How do you define a “good” teacher?

Measuring teacher’s effectiveness has been one of the most challenging, yet important issue that governments, private and public schools across the world is trying to tackle.

The Karnataka State’s department of primary and secondary education has prepared personalized report cards for teachers in government and aided schools based on the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate or the 10^th exams) that was conducted in May 2018. This report card is based on how the class fared in board exams and would be given a score between 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. They would also be categorized into 4 slots: Very good, good, average & below average. This evaluation measure also considers the number of students taught during the year, the pass percentage & the average marks of the class. Now this opens the room for a whole new debate – is this the right evaluation technique? Is correlating the class of students’ performance in the final board exam to the teachers’ effectiveness the right approach?

Graduating from “Access to Education” to “Access to Quality Education”

Without digressing into how the Indian Education system has been in shambles since 1947 and how the bad policies are throttling the system year on year, we know that the general narrative has now shifted to access to good education and not simply education anymore. Indian families that send all their children to private schools spend over 4 percent of their total expenditure more on education than a similar household which sends all its children on public school. It’s a 60% increase above the average education expenditure and this is financed by a reduction of expenditure on food, healthcare and entertainment among others.[1] The rhetoric around education claims that it is the best human capital investment individuals and government can make. Thus, it becomes important to know what the return on education is, for the individuals to make better informed choices, increasing the individual freedom and empowering them. Most families believe that Private Schools have a better return on investment (quality of education) compared to government schools.[2]

Teacher’s role in a student’s success

Studies have shown that teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.[3] While external factors like the family circumstances or personal characteristics have higher impact on the student achievement, most policies focus on improving teacher’s effectiveness since it’s easier to control. Measuring teacher’s impact has been a bone of contention for several years across education specialists, since measuring “impact” has been a tricky business. Karnataka government’s plan to release a “Teacher Report Card” is yet another attempt to jump into this business, but this method is utterly flawed. Why? Well,

a)       Students start out at different levels, so growth in their scores over a period is a better basis for judging teacher effectiveness.

b)      Studies have shown that external factors like health, neighborhood, family have between 4 to 8 times more influence on student’s scores.

c)       If a student had more than one teacher in a single subject that year, it would be hard to zero in on the teacher’s contribution to the student’s learning.

d)      Important skills can be underrepresented in or excluded in board exams. Final board exams do not fully assess the student’s grasp of higher order skills, interest in subject, academic curiosity which are essential components that decide the fate of the student’s academic path.

e)      Unintended consequence: This would not reflect the actual ground impact and could demoralize the teachers, creating more harm than good.

There are several other techniques such as Value-Added Model, Student Growth Percentile techniques used to measure the impact. They’re highly data driven methods and though not perfect, they pave way to better understanding the role of the teacher in the student’s learning outcome.

Value Added Modeling:

VAMs capture the teacher’s effectiveness over a period, thus holding the teacher accountable for consistent performance. This means focusing not on how students test at a single point in time but rather on how much improvement they make from one testing period to the next.

The model works as follows:

If a teacher A teaches grade 6 math, statisticians obtain grade 4 & 5 test scores of all her students, as well as background information. Using this historical data, prediction of grade 6 math scores will be made for each of the student. If student A, scores 5 points more than the predicted score and student B, scores 2 points below the predicted score, Teacher A’s value-added estimate will be average of the difference between the actual & predicted score of the students.

Since VAMs consider the previous test scores and the background of the student, one teacher’s value-added estimate can be compared to another and be ranked accordingly. (teachers teaching the same subject, same grade).This method is largely used by several states in the US and is also actively being adopted by states during recent times.[4]

Conclusion:

Teaching is a complex activity and cannot have just a single method used to measure the effectiveness. Using multiple measures to assess the many aspects of teaching effectiveness as completely as possible and providing teachers with detailed information to help them understand their strengths and weaknesses would help in building knowledge about best practices across the teaching community. Karnataka state department’s decision at building a teacher’s report card to build a culture of sharing best practices among teachers is a welcome move, but the means to develop such a report card must be rethought and carefully analyzed.

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[1] http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2018/aug/25/families-cut-food-entertainment-expenses-to-send-kids-to-private-schools-research-1862728.html

[2] http://2010.economicsofeducation.com/user/pdfsesiones/042.pdf

[3] https://www.rand.org/education/projects/measuring-teacher-effectiveness/teachers-matter.html

[4]https://www.rand.org/education-and-labor/projects/measuring-teacher-effectiveness/value-added-modeling.html 

Is this the kind of planet we want to leave behind?

Latest UN study says we have 12 years to prevent the world from an environmental catastrophe

11 months ago, Om, my nephew was born. Almost every morning since then, I spend at least a good ten minutes staring at his pictures & videos, where he innocently tries to explore his surroundings and learn more about the little world around him. The past 11 months have swooshed by and I can’t get enough of him and the rate at which he’s growing. But the past couple of days have been disconcerting. A few days ago, I woke up in the morning to read an article about the latest UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change) report. Since then, I can’t stop beating myself about the sort of planet you and I, together, are leaving behind for Om and his other friends. I cannot stop obsessing about the impending danger this brings to everyone and everything we love. I cannot seem to wrap my head around the scale of this problem. So, this post is my attempt to understanding what this means for India.

IPCC report & its takeaways

Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change, a UN committee says the Paris Climate agreement, made in 2015 – to reduce greenhouse emissions, maintaining the global warming from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is simply not enough. It says, we would require a 40-50% of reductions in emissions by 2030. This may seem impossible, but the report leaves us with hope. It talks at length about ways in which we can cap this situation through use of technology.

India: The biggest loser

Social cost of carbon (SCC) is a policy tool which is being used to attach a monetary value to the societal damages caused by the emission of every ton of carbon. It captures the loss of productivity due to extreme heat, loss of agricultural produce and other outcomes which impact the lives of people negatively. Though an imperfect tool, it helps us in gauging the costs and benefits and the way we need to adopt to fight climate change.

Research shows that India loses the most in the world due to climate change – up to $86 for every ton of carbon emission. This means that India loses $210 billion annually at current emission rates. US is behind, losing $48 per ton. With so much to lose, we cannot sit on our hands waiting for the disaster to strike. Another interesting find is that, how climate change results in negative social cost of carbon for countries like Russia, i.e they gain as the world gets hotter. Some countries pay a higher economic cost than the rest. But one ton of carbon emission contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. Thus, as countries come together to set regulations to check the damages caused, they should all be equally responsible to share the load, without just focusing on the SCC of their own.

 

Collective conscience: The only way to make the world a better place to live

India emits 6% of the global greenhouse gases and will bear almost 20% of the global economic burden because of climate change. Most wealthy countries are almost balanced in terms of the high SCC and its greenhouse gas emissions. This sort of injustice can only be resolved by ensuring India does its best in cutting its carbon footprint through many ways which have been elaborately discussed by scientists in the past (also beyond the scope of this article). It’s also time we sit up and start pushing our neighbours and other wealthy countries to bring down their emissions, which is what Paris climate agreement attempts to do. Though some of the wealthy nations have very little incentive to do so economically, morally, all the countries owe this to our future generations. 

It is immoral to leave a place worse off than the one we grew up in. It is nearly impossible for ordinary people like us to envisage the sort of changes a 2 degree increase in climate can do, because we take so much for granted. We are so used to the status quo, we are ignorant and in denial about the impact it can make to our lives, in less than 15 years! Though we all talk about how hot the world is getting, there is nearly nothing we are doing on a day-to-day basis to change our practices. This is exactly what scares me. If we do not change our lifestyles and adopt the idea of being environmentally more conscious, how do we even hope this problem to get any smaller? I hope to see a day where everyone around us lead their everyday lives trying to make their surrounding a cleaner, healthier place to live in. Till then, I guess this will continue to trouble me.

References:

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17897614/climate-change-social-cost-carbon

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24092018/climate-change-economic-damage-america-social-cost-carbon-china-india-russia

https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange/social-cost-carbon_.html

"Parks & Recreation" shows us how to fix our education system

How Leslie Knope’s ideas of management can change the way our Indian higher education system operates

A hearty shout out to all the Parks & Rec fans out there! I’m sure everyone who has watched the awesome TV show, would agree with me on this -beneath all the silly, sometimes-mindless comedy, it is a show that leaves you thinking about how to lead a good life filled with passion, goals and just pure zest. Every time I watch it, I’m left thinking about it with an entirely new perspective. This time, I figured there were so many simple, yet powerful messages a few episodes sent across and they strongly resonated with me.

So, this post is my attempt at breaking down the different elements of what makes this show so fantastic & how we can think about how implementing some of these principles into our education system. Why education, you ask? Well, because it needs some heavy-lifting now more than ever & it’s high time we address it. 

“Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing”

 Ron Swanson gives Leslie this piece of advice when she finds herself juggling between various assignments, her work with the Parks & Rec department & running for city council. 

Lesson for the education system: #1

The Central government & the State government are always locking horns about funding, quality, access of education. They are hardly ever on the same page about what the priority is.

Education, a subject of national importance has been a concurrent subject since 1950. Higher education is a subject of shared responsibility of the State and the Centre. But they have always exercised these responsibilities in different areas. While the Central government paid attention to quality higher education, the State governments have stressed upon expansion of access rather than on quality. Producing less expensive and low-quality higher education institutes to increase access have been proven to be more politically rewarding for the State governments. Due to budgetary constraints, coupled with popular pressures, states push for expansion of higher education institutions. The asymmetry of the federal system has led to a constant friction between the Centre and the State about the utilization of funds and misplaced priorities. While both quantity & quality are of equal importance for a fast-growing education sector like ours, it is of paramount importance for both the entities to work to prioritize, plan & execute.

Meaningful partnership. Always.

Almost every single episode in the show talks about team effort, identifying strengths & simply the joy that comes out of working together.

Lesson for the education system: #2:

While the Central government complains that states are not doing enough to implement the national programmes such as universal elementary education or allocation of 6% of GDP to education, the state governments complain about how they are strong-handed into implementing uniform schemes, restricting the need for tailoring to the local needs. Although this has brought down the inter-state disparities with respect to per capita expenditure and enrollment ratio, the inequalities remain high. Our constitution strengthens the role of the Central government, despite Education being a concurrent subject. In contrast, the US constitution declares Education to be a state subject. Even in the absence of any constitutional obligation for this purpose, the federal government takes definitive interest in making scholarships & fellowships available in Higher education & for improvement of teacher education. The federal aid is given without any federal control. This is the meaningful partnership which needs to be advocated in case of Indian Higher education system too.

Keeping the community in mind

The show shows us the sort of positive impact people in the local government can make if it is empowered and given the right resources to operate. It shows us how enforcing useful programs/policies such as soda tax, sex education was staunchly opposed, hence proving the need & preferences of the community plays a vital role in creating any program.

Lesson for the education system: #3

A subject such as higher education is highly community-oriented. Research in the US have shown that, policies related to education need to be stitched based on 4 distinct factors – Educational load, ability, effort & achievement. Educational load - denotes the number of children to be educated per 1000 of population. Ability – like the name states, is the ability of the community to support education, measured by their taxable capacity. Effort – It is the percentage of its taxable capacity spent on education. Achievement – it is measured by the standard of education. Thus, the variations are high between villages, cities & states. Thus, blanket education schemes across the country will not yield the intended results. Ideally, the State government must use these metrics to create its own education packages for its districts. The funding provided by the Central government should be carefully calibrated on these metrics, to equalize education across the country. The Central government should only nudge the States to think along these lines by providing achievable targets & incentives to reach the targets. This bottom-up approach empowers the local government & the State government to make their own decisions & navigate towards their end goal at their own pace.

Conclusion

30 million students, 40,760 colleges and 757 universities. Let those numbers sink in for a while. That’s how large the Indian Higher education system is – the third largest in the world. The student population was much lower than 200,000 in 1947. In 6 decades, it has grown more than 150 times. “Explosive growth”, you say? Despite that, only 23.6% of the Indian 18-23 age-group have access to education or choose to pursue higher education. We’re on the path to equalizing education, but we still have a long journey ahead of us. Like Leslie Knope, it is quintessential to never lose sight of the goal and work relentlessly towards it. Parks & Rec gives you a lot more than laughter, it reminds you of your priorities and inspires you to do the right thing! Ought to take a lesson or two from it!

References:
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/JPNaik_01.pdf
http://www.nuepa.org/New/download/Publications/Occasional_Paper-50_Prof.JBGTilak.pdf

International Student Assessment, 2021 : Our moment of truth!

2021 is set to mark an end to the decade-long boycott of the Program of International Student Assessment. Why is this more than just another exam taken by students and why should we spend more time and resources preparing ourselves for this?

16,000 students from 400 schools across Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu appeared for PISA (Programme for International  Student Assessment) in 2009. The results? – Not encouraging at all. India was placed 72^nd out of 74 countries that participated. China also a first timer, topped the assessment in math and science with Shanghai schools. The outcome of these results? – India pulled out of the testing blaming the “out of context” questions. But after 9 years, India has finally decided to sign up for PISA testing, hoping to score better than the last time after requesting OECD to conduct PISA like assessment tests across Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas.

While appearing for this international student assessment is a welcome move, it is important to take this more seriously than we did the last time. There have been quite a few discussions about how the 2009 participation was just a litmus test and how India would have fared better if Shanghai equivalent of India such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc had taken part in PISA. But it is also true that the Indian education system is broken and it’s better late than never to come to terms with that. Complaining about how the test isn’t tailored keeping India’s culture in mind is just cowardice pretending to be logic.

If disturbing revelations from ASER, Educational initiatives year on year about the learning outcomes of students across the country have not been enough for the government and NCERT to sit up and take notice, perhaps an international assessment like PISA could tell us what we already know and bring the changes we are all hoping for a long long time.

What is PISA? What does it measure?

Programme for International  Student Assessment was introduced by Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation in 2000. It mainly focuses on 15-year old students’ reading, mathematics and science literacy every three years. It also includes an optional section for financial literacy and collaborative problem solving. It is used to assess the functional skills that students have acquired at the end of compulsory schooling. It is a good measure to assess to what extent students have attained skills essential for full participation in the society. PISA’s goal has been to evaluate performance of systems, how experts can measure the end-goals of education system and to generate better processes to collect new data across systems.

The results of such international assessments is vital to India’s growth, undoubtedly. This is why:

We have always believed that Indian students are good at math. Even President Obama had mentioned how the American schools were under threat from India. But TN/HP math results of PISA showed us that the best of the states’ students were 24 points behind average American 15 year old. The best performers in TN/HP were 100 points the average child in Singapore and 83 points behind the average Korean student.[1]

Well, I agree TN & HP alone isn’t a fair sample here, but the story the data tells us here is staggering. The major takeway from this “litmus test” should have been how we can use this assessment to our benefit and not shy away from participation in the future – which India failed to do.

PISA – The gold standard

PISA has been used as the gold standard for evaluation of the performance of education system. Its high credibility has led to many important education reforms in the West. PISA results in addition to the public pressure and the media’s attention to the results has prompted countries like Germany, Denmark, Japan to open up the stage to policy reforms in education. Germany after PISA 2000, pushed for intense debate over the then education scenario which led to significant reform measures including coming up with national standards and laying down a better support structure for the disadvantaged students and immigrants. Similarly Japan brought changes to its national assessment practices and important curriculum changes to catch up with the growing world.[2]

The flip side – What to look out for, after entering the PISA playfield

Participating in PISA means no more place to hide. Our education system will be out in the open to be judged and measured against the other OECD nations that sign up for this. Educational outcomes are complicated to be tracked over time. The country report card that PISA produces can put the policy makers under intense pressure to improve the score, incentivizing them to focus on the optics rather than actual, systemic change. Thus, PISA outcomes must only be used as a measure than quantifies complex educational outcomes into simplified metrics that can give us the general sense of trends and the gaps in learning. Using the PISA scores to reduce the percentage of students who are below proficiency Level 2(baseline proficiency level), brainstorming methods to reach 500 PISA points (OECD average) would be the path to take. It’s important not to get carried away by the rank, like we’re doing with the World bank’s ease of doing business global ranking.

The perfect window of opportunity

An external shock such as PISA outcomes can be exactly what India’s struggling educational sector needs now. With this external shock will come the perfect window of opportunity to gather enough people to make noise about this and push for the reforms for a better learning environment and methods. With this, we will have a better system in place to trade best educational practices with other countries. PISA results bring hope, since over the years it has shown that poor performance in school does not automatically follow from a disadvantaged economic background. It also shows that it is possible to achieve strong educational performance over short periods of time. Thus, it is critical that India makes a policy shift from educational inputs to learning outcomes to better prepare the young. PISA would nudge us in the right direction, break us out of our cocoon and put us in our place. We might not like what we see, but that’s the only way to learn.    

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[1] https://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-pisa-results-for-india-end-of.html?_sm_au_=iVVs6N21PPfZ7j4Q

[2] http://simonbreakspear.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Breakspear-PISA-Paper.pdf

I had a dream..

Last night I had a particularly strange dream. I dreamed that I was in an exam hall, holding a pencil in my hand, staring at what looked like a blurry piece of paper before me. I remember being nervous, sweaty palmed and truly worried about the results. Clearly, it wasn’t an exam I was prepared to write! But then when I woke up, I couldn’t shake off the thoughts about the dream. I realized that throughout my school years, I had always found post-exams-waiting-for-the-results phase nerve-wrecking and strangely unsettling. It got me thinking about the exams we were all made to write as children in school and how I now think those exams could have been better tailored to measure my understanding in the subject, rather than just testing me on my ability to memorize what was in the text books. I think about how much the “syllabus completion” aspect was more important than me knowing what the subject was about. I think about how I was made to study history, civics, geography when I had difficulty following what some words meant in the text book. I think about how I had difficulties in picking up English during my early primary school days and how insecure that used to make me feel. I think about my slow math days and how I used to hate homework. I’m lucky I had help then, else I wouldn’t have certainly grown up to be a confident person that I am today.

That gets me thinking about the state of education and students in India today.  ASER Center releases The Annual Status of Education report every year. The below infographic are some quick takeaways from the ASER 2016 & 2017 report.

The Wire’s analysis on the state of enrolment over the years shows the following: 

This disturbing piece of information about how the quality of learning has deteriorated over the years despite the increase in the rate of enrolment shows us that the government policy which does not allow schools to fail students until grade 8 is clearly responsible for this sorry state of affairs. But I am not writing today to comment on those policies. Reading about all this got me thinking about another article I’d read about the other day. It was about how India aims at becoming a 6 Trillion USD economy in 10 years and how this is mostly driven by the digitization initiative. As vague as I think this plan was and how the goal wasn’t more well-defined, I thought this was commendable. But the truth is no matter how we hard we try to accelerate our current economic growth using technology, this goal is a myth if we don’t take the importance of quality education earnestly.

By 2030, India will have 600 million youth. This is nearly 7.9% of the world’s population. India is set out to have the highest youth population in the world when other countries like China and the US are estimated to have the elderly population outnumber the youth. While this is surely a promising statistic in India’s favor and how our productive section of the society is set out to grow in the coming years, multiple blogs, news reports about the concerns of employability of the youth paints a dark shade of worry to this issue. The rate of youth leaving India has seen a 225% increase between 1999 to 2015 for education, work or permanently. There are discussions and programs in place for better quality higher education and this is a step in the right direction. However, it’s also of grave importance to open up more discussions about primary education. Who are we helping if we cannot get more students to stay enrolled after 8^th grade? By just focusing on improving the higher education sector, we’ll end up increasing the inequality gap and leave a large section of the society feeling marginalized. Leaving a section of the society neglected, is not just an economic issue, but also an issue of national security. It’s dangerous to not focus on both the issues at the same time and take incremental steps to make structural reforms to both primary and higher education at the same time. While still battling with the issue of keeping children in school, we also need to adopt better tools for performance measurement at primary level. While organizations like Educational initiative have been doing an admirable job in ensuring students learn with understanding, we need more initiatives in this area.

First step to identify the gaps is to be able to have enough data to carry out these analyses on. ASER 2017 report was built on highly complex data generated at district level (24 states, 26 districts, 23,868 households and 28,323 youths). Collecting data in more granularity will help us understand the picture in greater detail and help fix broken policies such as RTE. Though the intentions of most such policies have been great, the outcome doesn’t quite show us the sort of positive impact we were promised it would have. 

Yes, I do not have all the answers here. And I have way too many scattered thoughts about this subject since it is dear to me. Well, I hope that there is a silver bullet that would fix all these issues. Till we all find that silver bullet, here's what we need to do - have a dialogue about this. Till then, we need to brainstorm new ways to fix this problem. Till then, we need to be brave to accept the fact that our children have indeed fallen behind and it’s time to help them launch themselves into being more self-confident, curious adults.

Are we looking at the metrics that measure Quality education all wrong?

Education system is highly complex. Small data can fix gaps. But is that enough? 

Last year I got a fantastic opportunity to visit the United Nations Headquarters in NYC.  As I visited the different chambers where many resolutions have been passed over the years, the budding policy wonk in me was hungry to learn more. UNICEF’s “School-in-a-box” kit which is used as a back-to-school operation around the world got me thinking about the education system and about the different variables used to quantify quality education in developing countries.

Big Data in educational reform and its impact

In an article in The Washington Post, “’Big Data’ was supposed to fix education. It didn’t. It’s time for ‘small data’”, the author talks about how Big Data has only helped reveal correlations between the various factors and not causality. Thus systemic improvements in the education system by using this information is not as useful as we may want it to be. Since education system is complex by nature, small data that captures the essence of learning and teaching in the classroom is what would eventually assist in making more effective policies.

Sustainable development goals (SDG) and Quality education

The 2030 Agenda created by UN has 17 goals. The 4^th goal being Quality Education has set most developing countries on the right path to incrementally achieve this goal. Various programs undertaken by Global Partnership for Education has resulted in an increase of youth literacy from 71% in 2000-05 to 75% in 2008-13. World Bank’s SABER ( Systems Approach to Better Education Results) program helps identify where individual countries need most interventions by collecting data on educational institutions and policies. Knowledge integration of data collected by these programs will be challenging, but will prove to be powerful in gauging the extent of improvement of these systems over the years. It would also help in identifying the crucial indicators for building a robust educational system.

SDG Target: “Equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to effective learning outcomes”

In order to reach one of the targets set by the UN, it is vital to have quality data in order to make effective decisions to enforce the best practices thus improving the system. But how does one decide the metrics for this data? Various studies carried out by US Department of Education suggest that Teacher Assignment, Teacher Experience, Teacher Academic Skills, Class size, Technology, Academic Development, Goals, School Leadership among many others are used as quality measures. Another paper published by National Center for Education Statistics explains about using measures like Graduation rates, Proportion of students graduated without delay, drop-out rates, % of unemployed and so on. While using all these parameters may be one way to measure the quality, are we missing out on data points that may be unique to communities? Is there a danger of way too much generalization through the above mentioned metrics that cloud our abilities to understand the true underlying ground realities? We all do agree that we cannot compare the education systems of developing countries with those of the developed countries. Then is there more we can do in terms of quality data collection and additional metrics we can use specifically for developing countries?

Pulse of Education system in Developing countries

“Learning Unleashed” an Economist article mentions that the number of private schools have increased substantially over the years in developing nations. A large section of the society has preferred private schools over public schools due to poor infrastructure, quality of education in public schools. Lack of competition have left these public schools high and dry with no incentive for improvement. So it may be meaningful to identify metrics that measure competition in our data collection that contributes in an indirect yet significant way to quality education.

Along with variables that intend to capture the qualitative information about the internal school environment, we must also pay attention to the external environment. One can measure competition by geo-spatially mapping different schools in the surroundings, identifying if they’re private or public, funding for the schools and cost incurred per student.

Studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between quality education and diversity in schools. In most developing countries, public schools are mostly attended by children that belong to low-income groups and private schools by the higher income groups. Although, most schools now try to include children from all strata of the society, the students do not feel socially included leading to below average performance. Thus “socially-inclusive” variable is an important one in better understanding the quality of education.

Data about the surrounding physical condition of the school is a crucial factor too. Cleanliness and safety must be captured with the rest of the data points.

Changing reforms with changing times

While quality data collection has an undeniable role in making a positive impact in this field, suitable policies and reforms must be enforced making use of the inferences obtained from the collected data. Since private schools are preferred, it may be a good move to incentivize the private sector to invest in public schools. Developing countries like India have created a barrier to market entry by making land ownership a pre-requisite for building a school. Thus entrepreneurs with low capital with a drive to build schools lose opportunities.

It may also be a good move to allocate precise and limited number of responsibilities to primary school teachers with specific targets. For example, by ensuring a primary school teacher concentrates on improving only the reading skills of the students, it will be easy to keep track of the progress.

There’s a long way to go before the education system gets fixed for good. Good quality data, data analysis married to timely policy reforms can accelerate this process. Data alone is no silver bullet!

References:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001030.pdf

http://www.globalgoals.org/global-goals/quality-education/

http://wbgfiles.worldbank.org/documents/hdn/ed/saber/supporting_doc/in_actions/SABER_in_Action_Nigeria.pdf

http://www.globalpartnership.org/focus-areas/learning-outcomes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/05/09/big-data-was-supposed-to-fix-education-it-didnt-its-time-for-small-data/?utm_term=.e5304f541b29

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21660063-where-governments-are-failing-provide-youngsters-decent-education-private-sector

In the middle

Being a 25 year old, around 90% of the people I meet, range between 22-35 years of age. Though the sample size is inadequate to extrapolate and make general statements, I am drawing my observations in this post, gathered over a bunch of such interactions over the past 6-7 years.  

About 80% of the people I meet, read about, follow on social media are either very strongly opinionated or have no opinions at all. People either care too much or too little. People either complain constantly or are complacent. People are either too optimistic or have lost all hope. People call themselves liberals or conservatives. So, the questions I keep asking myself is, “Why aren’t we in the middle?”, “Is it alright to have such extremities?” and “Is it possible to be a little bit of both?”

These interactions about a myriad of topics ranging from geo-politics to childhood cartoons and deep learning algorithms to Roman civilization has taught me a little bit about people’s personalities and how people draw their satisfaction from being proven right. Now this is something we all know and I’m no pundit on human behavior or psychology. But it’s something that deeply fascinates me. And learning what makes each of us tick could help us find the answer to why we aren’t in the middle. So, I went through the following phases to analyze this.

Phase 1: Self analysis:

I try quite hard to be in the middle. Not have extreme opinions on anything. When I hear a story, read an article or absorb any piece of information, I try to take it with a pinch of salt and skepticism. I try to consume the same information from various sources. But during this process of self analysis, I inferred something quite significant. I realized how I had made no attempt to express my thoughts, opinions out in the open. And no other better way than to pen them down. Now you know why you’re reading about this, don’t you?

Phase 2: Learn about the source:

I started out an experiment where I started asking people where they consumed their news and other information from. While it helped me learn a good deal about their preferences, I also understood why they believed what they believed in. In this era of fake news and alternative facts, I tried to ask them how much they believed in what they read. Though most people didn’t entirely rely on what they read or watched, they seemed to be influenced by it in some way or the other.  

Phase 3: Learn why they think it’s right:

Certain life experiences drive people to have certain biases towards/against a certain process, race, gender and so on. What I learned is that - something new that follows intuition and supports the biases overrules logic most times. Regardless of how hard one tries to disassociate oneself and their preconceived notion with the newly learned piece of information, they generally tend to formulate their opinion based on this information that transitions into a fact in the head. And once a fact, it becomes quite hard (not impossible) to unlearn it.

Phase 4: What’s next after the fact is established? :

Humans have an incessant need to be proven right at all times. We all try our level best trying to show our friends, relatives, colleagues how our opinions (which we consider facts) are almost always right. While the streak of modesty in us tries to remind us of all the possible ways our logic could be failing us, we still don’t take a step back and think. And every time we desperately try to prove to someone why what we think is correct, we also try to prove the other person wrong. We stop listening and we impose. This is where I believe the nature of extremity crawls in. At the time of information consumption, we are all in the middle. We are learning something we do not know, it’s all new. Once it transitions as a fact and we want to convince someone else why we think we’re right, we push ourselves into believing that it’s the only single truth ever known to mankind and how every one else who thinks otherwise, is an idiot.

These 4 phases didn’t entirely help me arrive at any specific conclusions about the questions I had. I’m still in the process of understanding why being in the middle is important to me. Whatever we learn, we learn from nature. While extreme ecosystems does support life, what we know from science is moderate ecosystem is what lets life grow and expand. From the fear of getting too philosophical and preachy, I’d like to stop my first post with the question I’d posed somewhere in the middle (Haha, you see that?) of my post – “Why aren’t we in the middle?”