Ladakh, here I come ...

After a gap of six years I am again cycling to work. I borrowed a bicycle from a friend of mine to try and see how it works out. The school is six kilometres from my house and I have been going by car all these days. There is no convenient bus, I have to change a bus from Banashankari bus stand. But the last 3 days I have been using the cycle to get there and back. It takes 30 minutes by bicycle and around 25 minutes by car. I take the inner roads and avoid traffic and so it works pretty well. In Bangalore I definitely need a cycle with gears. This one has the standard 18 setting Shimano gears and hence works well. Still, with all that ups and downs it is good exercise. 12 kilometres a day is not bad and I think if I do that till April I would be all set for the Ladakh trip :)

I used to bike to work when I was working for Oracle at Redwood Shores and lived in Belmont. It was just 2 miles but our apartment was on a hill so my commute back home was bloody hard work. I used to give up on the last bit where the gradient was almost 45%. Here it is not that bad but still needs some serious pedalling. The pollution is pretty bad, I get a good coating of dust and suspended particular matter on my throat and all over. I have to get a mask.
I also plan to use ear plugs, I find the honking so bad and so loud!

The kids were very amused to see me on a cycle. They wondered (aloud) that I was coming in a car few days back and now in a cycle. Why they asked and I let them ponder.... (there is this old MGR song in Tamil which loosely translated to "Why? The question Why? Without that there is no life". So let them ask why...

Test results!

Last Saturday I had conducted a test. It was a VERY simple test to see if my students know the English alphabet and also some basic vocabulary (through pictures). I had taken only 20 students out of the 40 so that it would be easy to manage. I picked a good distribution of students ranging from mediocre to very good. Here are the results of that test

0 to 25 % - 0
26 to 50 % - 2
51 to 75 % - 8
76 to 100 % - 10

Out of this 6 students scored 100%.

Varalakshmi is the smallest person in the class. She is so tiny it is amazing. She must be badly malnourished. She has difficulty with her sight too. One of these days I will take her to a paediatrician whom I know. She has this intense look in her face whenever I ask her a question or when she has to read out something. She has scored 100% and I am thrilled.

The 2 who have scored lower than 50% are Diksha and Manjunath S. I know about them already. After 3 years in school they still don't know the Kannada alphabet itself. I thought may be it was worth trying differently with them. Azim Premji Foundation (APF) has these nice CDs through which students can reinforce their vocabulary etc. So I took my laptop with me and asked Manjunath and Diksha to work with the laptop. I also had to be with them and prompt them at every stage. It did not make a big difference and in fact I found the computer a distraction for them. May be my experience is limited but I feel that computers have no role to play in elementary education. There is no replacement for a good teacher and that is all that is required especially from class I to IV. May be computers can be of use in middle and high school. There is definitely potential in explaining science experiments etc with computers. And also good material can be useful for the teachers. Most teachers themselves don't know the full details about science experiments etc.

How do I handle the bottom 10% of the class? They are way behind the rest. The naughty ones who talk a lot are actually better once I get their attention they are able to learn quickly. But the bottom few pretty much stay quiet but are not absorbing anything at all. My energy is limited and I also confused (philosophically) where I should spend the energy on the 90% of the class who would benefit or whether I should spend on this 10%.

System of School Vouchers in India

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about School vouchers and people have taken predictable positions on that. A friend of mine had recently forwarded a blog entry on this subject by Basab Pradhan who also quotes Gurcharan Das on this subject.

Briefly, the voucher system is supposed to solve the problems of quality delivery of primary education by introducing free market dynamics. Through vouchers the parents have a choice of choosing which school their child goes to. The delivery of education is entrusted to private players who can redeem these vouchers from the government. The idea is that the parents would choose the best performing school and those schools which are not performing would have fewer enrollments and thus the government would not be wasting money on them. Obviously this proposal would appear as a silver bullet for the free market proponents like Basab Pradhan and complete anathema to hard core lefties. The reality, as always, lies some where in between.

I am definitely not as enthusiastic about this proposed system and I would like explain why.

Lack of information amongst parents

It is standard economic theory that one of the essential pre-conditions for efficient functioning of markets is availability of adequate information for all the players. In the Indian context the poor parents in rural areas are usually illiterate and cannot really determine whether the school is functioning at par, above it or below it. Can they really make an informed choice about which school their children can go to? I really doubt it. As the next point would show there is already sufficient evidence to the contrary.

Quality of private schools

There seems to be an unsaid belief that the private schools would be better than government run schools. This probably is reinforced by observing the private schools that cater to the middle and upper middle classes in urban areas. There are quite a lot of private schools (“convent” schools as they are called) which have proliferated in urban slums to cater to the needs of the working class and the poor. They usually sell by claiming to be English medium. These schools are really bad in reality. Our maid’s son went to one such school and even after 4 years in those school, and paying fees, he could not even read basic English. The parents themselves being illiterate could not tell whether their child was learning anything at all or not. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that India’s premier educational institutions like the IITs, IIMs and the REC’s (now called something else) are in fact government run institutions. In any case it would be worthwhile to survey ALL (not just the elite) private schools and find out their performance before making any conclusion on who is delivering better primary education, private run or government run.

Feasibility in rural areas

Voucher system has serious feasibility issues especially in rural areas. Consider the following data got out of the Department of Public Instruction.

Area	Govt Schools	Aided Schools	Private Schools	Total
Bangalore (South) Urban	493 (59.9%)	49 (5.95%)	281 (34.15%)	823
Bangalore Rural	1722 (93.74%)	4 (0.22%)	111 (6.04%)	1837
Challakere	192 (91.87%)	1 (0.48%)	16 (7.65%)	209

As you can see clearly from this data the penetration of private schools in rural areas is minimal and even there the data presented is at the Taluk level and I am fairly certain that the private schools are concentrated in the towns (taluk head quarters like Challakare and small towns Nayakanahatti). Since vouchers are based on market competition, it is not enough just to replace the existing government school with a private school which receives vouchers. There needs to be multiple private schools competing with each other for the same set of students. Do we really think this is feasible?

Teachers in rural areas?

Government school teachers are absent in villages as they find facilities there appalling. They prefer to stay in urban centers for the same reasons why you and I prefer to stay in the urban centers. Without any other factor changing, just by issuing vouchers there is not going to be a sudden change through which teachers (whether working for private schools or government schools) would be willing to go to villages every day. This is a very serious problem for which there is no single solution yet. But vouchers are definitely not going to make a difference.

Abuse of the system

There is a scheme already in place which is very close to the school voucher system. In Andhra Pradesh there is a scheme for SC/STs in rural areas for getting trained in employment generating vocations. They can go to the local training centers (something like ITI) and get trained in motor winding, electrical, operating the lathe kind of skills. For each person trained the government pays the training center for the training. The training centers just exist in name only. They give half (or mostly less) of the money that the government pays them to the candidate directly and give them a certificate without conducting any training. The candidate initially is very happy with that money and probably spends it on alcohol but has gained no skills. What is stopping the voucher system to disintegrate into this kind of abuse? Where parents routinely send their children for child labor (in some cases even hazardous) this kind of abuse is not mere speculation but one more system of corruption waiting to happen.

P.S. – I am not an anti-market person. I think the government has no business in running businesses, in general. That is best left to private players. But governance involves delivery of certain public goods (like basic education and basic health) that only a government can deliver best, especially in a country with low level of human development. This “markets would solve everything” is a puerile attitude not befitting those espousing it.

Soon there would be more girls in government schools than boys...

In the class that I teach there is this girl, Rupa, who is extremely good. She does all the work assigned to her, is very earnest, pays full attention and is eager to learn. She is very bright too and picks up things very fast. I found that she knew more English than I have already taught and she can almost read all words and even sentences. I was curious as to how she knows so much so I asked her after the class yesterday. She said her elder brother taught her. Her brother does not come to this school, he goes to a private school in that area. She has a younger brother too and he too goes to a private school. Her elder brother seems to know a reasonable amount of English and so I asked her why she did not go to the private school too. She said her parents did not want to spend money for her and so she is sent to the government school which free. She had an expression, “duh isn’t it obvious?” on her face. Gender discrimination, stark and unabashed! Her parents feel it is worthwhile making their sons better educated and not their daughter. Do they think that the sons would look after them while the daughter would be married off and even if she earns her earnings would go to the family of the guy whom she is married to? The whole way our Indian system of marriage and family works against adequate investments made for women. The irony of this whole thing is that in the end the boys never take care of their parents or their families anyway. Especially in the poor sections of the society they mostly end up being alcoholics and are a drain on the family.

The extreme form of this gender discrimination is the selective sex determined termination of pregnancy which seems to be quite prevalent in India. India has a very adverse gender ratio (see Missing women of India). May be it is better to kill them off rather than giving them second class treatment all through their lives.

I am determined to teach Rupa at least as much as her brothers learn, if not more.

Trip to Nayakanahatti

Asha Bangalore wanted to evaluate the tuition centers run by Chaitanya near Nayakanahatti in Chitradurga district of Karnataka (http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=657). We decided that we would make a detailed evaluation like the one Rajni did for the Chandranagar School. Mounesh and Siddanagowda who had earlier taught in the Chandranagar School were to conduct the evaluations in all the Chaitanya centers in the next two month and submit a detailed report for each center. Anand Rao and I had gone along with them to Chaitanya.

We left Bangalore at around 900 hours on Monday and reached Nayakanahatti at around 1500 hours. We took a bus from majestic bus station to Challakere which left at 900 and then took a private bus from Challakere to Nayakanahatti. Chaitanya has an office close to the bus stand and they run a computer center there along with a tailoring center. We met Ramesh who co-ordinates Chaitanya’s work. They use the same premises for also conducting the evening tuition centers. On Monday evening we visited another 4 centers. In Channabaseyanahatti, which probably a couple of kilometers away from Nayakanahatti, there are kind of two villages old and new and there is a tuition center in each one of them. Both cater to the same government primary school. The tuition centers are run by Bosiah P and Tippeswamy. Tippeswamy is a graduate (BA Kannada major) and tends to his farms. His living conditions appeared very basic as his house was very close to the center. The centers run from 1730 to 1930 and in both these places it runs in the community halls in the villages. The electricity comes after 1800 and it seems it is quite regular (there are huge wind farms in Chitradurga and apparently they generate 400 MW which is sufficient for the district). There were more than 25 students in each center. We next went to Gowdgere, which is about a kilometer from Channabaseyanahatti. Here the center is run in a house which kind of tiny and cramped. Ms. Chamundeshwari is the teacher there. She was making the students recite the tables. The school is quite close to the village and I don’t know why they cannot have the tuitions in the school itself, unless there is not electrical connection to the school. We then went to Matturhatti which was a 20 minute motorcycle ride from Gowdgere. Here the center is run in a temple and there are almost 90 students attending! Probably half of the school is going to this tuition center. Prakash is the teacher and he seems to be doing a reasonable job handling 90 of them together. Chaitanya acknowledged that they need an additional teacher there.

We wanted to go to the schools also and so on Tuesday morning I went to the schools with Mounesh and Siddenagowda. The interaction between the tuition centers and the schools seem minimal. In fact in Channabaseyanahatti the HM (who is new) did not even know that such centers existed. The school has around 240 students and 5 teachers. Out of which only 2 were present. The others were supposedly on leave. We heard from the HM that the previous HM had some problems with the SDMC (so what is new). Most of the families are telugu speaking and all are Scheduled Tribes it seems (nayaks to be specific). Also the schools performance in KSQE was not great. They said it was less than 40 but seemed reluctant to give out the exact number and I did not insist. The HM feels that the language is an issue with the students being Telugu speaking but the school being a Kannada school. The school in Gowdgere has 180 students with 4 teachers but again only 2 were present. I am not sure if the teacher absenteeism is a chronic problem but could not find out from the Chaitanya teachers either.

The tuition centers can only perform supporting role and might not be beneficial at all if no effective schooling is happening for the children during the day. For now the centers are quite cut off from the school and its related issues. I think it would be worthwhile for the volunteer teachers appointed in the centers (all are local to the villages) to play a role in interacting with the school, its teachers and SDMC. I talked to Ramesh about this and he seems very skeptical about the role of SDMC. Considering that he himself is a government school teacher I am not surprised. I have asked Mounesh and Siddenagowda to keep a tab on the attendance of the teachers at school during their two month stay. Let us see what it shows.

My experiments with teaching - Part I

It is strange that I am getting to teach English in a school. The popular story in my family is how I conversed with my classmate in the school bus when I was in my 2^nd standard or something. “You bring ball?” (with an enquiring expression), “I bring ball” (with a proud expression). My family also claimed for the longest time that my English remained at that level and were quite puzzled about how I could successfully court someone through English. In any case the poor students in Chandranagar do not really have a choice. There are 270 students and now there are only 4 teachers. It is just chaos in the school and any additional help in terms of teaching is welcomed with open arms. So I go there everyday to teach English to the 4^th standard students. I have two text books (an english alphabet book and an english primer book) which I have to finish my Dec 6 before I start gallivanting again.

Oh boy, where do I start? There are more than 40 students in my class. I guess around 15 or so girls and rest boys. They sit on the floor and even if the room is big they tend to sit tightly close to each other. When one opens a book it usually goes over the next ones lap. These kids are badly malnourished. They are so tiny! The biggest one must be as big nephew who is in the 1^st standard. Gosh, but I can’t imagine what it would be like if there were 40 well nourished kids in the room. Their energy levels are very high (except for a couple who seem seriously under nourished, I will have to get them checked out). Many of them have serious problems in concentrating and paying attention. The lack of discipline in this school in legendary (read Rajni’s report). I would really like those who espouse these new-age ideas of teaching to come to this class room and handle these 40 kids. Unless the teacher is someone like Meryl Streep who can hold the attention of any kind of audience spell bound, which I am surely not capable of, there is no way to teach anything to this kind of class without laying down some basic rules. Discipline vs. freedom is something the teacher has to maintain a fine balance. I resorted to time-out by sending the trouble some kid away. But they put on such a sorry face that even the Khumbu ice-fall will melt, but when they get back they start trouble the next minute.

I can give the children all the freedom to do what they want but I am not sure if they would really learn anything at the end of the class.

How do I do to hold the attention of a class of 40 kids without having to behave like Adolf Hitler? Can anyone HELP?

After the second day, I sat with around 8 kids who were either too troublesome in the class or had not learnt much at all separately for an additional hour. One kid seems to have a serious attention deficit but if I work with him one on one he has learnt the stuff. I am quite exhausted after taking one class (45 minutes) and one extra session for these 8 kids (another 30 minutes) and I ready to head back home. How do these teachers manage for the whole day?