A TEDx talk at BITS Pilani Hyderabad on using data to create choice in public education.
In this talk, Gautam discusses the issues plaguing public sector schools in India, especially in the state of Karnataka, and how big data can be used to provide a solution.
Transcript
This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.
You might wonder why the word choice is so large. The word choice is so large because it’s really important to me. And because I think that everyone in this room is here because of choice.
Choice in two ways. One, that you made a choice to come here this morning. Unlike, however, children who go to school.
Let’s take the example of English. Unless we believe that the trouble is only with language, there are serious troubles with mathematics as well. And A to Z students from grades 1 through 7 at least, will not be able to do simple division.
Three-digit division, nothing more than that. One would assume, then, that because these are government schools, and everything is independent, that the quality of infrastructure will be in these schools. But sadly, that isn’t the case either.
And that 56% of government schools in Karnataka will not have a usable toilet. Which is perhaps not too bad, because especially in rural areas, one could leave the school and go home to the toilets. One could be a great outdoorist, as most of us do in our cities anyway.
But there are other issues as well. For example, 80% of schools don’t have drinking water. It’s hard to go to school if you don’t have access to drinking water.
And the children who go to public schools don’t really have the ability, the opportunity to carry water bottles to school. But the flip side to this is that over 90% of schools get a hot meal every day. Which is some of the complexities in dealing with the education sector that one must face.
It’s even more unfair if you’re a girl and you go to these schools, because 60% of these schools will not have a toilet for girls. Why is this important? Because it has very directly impacted the ability of going to school, because it’s too embarrassing.
I’d rather stay home. The important bit of irony that we all associate with clay, and you’d imagine that’s what 10,000 of these schools across the state have classrooms that require major fairing. This would be acceptable if the number we were talking about was in the tens or the hundreds or even the thousands.
But the numbers we’re talking about are enormous. Just one state, Karnataka, there are over 60,000 private schools in Karnataka of which three quarters are government schools. Which is a statistic.
I have told you about funding. It’s slightly better. The levels of infrastructure are not much better.
And the largest challenges in the public school sector is most children go to government schools. And the really dismal part of it is that only 30% of children enter grade one or finish class ten. What choices does one really have when you’re in a state like Karnataka and go to a public school?
Now, once you have, or once you have a problem, the nature of most solutions for parents and seekers is data. So that’s one lesson in trying to find solutions. The big challenge with working with government schools is that the largest provider of data are government schools.
And government data isn’t very particularly accurate. And it’s hard to develop solutions based on inaccurate data. You’d rather not do that because it would waste scanned resources that you have.
And even when there exists legal competence or much less technical competence, so being open in government isn’t something that’s very easily possible. And where it is possible, they either lack the technical ability to share the data in a meaningful form, the legal structure by which to give you the data, or sometimes the philosophical way of government, which of course brings us to the question what do people like me who work with small and non-profits in the public education business do? So our big idea, our big moment of realisation was that we looked around at the scope of non-profits and we realised that each individual non-profit stores a vast source of data about the schools it works with, about the programs it does, about the children it works with.
And then there are non-profits all across Manila, small, big, medium, large. And while there are the same set of schools and children and beneficiaries that other non-profits do. So if you take one school as an example, one organisation might do the mid-day deals in there.
One organisation might improve the quality. There’s a wonderful organisation called the Akshaya Bhaskar Foundation. It’s a wonderful organisation that has science-based camps in schools.
And there are organisations that work with communities to improve the quality of decision-making in communities as well. Mahatma Gandhi talked about collective action. He talked about collaborative action.
And there’s no reason to imagine that there’s multiple organisations solving multiple issues together. And that’s what we did. We spent some years building and sharing their data.
So we now had an alternative to government as a source. This was a wonderful repository of data about which basic question you must ask this data. What you do with data is what you do with it.
And I think our big learning over the last year has been that data is a good start. But what you really need is organisations to be able to localise and contextualise this data. Because it’s important to realise that no organisation, much less a school, exists in any sort of vacuum.
A school exists in a context and it’s important to realise, recognise and realise what that context is. You have a representative being an operator or a member of the Legislative Assembly or a member of Parliament. And you have school market communities or BPAs within BPAs.
So what do I mean by localising and contextualising the data? What I mean is taking this raw data that is a storehouse of information and telling stories with it. Telling stories that are meaningful to each of these stakeholders.
Because while the source of the data is collaborative, we target all of the stakeholders. And over the last year what we did is provide meaningful reports to each of these different stakeholders in ways that was important to them to improve both the quality of the demand that parents of children going to school would know how neighbouring schools are doing, would know how neighbouring districts are doing and have the ability to ask questions why my school isn’t doing as well as the other schools. To make a choice to say that I don’t want to send my child to a school that isn’t doing better. To move away from the default path for elected representatives to look at the data in meaningful ways and say no longer is the problem invisible.
I have data. I can make meaningful decisions as to where I need to implement money. To the government to say to look at the data and decide where to implement new programmes, where to implement new infrastructure issues.
Because otherwise it’s very hard If I obey bad data it makes it difficult for them to do it as well. I’m quite sceptical as to whether this will actually work because collectively large areas of society are really using what we imagine to be a sophisticated tool of using data to drive democracy and to drive choice and to drive community. I think it’s very, very difficult.
This is just one example where we have several of a pre-school in Bangalore that was in terrible state and through the collaborative action model parents and communities putting pressure on the system elected representatives being able to decide where they want to spend money and the education system themselves being able to figure out that there are problems that they can target and it’s very, very important to realise that while data requires local organisations to make it meaningful you all are a set of people who have a choice to make who have been able to make that choice and have a unique set of skills that bridges the technical and the social and you all have the ability to take all these vast data sources that exist in public about various things to talk about the state of roads to talk about the state of power because for the average system these are things that are important but they have no ability to access the data but what you all do is have the technical skills to access the data and the communication and social and collaborative skills to make it meaningful and actionable because if you all don’t do it who is?
Originally published by TEDx Talks on 31 May 2013. View on YouTube →
Gautam John 
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