Search

This paper, authored by Rukmini Banerji, director of the NGO Pratham, offers an on-the-ground narrative of how an idea navigated its way through a changing landscape and played out in the context of established mind-sets as well as entrenched systems and interests. Tracking the path of the “Pratham-Jehanabad model” of “teaching at the right level,” Banerji follows a disruptive pedagogic innovation in Bihar, India, from its introduction in 2012 to the current time. Any intervention is also embedded in a larger web of cross-cutting interests and institutional structures. On a smaller scale, an individual at the right level of authority can maintain the momentum for at least a school year. But for the approach (the goals and the activities) to become ingrained into the habits of people and workings of the system may require longer run, intensive work, digging deeper into the roots of people’s perceptions and practices. Detailed studies of government officials at different levels of the system – school, cluster, block, district and state – provide vivid illustrations of how different people react to a new intervention especially a disruptive pedagogical innovation like “teaching at the right level”.

In India, a simple, citizen-led assessment is helping citizens gauge children���s learning levels���and challenging a deep-seated belief that going to school means getting an education.

Undertaken by the ASER Center of Pratham, this study explores a set of interrelated factors that influence how teachers teach. Designed as a series of data collection exercises that were conducted between July 2013 and December 2014, the study covered 400 schools and tracked more than 2,200 teachers during visits to each school. The study uses teacher surveys and classroom and school observations methods. It evaluates teachers’ subject-matter knowledge, ability to communicate, and ability to learn from children’s work. The findings generated by the study provide significant inputs and suggestions for designing future teacher training and teacher professional development programs.

This briefing identifies key issues influencing children's learning outcomes and provides policy pointers for remedial action. The study summarized here was undertaken in two states of north India whose educational challenges are comparable to or worse than those of many African and South Asian countries. Thus the findings potentially have utility not only in India but more widely.

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools, into committees and gives these powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey this paper finds that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. The paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. The authors find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.

There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees (VECs), consisting of village government leaders, parents, and teachers. The authors report findings from a survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh, of public schools, households, and VEC members, on the status of education services and the extent of community participation inthe public delivery of education services. They find that parents do not know that a VEC exists, sometimes even when they are supposed to be members of it; VEC members are unaware of even key roles they are empowered to play in education services; and public participation in improving education is negligible, and correspondingly, people's ranking of education on a list of village priorities is low. Large numbers of children in the villages have not acquired basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet parents, teachers, and VEC members seem not to be fully aware of the scale of the problem, and seem not to have given much thought to the role of public agencies in improving outcomes. Learning failures coexist with public apathy to improving it through public action. Can local participation be sparked through grassroots campaigns that inform communities about the VEC and its role in local service delivery? Can such local participation actually affect learning outcomes, and can any impact be sustained? The authors describe information and advocacy campaigns that have been experimentally implemented to address some of the problems with local participation, and future research plans to evaluate their impact.