Talk at Takshashila Shala

A talk at Takshashila Shala on primary education, drawing on APREST data and papers.

Transcript

This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

Gautam John: Thanks for coming, my name is Gautam. I work in Bangalore with an organization, well, with two organizations, one called the Akshara Foundation that works in the pre-primary and primary public schooling space, and another organization called Prathama Books, which doesn’t do education per se, but we work in the children’s reading space. What I’m hoping to do over the next 20 minutes is to speak about my learnings in the last three or four years in the primary education space.

And a lot of this is based not necessarily on my own experiences, but also from a review of literature and things that I’ve imbibed from conversations. The reason I thought it would be interesting is that most of this was counterintuitive to me when I finally discovered it, and I’m hoping that it might be interesting to you. And the larger conversation I’d like to situate this in is the policy imperatives for primary education in this country.

So, for those of you who don’t know, we, India, in the year 2000, started a mission called the Sarasakshabhyan, where we said all children between the ages of six to 14 would be in school and would meet minimum learning levels by the year 2010. Now, of course, 2010 has come and gone now. The mission hasn’t been successfully completed, but the government has now moved on to middle school.

How much was spent? Well, from 2005 to 2006, the government spent about 80,000 crores on this program. But most of the money has gone into inputs, schools rather than schooling, so to speak.

We’ve built schools, we’ve provided uniforms, we’ve added more teachers, we’ve put more teaching and learning material into the schools, but the focus has really been on the inputs and not so much the outcomes. Now, the context of this is really that in April 2010, the Right to Education Bill was notified, and conservatively, we estimate that over the next decade, you’re going to have another 350,000 crores pumped into the public primary education sector. And if you look at the RTE Bill, the trouble is it reads a lot like what we’ve done for the last five or 10 years, add more teachers, build more buildings, provide a playground, but there’s very little focus on the quality of education.

And the quality of education certainly is important because if you look at the data for India, it’s fairly scary. There is a very large survey that’s done year on year on year. It’s called the ASAR Survey, the Annual Stages of Education Report.

It’s done by an organization called Pratham, based out of Delhi. And the numbers are truly astonishing. For example, 92% of children in class one cannot read a grade-appropriate textbook.

And 60% of children in the age group of six to 14 cannot read a simple paragraph. And if you go to the ASAR website, you can take a look at this paragraph. It’s not very difficult.

It’s very, very simple. Now, please keep in mind that a lot of these numbers are for the public, for the government system. I’m not referring to the private system here.

The reason I refer to the government system is when three quarters of our children still go to government-medium schools. And while three quarters of us, three quarters of the children in this country go to government-medium schools, as the morning session pointed out, it’s a system that’s almost invisible to us. We don’t interact with it because we don’t have to.

We don’t know the challenges within it because it doesn’t directly affect us. And the reason it should directly affect us is for two reasons. One, if you look at what’s called the TIMS data, which looks at mathematics and science performance, India fares really well.

We have the fifth largest pool of highly qualified TIMS students in the world. For every 10 in the US who perform at the top rank, we have, I think, four in India, which is not bad given the state of education. But for every 10 poorly performing students in the US, we have 200 in India.

The gap between the top 5% and the lowest 5% in India is the second largest in the world. And the reason this worries me so much is because it’s not only that our children aren’t learning well, the government school children don’t know, haven’t yet met minimum learning levels. There’s this huge gap between the private and the public system.

And in the public system, even the trajectory of learning, how much you learn through the years, is very, very weak. For example, in a survey in Andhra Pradesh, 100 children who entered grade two, about 30 of them could do a simple single digit addition. Now for that same cohort of 100 in grade, let me see, in grades five, only another 30 of them could do that same math.

So the performance year on year on year is also very, very weak. And a lot of this is fairly easy to ascribe to multiple factors, we’re a poor country and so on and so forth. But given this quantum of money that has gone into inputs, at some point it’s rational to start asking what are the other flaws in the system?

And a fairly obvious flaw that has emerged over the last 10 years, is our lack of focus on education outcomes and flowing from that on teachers. Now, there are as many studies as you want about teacher attendance and teacher teaching in India. The numbers are all fairly shocking.

They range from low ball estimates of 15% to high ball estimates of 45% of teachers absent every day in public schooling system in India. And that’s scary, because if half of your teachers are absent, you don’t meet your pupil teacher ratio norms. And there’s enough evidence to show that if you don’t meet your pupil teacher ratio norms, your children cannot absorb sufficiently because there aren’t enough teachers.

The second and something that’s even more worrying is that even when the teachers are there, studies show that 55% of them aren’t teaching. So if you take a school that notionally has 100 teachers, if 45 of them don’t turn up, and from the balance 55, half of them aren’t teaching, who’s left to do the teaching? It’s unfair to blame the entire system and the children and the parents of the children for a flaw that’s fairly evident from the fact that the people who are mandated to deliver the education aren’t.

And there are lots of reasons for this. I mean, the political, the teachers unions are one fairly large reason. But it’s also interesting to note that teacher absence and teacher non-teaching is highest in the poorest states.

And so there’s the greatest leakage where it’s needed the most. And it’s the most educated, most qualified, most teachers who’ve been in service the longest who have the highest rates of attendance and the lowest rates of teaching. So this incentive model is just completely broken in the public education space because there’s no reason for a teacher to have to teach because they aren’t held accountable.

And it’s tenured service along with a union of sorts. Now, the reason this is scary is because the last few years have had a couple of interesting papers that have come up that look at the correlation between education and GDP growth. Everyone’s always talked about education attainment and GDP growth, and there’s a fairly well-established correlation between the two, that the longer children stay in school in countries, the higher the education growth.

But what’s even more interesting is about five years ago, the World Bank put out a paper that showed that it’s not just how long they stay in school, but the cognitive skills that they learn in school that are far more important. And there’s a much stronger correlation between the education quality, not just the quantity and the GDP growth. I’m not a statistician, I’m a lawyer, so the actual measures of standard deviation escape me, but I’m happy to point you to the paper, which brings us to the question, what has been tried in India to fix these myriad problems?

We’ve got three specific issues. One is on teacher absence. The other one is on the fact that teachers aren’t teaching when they’re mandated to.

And the third one is a much more overarching picture that the incentive models are broken. So I’ll refer to five interesting studies that were done, and they target different areas of the education system per se. The first one was a model of what were called block grants.

The education system has its own geography, so multiple schools come together to form a block, so a block is a hierarchy. There was another, the second test was one where diagnostic feedback was given to the teachers about their own charges and how they were faring. The third one was where contract teachers were added to the schools.

Contract teachers are non-formal ad hoc additions to the school system to support it. And the fourth and fifth ones, which are fairly interesting, were essentially an incentive model. One is a group incentive model, and the third one was an individual incentive model.

And the reason I’m speaking about these is they target five specific areas that are, in some ways, growing in importance in the next few years. The block grants, because that’s the RT model, that they will pump in money into a block level and the schools need to use it to improve facilities. The diagnostic feedback, because a consistent claim has been that, you know what, the teachers would do better if only they had the time and the energy and the effort to know which children need how much help and so on and so forth.

The contract teachers is an ongoing debate. It’s a debate that happens every so often. There aren’t enough teachers.

Can we hire teachers temporarily? But if we hire contract teachers, A, they’re not educated as well. Will they bring down learning levels?

Or will they be exploited? I’m not sure how that entirely works. It’s a job that’s advertised as comfort, but will they be exploited?

And the fourth one is very, very controversial, the notion of performance pay. I mean, you don’t do performance pay within pretty much any government system and certainly not in the education system where the teachers union is so strong and powerful. So these were five experiments done in Andhra Pradesh over the course of five years.

And they all have fairly interesting outcomes. And I think outcomes that anyone in the education system should look at to build a model for what needs to be done in the education system and public policy imperatives in the education system. So on the first one, where it was blocked grants, it’s kind of interesting.

In the first year, there was a significant improvement in student learning outcomes with the addition of block grants. But in the second year, it fell quite dramatically. And also the things that were purchased with these grants were not really durables like computers, TVs, and things of the sort, but it was mainly what we refer to as consumables and notebooks and things of the sort.

And the working hypothesis here is that with the block grant in year one, it was an unanticipated grant. So that is the reason why there was a strong correlation with an improvement in learning outcomes. But in year two, it became an anticipated grant and had an impact on general household spending patterns and priorities.

And that essentially meant that the learning outcomes weren’t influenced as much. And it’s interesting because of the entire RT model is that we’re going to pump all of this money in and it becomes anticipated. The question that I would ask is, listen, is this really going to work?

Because our five-year data set shows that it’s not working in the intended fashion. The second one was intended to deal with the notion that teachers are overworked and they don’t have the ability or the time to actually work on diagnostic feedback at a per-child level. And if teachers had the knowledge of how each student performed, that they could better tailor their classes.

So diagnostic feedback was performed. Diagnostic feedback was given on every child in the class and on the teacher’s teaching as well. This was done, there were six visits to the school for the academic, during the period of this intervention.

And there was detailed feedback given. And then the outcome was measured. And it was fantastic because there was a dramatic improvement in what we call the teaching activity.

So teachers would read more, they would ask more questions and all of that, which was fantastic because that was one of the outcomes. But it had no statistically significant impact on learning outcomes, none whatsoever. Which is interesting because you’re like, we did everything right, we provided the feedback, the teacher said they’ve used all of that feedback and intensified their in-classroom activity, but it had absolutely no effect on student learning outcomes.

And this is one of those things that you look at and you say, oh well, this is what observation bias is all about. The six times you turned up in school, they were all teaching according to plan. But really, they didn’t do very much with the feedback.

So in a sense, it begs the question of, it begs the question whether the teacher’s issue of time, is it an issue that the teachers have of time? Or is it a more fundamental issue of interest and incentives? Because we’ve clearly established that the time isn’t an issue because we’ve provided that which they said they lacked.

The third one was on contract teachers. Now, you have to understand that the government education system, it’s a job that everybody wants. I mean, you want a teacher’s job because once you’re in, you can never be fired.

As we were discussing in the morning, that the best that can happen is you will be transferred. You might, in extreme cases, be suspended, but you will be suspended with pay. So there’s almost nothing that changes, that changes patterns in the education system.

So a contract teacher is really put into a school to, the pupil-teacher ratios are low. So you put in a contract teacher, the contract teacher boosts the pupil-teacher ratios, and the contract teacher isn’t a permanent job. So contract teachers, for the most part, are much younger than regular teachers.

They’re far less educated, far less trained, paid between one fourth and one sixth of what a regular teacher is. But conversely, close to 90% of them come from the same village in which the school is, and most of them have to travel less than a kilometer to the school. And this is important, because the outcome of this is that we find that the contract teachers have substantially lower absence rates than regular teachers, substantially higher teaching activity and teaching intensity, and the students in contract teacher classes outperform on every single metric, students and teachers who are regular teachers.

And what’s really interesting is that the improvements are across the board, across demographic variables. So it’s not a case of, you know, certain extraneous things influencing this. And when you look at this, it kind of makes sense, right?

The contract teachers have far higher degree of motivation to do this and to do this well. A, their contract is annual, it’s not for the, they’re not tenured. B, they live close to the village, they live close to the school.

So there’s a far greater degree of personal interaction, personal involvement in the entire ecosystem. And the third one is one of convenience. I mean, if you look at your attendance rates in schools for teachers, one reason is that very few teachers actually live really close to the school.

They all have to travel a fair distance. But the moment you have a contract teacher who lives within one kilometer of the school and almost always in the same village, that factor is taken away. And also what’s really, really interesting is that the contract teachers in general across the board teach more.

And what is really heartening is they spend more time teaching the weaker students, which is something regular teachers don’t do. Because for them, it’s fine. For any teacher, it’s far easier to teach the top end of the class than the bottom end of the class.

And if you look at most NGOs that work in the education space, a lot of them spend their time bringing the weaker students up to the median level of the class so that it’s easier to teach the class. Then of course, there’s the tricky one on performance pay. And so the performance pay was two kinds.

Individual performance pay and group performance pay. So it was either a teacher or a school. And it’s fantastic because using performance pay, and this was done only for regular teachers, not contract teachers.

Student performance and student learning was up across the board. Again, across all demographic variables. And what was fascinating is that even though we were testing, even though the incentive payment was only for mechanical improvements, so that is addition, subtraction, and in mathematics and language, there was also a statistically significant improvement in the conceptual learning of the children.

So it wasn’t just mechanical. So it wasn’t so much that the teachers were teaching to the test, but it was what we call true learning. That they were learning the mechanical aspects as well as the conceptual aspects.

And what was fantastic was that there was a spillover effect and that they were performing better on tests in subjects that weren’t part of the performance pay as well. So it’s brilliant, right? You’re testing in two subjects.

They’re doing better on that, not just in the test, but also in the concept, but also in subjects that aren’t a part of this. So there’s true learning and there’s spillover effects. So incredibly powerful.

And what we found, what was true, sorry, not we, what the study found was that the improvements was in both group incentives and individual incentives, but individual incentives performed better than group incentives, 10% in the first year and 68% in the second year. So if there’s a leaning, it just means that every man for himself, the individual incentives were far more effective in the long term. Now, what was interesting is that when this performance pay was done, it’s not like teacher absence came down.

Teacher absence was the same. Teacher intensity of activity was about the same. But what the teachers did say that they did a lot more was just preparation.

There was incredibly higher levels of teacher preparation during the incentive model, while the incentive model was running. And what we found particularly interesting about the incentive model is that we found, is that the paper finds that it’s actually a catalyst that teacher education and teacher training, teacher qualifications alone don’t significantly impact learning outcome. But the moment you add teacher incentives to that, they have statistically significant impacts.

So the incentive is a multiply on multiple on other parameters as well. Which brings us to the question of, what are the public policy implications of all of this? So we have very publicly committed ourselves to the RTE model, which says that we will, we will measure pupil teacher ratio, number of classrooms, and continue to measure infrastructure and not really outcomes.

We’ve also embarked on this, the state has also embarked on this wonderful campaign to get 25% of all private school seats for children who could otherwise not go there. And the question that we’re asking now, that I’m asking now is how valuable is this? A, 25%, one quarter of one quarter of the seats of the country is not a very significant number, but it implies the expenditure of significant portions of political capital.

And if it’s an education question, it’s not going to solve the problem. If it’s an equity and equitable solution to a much larger social problem, then that’s the way it needs to be looked at, not purely an education issue. The second one is that it’s time for the government to now confront the issue of teacher quality, teacher performance, and teacher incentives.

It’s hard to do, it’s very tricky to do because teachers unions are some of the largest and most powerful unions in any state. And it’s not easy to do that. And my take on this is because it’s not so easy to do that, the government has focused on things that it hopes will solve the problem, but in my opinion won’t.

For example, technology. Take our entire wonderful Akash tablet model. We have a fundamentally broken education system, right?

The intentions, the human intent behind the system is flawed because of a flawed intent model. The simple addition of a piece of technology, be it a tablet or a computer or an internet, isn’t going to solve that problem. What’s going to solve the problem is to align the incentives within the entire system.

And that, to me, is the basic issue that the government should be tackling. Along with that, and a study that I participated in, I think that working on the demand side is hugely important. We did a fairly extensive survey in Bangalore of about 60,000 households, and we asked all of them, were they happy with the education their child got when they went to a government school?

And 75% of them said yes. So we said, hang on, this cannot be true. I mean, why do we even exist if 75% of parents of children who go to government schools think it’s okay?

I mean, what are we doing? So we went back and added some more depth and granularity to that. And the fact of the matter is, A, that most children who go to government schools, their parents are illiterate, so they’re first-generation learners themselves.

Secondly, what you and I consider important out of school isn’t necessarily what they either consider important or are able to perceive as important. And the distinction is important. They get a free bag, they get free books, they get a free uniform, they get a free bag, and they get at least one hot meal a day.

The parents’ point is, listen, this is more than what I can give my child any which way. And the logical question is, what about the fifth limb of this? What about education?

To which they answer, I’m not educated myself, how do I know? And then if you say, if you know that other schools would, certain schools were performing better than the others, would you make a choice? The answer is yes.

But there is no system in the public education space to point out these differences, to actually be able to allow parents to make a choice. So the one hand, there’s this overarching school choice campaign, which should mean that parents should have a choice of sending their child to any school, be it private or public. But simultaneously, you also need to be able to allow parents to make a choice within the public school system, based on information, not based on anecdotal data, the prudence of which I’ve told is not evidence.

So to me, public policy directions in primary education, stop focusing as much on infrastructure, focus more on learning outcomes. When you focus on learning outcomes, there will naturally be a focus on teachers. When you focus on teachers, it doesn’t always have to be a stick, you can use a carrot.

The carrot is the incentive model. It’s important to realize that the incentive model works with the younger teachers better than the older teachers, and with the teachers and the converse of the teachers who get paid less than the better paid teachers. But I think that’s a great place to begin the entire narrative, rather than simply continuing to put an infrastructure into schools, which has no direct correlation with the quality of education outcomes.

The reason we’re focusing on education outcomes is because there’s a direct correlation with the GDP of the country. Next question.

Speaker 9: Regarding your observation about how performance systems are working, at the contrary viewpoint, there’s studies in the US, there is an observation in the US, I found that a lot of teachers are giving us a threat, as in they’re encouraging the students to, they’re giving hints to the students to answer the right questions, and this is, expose the use of law in that performance-based system. What are your thoughts on that?

Gautam John: It’s a very, very valid question. So, for example, in the limited, these outcomes are from studies where all of this was factored into. You factor that the fact, you look into the fact that they’re not teaching to the test and so on and so forth.

But, for example, I don’t know how many private primary schools there are in Tamil Nadu, but in Karnataka there are 46,000. So, if 46,000 schools are part of this program, how do you ensure that this doesn’t happen? And there are a couple of ways of doing this, right?

One is fairly advanced statistical methods. Those are non-trivial to implement. The second one is that you go into this eyes wide open.

And the reason I say you go into this eyes wide open is that about five years ago, Karnataka did what is called a Karnataka State Quality Assurance in Education System. So, year one, they essentially tested two grades across the entire state, a sample survey, and the numbers were abysmal. The second year, pretty much every DM said that, listen, last year’s numbers weren’t acceptable.

The children need to perform better next year. And of course, lo and behold, all the children did perform better. It’s the same issue, right?

I mean, that you’ll get the performance you want, but not necessarily learning you want. My suggestion, the answer I have to that is better implement, better monitoring, and the government has an extensive monitoring program. You have CRPs and BEOs and DDPs, and they’re supposed to be doing a lot of things.

And the incentive model for them is as broken over here. Now, it’s entirely possible that you build this incentive model that the only reason it works is because people game the system. That, you know, from the teacher all the way up to the Secretary of Education, all they sit and do is game the system.

I don’t think that’s going to be realistic. And which is why I allied with my second thing, improving the quality of demand. So, for example, if parents know that their children aren’t learning, but everyone’s saying, hey, you know what, these schools are fine, then you immediately have a check and balance, which is why, to me, improving the quality of demand is very, very important.

Speaker 5: I think it’s fairly right to say because, right, like we spoke in the morning, we discussed that how many people put their children in government schools, right? But the key thing that he said is how many people who put their children in government schools go and talk to teachers and find out what they’re learning. Let’s turn the argument and see how, I mean, all of our children are studying in private schools.

How many parents actually go to private schools to find out what their children are learning?

Speaker 12: We probably know that they’re learning a lot.

Speaker 5: No, I’m saying there is an implicit assumption that if it is a private-provided service, it is going to be much better than a public-provided service.

Gautam John: It’s not necessarily much better. There are enough surveys that show that private education isn’t significant.

Speaker 5: Assumption. The key word is assumption.

Gautam John: I’m trying to explain why I don’t think it’s on. I’m open to the other people answering. I certainly don’t make the assumption that private is better.

I mean, what’s key over there is private gives you a choice. Now, whether I go to, I don’t have children, but assuming I did, and they went to, assuming they went to a private school, which they probably will, whether I’m interested in their education outcome or not, the school has a vested interest in that because the school wants me to know that I’m sending my children to the best school so that, because that is a marketplace in itself because I have a choice.

In the public system, there is no choice. You can go to any single school you want, but those choices are, there’s nothing to make that choice. So, I’m certainly not making the assumption that the private system provides better education.

I’m saying it provides better choice, and by virtue of that, better accountability. All I’m asking for in the public system is the, you know, is real choice, not this fake choice that you said, you take a scattershot approach and some amount of accountability. Sorry.

Speaker 3: The problem is in the public education. This whole system is flawed. There are two approaches which the government is following.

One is RTE, where the kids are given the choice of getting into a best private school, and the government is effectively subsidizing. The other is initiatives of privatizing the public education system. The Akamshas and the, I’m not sure what the term is, but there are a few of these things which are going on.

So, do you see that as a more viable, politically feasible solution, rather than trying to, as you said, get into a system where the unions, state governments, politicians, already kind of make the mix very difficult to deal with? So, is privatization slash pushing the public education at all?

Gautam John: So, if I can try and answer that, A, the Akamshas of the world, and they do wonderful work, essentially run charter schools. It’s a government school that they run. They find the funding.

It’s still free or very low cost for the children. It’s not really scalable. I mean, if there are 48,000, 46,000 primary schools in Karnataka, it’s just nearly impossible to do that.

But what is possible to do? And I hesitate to use the word privatization. I mean, I don’t even know if it’s possible to privatize all the schools because there are too many things involved.

There’s another way to do it, right? To deregulate that market. So, what a parent can’t do is, even though all of us in this room are paying close to 13,000 rupees a year per child that goes to a public school, a parent can’t say, give me the 13,000 rupees.

There’s a budget school down the road. School choice. So, if you allow that market to deregulate itself and that you give children not a school but a voucher, say, here go get an education, you perhaps have a far better.

And there’s lots of work. James Tooley does a lot of interesting work in this area. And because it then creates a marketplace where there is transactions and there is value and there is cost and all of the other things that you need for a marketplace to function, you almost immediately have better transparency and accountability and learning outcomes.

Speaker 3: You take the telecom sector, right? You have MTN and BSNL. You have a competition coming in.

Did MTN and BSNL improve? No. Has Air India improved?

No. BSNL is…

Gautam John: Well, I don’t… So, that’s perception. I use BSNL today and not Air India.

Speaker 11: See, BSNL and MTNL haven’t… Air India hasn’t improved. But the customer has improved because of these choices.

So, if it is deregulated, government schools may not become better. But people have better options than the existing government schools.

Speaker 3: That’s precisely the point I was making, which is that the public education system, you just bypass it to create more choices for the people who currently are forced to go to public schools.

Gautam John: That’s something that is pretty much what I’d support.

Speaker 12: I think the question is whether the means are ends. At the end of getting every child educated, what is the means? Should government be there at all if we can get every child educated?

Gautam John: See, the thing is, there will always be a space for government schools. There will always be a space for government schools. Sorry, one second.

Speaker 2: No, I have two comments to make. One is, the ACER report by itself doesn’t give a good picture. It’s nothing.

Which gave highlights of that. But I think the real insight will come from the PISA.

Gautam John: Yeah, they’re doing Himachal and Tamil Nadu.

Speaker 2: Though it’s very partial, it’s just Tamil Nadu and Himachal. I’m waiting for a report that will really benchmark you against the rest of the world, Shanghai and Finland. And then we’ll dig in for a shock.

Let’s wait for that.

Gautam John: But also, I mean, while PISA is important and it’s great for purposes of comparison, it is skewed. Like, for example, Shanghai is in China.

Speaker 2: I agree. But they made a point to differentiate Shanghai and the rest of China. The report clearly…

Gautam John: I agree, but it always becomes Tamil Nadu versus Shanghai. See, it does serve a valuable purpose. It does serve to highlight the incredible contrast, not just within the country, but globally as well.

And you’re right, I can’t wait to see it as well.

Speaker 2: The second thing is partly to answer Mr. Bhatia’s question. I mean, in all this, can I correct it? The few initial initiators of privatizing public education, whether they were the Bharati Foundation up north, or Aseem Premji, I think have slowly started making improvements.

But then, like you said, given the size, if there’s even one state, you need about 40 or 50 such foundations in each state. And I think Bharati Foundation is doing a wonderful job. They’ve taken over government schools.

They’ve asked the government to transfer their teachers out. Five hundred such schools in four states. They bring clothing, teacher salary, food, textbook, all materials.

And that experiment is going on.

Gautam John: But it’s important to note that it’s for charity. It’s not just for charity.

Speaker 5: In terms, I think maybe a bit higher up the class for politics, I think the Department of Labour and Trade will be involved in this option where they will fund some… If you can run the… they will first run it for…

funding for first years or something like that. Apparently, there are no leaders.

Speaker 2: No, the new manufacturing policy, also, I mean, it’s just very hard, it’s very easy, should give it further impetus, hopefully. Hopefully, it will give it further impetus.

Gautam John: Premji?

Speaker 10: I had a question. I mean, I’ll come back to it. I had a question about the fact that you said the 60,000 teachers, the 60,000 households in Bangalore said they didn’t have information with which they could make valid judgments on that.

Now, can they actually do that if there is some kind of a neutral rating?

Gautam John: Yeah, so that’s the project I work on. It’s called the Karnataka Learning Partnership. The idea is to build school-level ratings for public schools.

I don’t want to sell from the state, so we’re happy to talk about it. It’s non-trivial, but the idea is to do that because you need a rating agency to be able to tell private, public, you know, all schools as to which one’s better. There’s some interesting learnings from Hyderabad.

There are organizations that fund low-cost private schools, and they themselves rate these schools, and the schools use that rating to attract students. The market is an interesting place. Sorry, Pranesh, you started with the next question.

Speaker 4: That’s actually what I had first read, that the voucher system on paper is a wonderful model, but without knowledge, without information about what school is better, the voucher system is as good as useless, as good as the present system because it actually doesn’t give you any amount of choice. And secondly, in India right now, the voucher system is a good thing, but you need more information to percolate as to how good the schools are, and that somehow manages to happen in private schools with reputations, and though I believe that most good reputation schools aren’t as good as they seem to be. How do you fix that?

Okay, so KLP is one small part.

Gautam John: No, KLP is an example. To me, it’s the demand side of the equation, right? It’s very hard to do anything if your customer doesn’t care.

For example, if you as a cell phone user didn’t care what quality of service you got, there’s pretty much no point in any of the service providers making any effort in improving their service.

Speaker 4: No, but I care, but how do I know? Through advertising, I know what the rates are.

Gautam John: So this is a problem that’s endemic to the education sector. For example, if you work in health and a child is unwell, you know. If you work in infrastructure and there are no roads, you know.

If you work in the education sector, you don’t know. There’s nothing visible. It’s like 10 years from now that these problems are apparent.

The education sector does suffer from this problem. It’s hard to build a face to the problem. It’s hard to even identify the problem looking at it.

And there are various ways around this, right? One of the most common is to build simple toolkits that parents can use. Can you read this?

Yes, no. If you can’t, you have a problem. So there’s a lot of effort around that as well to diagnose the issue very simply even though one party in that transaction might be uneducated.

So improving the quality of demand is non-trivial. To me, it’s a sentence, but it’s an entire universe in itself. You have to build the testing tools.

You have to build the feedback mechanisms. You have to build a lot of elements. But without that, nothing else is going to work.

I mean, if there is no demand-side pressure, why would the supply-side ever change?

Speaker 4: Yes.

Speaker 8: You said that focus should be more on the education rather than on the infrastructure. You work on the field, but you have better information than me. But based on my personal experience, the thing is there aren’t many enough schools, enough to choose from.

If you look at a parent, most parents are worried if they will get a seat in a school. Rather than thinking, oh, I have so many choices or something like that.

Gautam John: You’re talking about private education, right? Yeah.

Speaker 8: Even in a government school, I don’t think so. In a particular area, actually, if you look at the people living in that area, if you don’t know how to travel, the number of choices available are very less.

Gautam John: So can I answer that two ways, right? First is, I don’t know about Tamil Nadu specifically. There is a huge difference between urban and rural.

For example, in Chennai city, within one kilometer radius, you will have a choice of more than five schools. Whereas if you go to rural Tamil Nadu, within a one kilometer radius, you will have a choice of one school. That is definitely an urban-rural divide.

The second thing is, if you look at education as a fundamental right, how do you approach it, right? The first thing to me is that every child should have access to a school. The second order problem is that every child should have access to multiple schools and make a choice.

We are still in the stage of where we’re saying every child should have access to a school. In cases where they have access to multiple schools, they should be able to have a choice. In cases where there aren’t multiple schools, what do we do to enable multiple schools and all that is regulatory.

So it’s a graded problem. I agree with you that there might not really be choice, but what I’m saying is you need to look at multiple factors, remove the regulatory barriers to allow more choice, remove the fact that the government will pay for your education, but only if you go to my school. So there are multiple elements in that piece.

It’s not a single point. Can I just come back to you? How much time do I have?

Five minutes. Okay, we can take a few questions.

Speaker 6: Since the topic is initiatives or incentives to promote primary education, I just want to clarify if anybody has heard of the government incentivizing private chains of schools. For example, we are sitting in a building which is promoted by IT for private people to run businesses. And across the road, we are sitting here in the same model where the government is incentivizing private people to start businesses.

So considering the scale of the problem, should we be having a massive influx of parents into the private schooling? I don’t know whether I can agree with the assessment that parents are satisfied with schooling. They obviously see benefits of free schooling, but even in a low-cost private school, I feel like probably people will be more than 80% for private schools.

Gautam John: I completely agree with you. In pretty much any survey you look at, where a parent can afford a low-cost private school and has a choice of a public school, they will choose to send them to a low-cost private school. There is an intrinsic value that is associated with cost that may or may not be true.

But nonetheless, I am paying for something, therefore I can demand something. And there are lots of anecdotal stories around this that are fantastic. For example, there was a story about this parent who went into a low-cost private school and screamed at the teacher saying, my child is failing, why isn’t he studying?

And the headmaster said, you know what, the child has got to study at home as well. You have got to ensure that the child is studying at home. The father looked at the principal and said, listen, I am paying you money, you make sure he studies.

It is very different. There are very different ways of approaching the problem. To answer your first question, I don’t know of anything directly.

There are government-aided schools, so you can set up a private school and get some amount of government funding. But there are lots of regulatory issues there as well, especially in Karnataka in terms of the medium of instruction. The market all wants English-medium schools.

In Karnataka, the language policy is a little bit more tricky, so it is much harder to start an English-medium school and much easier to start a Kannada-medium school. But a pure play, you know, incubation of private schools that I haven’t heard of, the idea that I am mooting is that you don’t fund the private schools, but you allow these private schools to exist and say that we will not give you money, we will give the parents the ability to make these choices, and they will have the money. One second, sorry, I am just going back.

Yes.

Speaker 2: I have just one line answer for you. The governments, Indian government, various state governments are busy punishing existing private schools. Also true.

Speaker 11: Is that the answer?

Gautam John: Sorry, one second.

Speaker 7: Sir, I understand that you have been focusing more on the structural problems of education in the primary level. How far can you extrapolate your findings to the empowered people of states? I mean, you have been working To the?

Empowered people of states, do you feel has now been higher? Because the problem, the field you are working on, the states, they are supposed to be the better half in education and human development in India.

Gautam John: So, you know, if you look at what are traditionally called the Bimaru states, right?

Speaker 7: Not the Bimaru, the empowered people. So, I don’t know what the empowered people, I apologize for my… They are the eight states where the government is focusing on the development of human development in India.

Gautam John: So, what are the eight states?

Speaker 7: They are focusing, not the problem.

Speaker 2: No, which eight states are these? Which eight states?

Speaker 7: Okay, they are Uttar Pradesh, Delhi-Khat, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh. They are basically the northern look of states.

Gautam John: The problems are more severe. So, it’s actually really interesting to look at because if you look at Chhattisgarh, at least Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which I’ve looked at, there’s been a remarkable growth in their learning outcomes over the last few years. A lot of this has to do with the fact that they started from a very small base, so the improvements are far larger, but also that Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, for example, are newer states.

And I had always, in my mind, I had always attributed to various other factors, but what you say makes sense. I can see the learning outcomes. There very well might be a correlation with what you talk about, but I don’t know for sure.

Speaker 13: So, you don’t have any data?

Gautam John: No, I don’t. I’m sorry, I haven’t looked at it. Can I just come back around for a second?

Sorry, how much time do we have? Last question.

Speaker 2: Last question, okay. Talking about the demand-side from parents, I think you did a bit of work in Tamil Nadu in the rural schools. We find that there’s a crying need for creating awareness among the particularly first-generation parents because the kind of things that are going on sort of in the name of learning, because even good, well-intentioned private school administrators are forced to adopt practices which have nothing to do with learning, are nothing to do with education, you know, as a whole.

We ask people, school administrators in very poor kind of neighborhoods, villages where there are hardly sort of 400 hamlets. So, why do you need a tie for children? Why do you need a shoe?

Why do you need all these things? And last time I went, they introduced an icon. So, I said, you know, every day, every day, I said, why do you need an icon?

They said, if I don’t have this, they will prefer some other school. They will go to some other school. This is what they consider learning.

Ultimately, we find children using the tie for wiping their faces. There’s nothing else. The focus on quality is completely missed.

Second is, a happy child returning home is seen to be a problem. So, we had to have parental conferences last month in some places where we had to tell parents that a happy child who sleeps well in 10 seconds is perfectly all right. They say that there’s something wrong with your child.

The child is sleeping and eating well. What is wrong with him?

Gautam John: You know, I fully agree with you. From the little work I’ve done on demand side, it’s an entire universe, it’s an entire universe in itself that the awareness building and all of that is in the campaign mode. So, it’s not a one, two, three-year problem to fix.

It’s a decade-old problem to fix. But to reiterate what the gentleman in the morning said, I think we have one generation to fix this because otherwise this demographic dividend is going to turn out to be more of a demographic problem. Thank you.

I think that’s all we have time for. Thank you.

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Recorded at the Takshashila Shala, Chennai 2011. Published on 21 July 2013. View on YouTube →