First, fix the teaching crisis in schools

A student learning crisis in India seems imminent, even as educational reforms surge ahead. Enrolment is 88 per cent in the country’s 1.43 million schools, but an ASER survey notes that the number of Class 3 children who can read, or recognise numbers, has fallen by an average 28 per cent between 2010 and 2014.

In the same period, the number of Class 5 children who can read Class 2 texts or do division has declined by 17 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively.

That said, there has been some shift in government efforts towards improving quality in schools as against increasing their quantity. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, for instance, has been running the School Excellence Programme which focuses on improving learning outcomes by 30 percentage points. Haryana has also started a Quality Improvement Programme.

States and cities are not alone in this quest for quality. About 75 per cent of CSR spend goes to education, with more than half the corporates focused on investment in this sector.

These efforts, however, are outside government systems and privately funded.

To mainstream such programmes has not proved much of a success, with the rare exception of Tamil Nadu’s now renowned Activity Based Learning reforms.

So, why are we not able to improve learning outcomes at scale? At the Dell family foundation, we have learned that progress is possible when States follow a four-fold intervention model. The key intervention is to create focus and accountability around the academic agenda.

Shift the emphasis from infrastructure and enrolment to student learning, and make the system accountable towards it. As our founder Michael Dell says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

One initiative that many States are following is setting up performance management systems geared towards contribution to academics, creating academic monitoring tools such as school inspections, and reporting and reviews focused on academics.

The second important intervention is to strengthen the broader organisation to deliver on the academic agenda. A State needs to make school heads feel that they report to academic leaders, and not just administrators.

It must also hire new talent and continue to build capacity of the DIETs and SCERTs, ensure there are no vacancies in critical roles, and remove inefficiencies and non-academic responsibilities that consume academics’ time.

System-wide MIS to ease the burden of administration and allowing free flow of academic data can strengthen this.

The third intervention is to put in place the minimum critical conditions (like human and physical resources) for quality improvement. This involves merging one- or two-teacher schools for more targeted infrastructure creation; and redistributing teachers to cut their deficit.

The last intervention is to provide tools and trainings to fundamentally transform classroom transactions.

Good quality classroom assessments, multi-grade methodologies, activity-based learning, and remedial teaching are all areas where teachers need actionable tools and trainings to be effective in their classrooms.

Having the right set of classroom strategies is critical for any education reform programme, but without supporting systemic reform changes, we cannot deliver outcomes at scale.

In the classroom environment, innovation from the private sector can play a critical role.

For instance, Karnataka is piloting a 1,000-school technology-based intervention through Edutel Technologies to provide for the severe lack of high-quality maths and science teachers in high schools. NGOs, foundations and the corporate sector are more flexible in taking risks and experimenting with technology, pedagogy and teaching methodologies. The State governments can then drive execution top-down and focus on the learning outcomes.

There is a crisis brewing — but stakeholders in the sector have a solution.

The writer is with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, New Delhi

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