A Listening Device

Karnataka Learning Parternship is planning to launch a new version of our website next mong (April 2010). This new website will include a space for teachers, students, HMs, and other members of the community to share stories of their visits to government primary schools and Anganwadi centres. KLP's "Share Your Story" section, which will increase access to information about schools, and an opportunity to learn about others' perspectives on individual schools, will make our education system more transparent.

A similar initiative, called Open Data, is currently being introduced by the United States government. This is what Development Marketplace at the World Bank had to say about it:

[Author: Aleem Walji]

A couple of nights ago, I went to listen to Anil Dash, founder of Experts Labs in Washington, DC. The title of the talk intrigued me. How Dot.Gov is the new Dot.com.

Given my interest in Open Government and Transparency, I assumed Anil would talk about new business models and how the private sector is well positioned to create social and economic value from datasets that public bodies release. But I was entirely wrong. Although I believe strongly that clean and comparable datasets are an essential raw material for the visualization and creative community to create powerful citizen-facing apps, Anil's point was entirely different and more powerful.

The two-way or interactive web that surfaced around 2004 in the private sector was about a fundamentally new way of interacting with users. It provided businesses an opportunity to dialogue with customers and listen to users' comments, needs, and feedback in much more efficient ways.

Has that day come for Governance? Through data.gov and recovery.gov in the U.S., public agencies are able to not only broadcast information to citizens but also listen to what they have to say. What are their priorities, pain points, and the issues they care most about? How would they go about solving pressing policy problems and how do they think politicians and policy makers are doing?

Is this a new day for social accountability, data sharing, and collaborative governance? I'm not sure where this will go, but I can't help but think that public and international institutions should take notice. Open Data is not just about sharing what you know but listening to what people have to say about it, seeking their feedback, and ultimately making better decisions.

Imagine a day when our most difficult and seemingly intractable social problems are solved not by the smartest person in the room but by a group of concerned and engaged citizens who engage with a policy maker to make the best decision possible.

Welcome to Dot.Gov 2.0.

Will English become India’s weakness?

Via livemint.com

The Union government has itself recognized English as a vehicle of economic expansion and is moving to bridge the divide between those who speak it and those who don’t.

Intellectuals view English as the “link language” India needs to be on the same wavelength as other countries on a host of common global concerns.

But not everyone believes English is a cure-all. British linguist David Graddol argues in his soon-to-be-launched book English Next India that forcing primary school children to learn everything in a language that is not their mother tongue will only breed an under-educated generation. He recommends that English-medium teaching should begin only at the secondary level.

Historians see the introduction of English in India by British administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835 as an attempt to create a class of interpreters to do business in the colony.

Since then, English has come to be seen as the language of opportunity, and the number of English speakers has kept on rising. Some 191,000 Indians returned the language as their mother tongue, the language first learnt by a person, or the native language, in the 1971 census. Thirty years later, the number had increased to 226,000. The increase of English speakers from 1991 to 2001 was almost 27%.

Plugging the hole

Nonetheless, the spread of the language remains limited. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2009, released by Pratham—the largest non-governmental organization in the education sector— shows only 43.8% of students in class I could read the English alphabet, even in upper case.

“The whole task of trying to teach English in government schools is an incredibly difficult one. It’s still a mystery to me why people study English when they cannot speak it. If you continue, you will have another generation coming out of schools which didn’t study other subjects properly because you put children prematurely in an English-medium school,’’ he says.

The new book argues that the advantage offered by its large population of English speakers, which has given India an edge over other developing countries until now, will be neutralized in the coming years.

ASER reports, released annually since 2004, have also pointed out a drop in learning levels in schools. Various other studies, including a 2008 report by software lobby group Nasscom, have shown only 10-15% graduates are “employable” in business services and only 26% engineers in technical services due to educational deficiencies.

Graddol suggests using the mother tongue at the primary level and adopting English as a medium of instruction only at the secondary level to ensure that the learning process is meaningful.

He also says consolidating multilingualism could be India’s strength and recommends a three-language formula codified in 1968. The formula promoted primary education in the mother tongue and the teaching of English, Hindi as well as other regional languages at the secondary level.

Read the entire article here.

Image Source : Julie70

Anganwadi Newsletter

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National Seminar on Right to Education: Prospects and Challenges, Bareilly

Via Chintan

There is a huge reason to look forward and celebrate the implementation of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act in mid of this year. The RTE was billed to be a giant leap towards universalization of education in India. But we could see a large number of issues to surface and many challenges to impede the implementation. Considering the prospects and challenges of RTE, we are organizing a two day seminar at national level during 20-21 March, 2010. We note that you are enthusiastic to debate on such issue and we understand that your participation of shall be a positive gesture to this issue and for us also.

We shall be highly pleased to receive innovative papers with original thinking with reference to Right to Education on various themes such as sustainability with quality; special needs & disadvantaged groups; financial
implications; teachers’ accountability; technology and government versus private participation. The dead line for sending the filled registration form and abstract is *8th March 2010*.

Download related documents and information here.

Image Source : Michael Foley Photography

ASER Feedback

ASER Feedback from the Partners
Srikanth Bhat
District Coordinator, Akshara Foundation, Karnataka

Besides the old ASER partners, in 2009 ASER had some very interesting new ones; one of them was Deutsche Bank. 50 employees (most with an MBA or other post graduate degrees) of Deutsche Bank volunteered to do the ASER survey in rural Bangalore. They found the experience enlightening and different from other NGO field visits they had done.

Thomas Abraham, one of the volunteers from Deutsche Bank wrote to us to share his experience. He said the ASER survey was a very enriching experience. He was able to get hands-on experience on surveying children and got an insight on the quality of education imparted to students. In one of the households that he visited, the father, who had studied only till class 6 knew more than his daughter who was studying in class 8. In many other households he found the women to be more educated than the men. He was also delighted to see somevillagers voluntarily giving computer lessons and art and dance classes to the under privileged students.

ರಾಜ್ಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಾಥಮಿಕ ಶಿಕ್ಷಣ ವಂಚಿತ ಮಕ್ಕಳ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ ಕಡಿಮೆ !

Source: Kannadaprabha, 22nd February 2010, Page 11

Not Enough Teachers to Educate India

Via livemint.com

Roop Singh Taroke, huddled in the back rows of a damp and congested classroom, drew a blank at the mention of a geometry box and looked to his teacher for help.

At the upper primary school in Amazhir village, only 30 students out of the 180 enrolled in classes I to VIII had turned up the morning after Raksha Bandhan, along with a guruji, or guest teacher.

The lanky Roop Singh Kharte, all of 20 and the lone guruji present, smiled nervously at Taroke. “I teach only Hindi,” he told the 15-year-old, before turning to a group of class II students clamouring in a corner.

Taroke, son of a farm labourer and a class VII student, had never seen an instrument box in his life although the math textbook has a chapter on geometry. Still, a student not having geometry box doesn’t seem like such a big deal. What’s more important is that there aren’t enough teachers.

One of the cornerstones of the Union government’s social welfare agenda, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) aims to put every Indian child in school. On 26 February, SSA will find prominent mention in finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget, given the Manmohan Singh government’s focus on inclusiveness.

In Amazhir, the challenges involved in implementing the programme are starkly apparent. In four bare rooms, a teacher conducts two classes at a time. Two of the four teachers have been hired on a year’s contract, including Kharte.

An undergraduate student at a college in Bhopal, the state capital about 80km away, Kharte teaches at the school during vacations for Rs150 per class.

Not the kind of remuneration that makes for regular attendance. Contract teachers, also known as “para” teachers, don’t turn up when the village gets cut off by heavy rain or at festival time, say parents.

Not surprisingly, 48 out of 374 government schools in Sehore's Nasrullaganj block, of which Amazhir is a part, have no teachers, according to the Madhya Pradesh government website.

Fifty-two schools have one teacher each, in violation of SSA norms. Only about 37 schools have more than four teachers each. "In 1997, when the government found the teaching vacancies were too many and they had scant resources, they adopted a recruitment policy which favoured para teachers," Sadgopal said.
"The number of such teachers has increased alarmingly over the last few years. It's making the whole education system unstable."

The instability that Sadgopal refers to has been caused by underqualified and untrained teachers who have no job security.

In most states including MP, the minimum educational qualification for para teachers has been lowered to class XII (and class X for women), thus doing away with the minimum qualification of a bachelor of education degree.

Salaries are irregular and incentives have dwindled to zero, he said. "These are times of financial famine for teachers. The government says it has no money to pay us. Our festivals have no colour," Barkhare said.

School officials, however say, the system ensures lower absenteeism and better quality since the para teachers risk being fired for neglecting work.

"With permanent jobs, teachers slacken a bit," said Kedar Singh, principal of the Sarvodaya Government School in Bhopal.

However, various studies on para teachers including a 2006 report released jointly by the World Bank and National Institute of Educational Planning and Research, describe the system as a cost-cutting measure. Each para teacher deployment costs the state one-fifth that of a regular teacher in Madhya Pradesh.

Notably, teachers' salaries are not covered under SSA, but left to the state governments to fund.

Read the entire article here.

Image Source : basoo!