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However, this is not enough to reverse the crisis in learning
POSSIBLE CAUSES FOR THE CRISIS IN LEARNING – What does the research say?
Weak Pedagogy
Several randomisedevaluations find large positive impacts of supplemental remedial instruction in early grades that are targeted to the child's current level of learning (as opposed to simply following the text book) (references in appendix)
Weak School Governance
Most striking symptom of weak governance is the high rate of teacher absence in government-run schools, which has not reduced substantially since 2003.
Rigorous evaluations of carefully designed systems of teacher performance pay show substantial improvements in student learning in response to even very modest amounts of performance-linked pay for teachers.
• The World Development Report on “Making Services work for the poor” recognizes that for education to truly deliver on its promises, schools need to be accountable to their local communities through bodies like “School Management Committees” (SMC)
• The Indian Government also recognizes the importance of SMC’s by empowering them with legal rights and duties under the Right to Education Act
Empowering School Management Committees
• Volunteers drawn from two distinct pools – local citizens and professionals from varied different professions. Involving the former raises the capacity of local citizens to monitor their schools, thus helping in scaling our ideas at low costs.
• Technology enabled – Through strategic use of Information Technology, such as Massive Online Open courses, adapted to Indian conditions, we can further lower costs and reach a wide audience
Implementation Model –
Volunteer-driven, Technology-enabled
Snapshot of solution proposedWe propose a technology-enabled, volunteer driven approach to empowerment of
School Management Committees (SMC’s) to help them effectively monitor schools and
adapt pedagogy to suit the needs of children in their community
•Start with training 2 people per district (~1400 volunteers across the country).
Volunteer resource people:
•Diverse set of non-state actors who bring in requisite skill-sets, funding and ideas.
•They help empowered SMC’s achieve their goals.
Recruitment Of Volunteers in the 2 – Channel Volunteer
Model
Cascading model of training volunteers: Each set of 2 volunteers in a district train 80000 volunteers over the course of a year, thus reaching out to ~1.12 million across all districts in India
• Refresher training: To be provided through online courses, facilitated by volunteer trainers.
Training Of Volunteers
Skills imparted: Skills imparted across three domains
Domain Knowledge
• Public finances, with special reference to the district
• Financial literacy
Procedural Knowledge
• Procurement in a local government environment
• Assessment of learning outcomes through the use of survey-toolkits
Soft-skills
• Group dynamics with special relation to social dynamics in the district
• Decision-making in a group
• Team-building
Technology enablement
• Basic computer literacy and knowledge of internet
•Interaction in forums meant specifically for governance
Empowering SMCs
Initial training of SMC’s held in partnership with Block Development Officers and District Officers, to achieve scale.
• Refresher trainings held by volunteer trainers, as government capacity not enough to conduct regular trainings
• These technology enabled SMC’s would be networked onto the main GYAN platform, and can ask for specific ideas, funding and skill-sets they require for achieving their ideas.
Disinterested SMC’s SMC’s usually have low expectations from government schools, translating into disinterest in tracking the learning outcomes of their children
Controlled experiments in Medak district in Andhra Pradesh by Accountability Initiative has shown that using local methods of dissemination can help ignite interest
Khemani et al have found that Information and advocacy campaigns can lead to better participation in SMCs
Lack of buy-in from district officials Building a good SMC culture requires buy-in from the local government, both for purposes of infrastructure for training and rules
We have seen that sharing success stories as well as data on learning outcomes across districts can incentivize district collectors to focus on education
Infrastructural issues Online networking on the GYAN network requires access to good infrastructure
Partnering with infrastructure providers such as TARAhaat can mitigate this risk