided to quit our jobs on 1 January 1996, to be part of this venture,” says Rajagopalan.

Taking a salary cut, the three got down to setting up the Eklavya Education Foundation, the funds for which were provided by Handa. Money and failure did not figure very high on Rajagopalan’s risk list. “I had no financial responsibility and if we failed we could always go back to our corporate jobs,” he says.

Setting up a model school that aimed at revolutionising education through a multi-pronged approach introduced Rajagopalan to a completely new field. “I had spent time thinking of the areas where I could make an impact and education was one way of making a lasting difference. If we can do something to help improve the quality of learning and education, we are addressing the root of the problem,” he says.

Handa’s project provided the right platform to explore this ideology. “From coining the name and working on the curriculum to setting up the school and coordinating with the NGOs for students, each day was a learning experience for us,” says Rajagopalan.

Tips for starting an educational enterprise
• Don’t venture into this field unless you are passionate about the subject

• Don’t expect grand returns on investment. Money comes in, albeit slowly

• The business plan should spell out the vision clearly. Any ambiguity at this stage can set your plans awry

• Customise your tests, questionnaires and research. Each school is unique

• Choose the team members carefully. They should share your vision

Making a mark
In June 1997, they set up the Eklavya School in Ahmedabad, which integrated 75% of students from affluent families with 25% street children in all classrooms. The experiment worked well and the school soon acquired a formidable reputation.

Over the next five years, Rajagopalan helped the school grow. Soon, however, he realised the importance of training teachers to carry the initiative forward. Subsequently, he conceptualised and implemented the running of the Eklavya Institute of Teacher Education. Gradually, ennui set in as he realised that the objective was limited to just one school.

Along with his colleagues, he decided to locate the areas where studying by rote was creating gaps in learning. “Though the students write exams, score marks and are promoted, they are not developing critical thinking skills,” he says. The aim was to bridge these gaps by providing appropriate teaching tools

Stepping it up
The quest for these tools ended in August 2001, when the three decided to exit Eklavya and start Educational Initiatives. “As we took meagre salaries, we were quite low on savings,” says Rajagopalan. With Rs 7.5 lakh in their kitty, the three turned entrepreneurs. “Our business plan was based on a simple premise that a profitmaking structure is better than a non-profit one, that a good idea need not translate into a loss-making enterprise,” he adds.

Convincing schools to test the efficacy of their teaching methods was not easy. They started by sending mailers to 1,000 schools and followed it up with personal visits. Even though only 25 schools agreed to take the tests in December 2001, it was a big step for EI. “Not once did we regret not following regular career paths,” he says. After the tests, EI held post-test assessment workshops with schools and followed this up with teacher training programmes. Most schools found the exercise beneficial and enrolled EI for the next year too.

EI broke even after two-and-a-half years. The conventional notion at the time was that only coaching and computer education institutes could break even in such a short time span. “We offered a programme to measure children’s real understanding (as opposed to an education system that stresses on marks). So it was gratifying to break even within three years,” he says.

Testing times

EI’s Asset Test, a diagnostic assessment test for students, has become quite popular. “Over 2.5 lakh students took this exam last year and we expect the number to double this year,” says Rajagopalan, who has expanded the services to include benchmarking assessments with government schools, Unicef, World Bank, Pratham (Azim Premji Foundation), the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education and Naandi Foundation. EI has also conducted a national-level research on student understanding with Wipro, redesigned school curriculums, held India’s Child Genius Quiz with Star World and an entrance test for the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai.

Taking home modest salaries, the trio manage their personal finances without much difficulty. “Fortunately, our immediate families were keyed in to our vision and lifestyles,” says Rajagopalan, who continues to drive his old Santro and draws Rs 80,000 a month. But EI does not compromise when it comes to paying the staff. “Some employees take home a bigger salary than ours. It’s the team that is the actual wealth of a company,” explains Rajagopalan. Though the business is growing rapidly, Rajagopalan is not resting on his laurels. “We want the initiative to be equally popular at the grassroots. That’s our prime objective,” he says.