Measurement In India

Posted: July 11th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

I met Ashish a year ago — impressive guy who was finishing up a successful business career and looking to give back charitably in India.  He’s launched an org called Central Square Foundation.  He writes: 

Can you think of any institution or enterprise that has attained success without a clear vision? The Indian school system with 1.3 million schools serving 240 million children is flying blind – we are guided without any clear outcomes-based goals or any data on student learning. Year after year we sink billions of taxpayer rupees into education without educating the majority of our children.

India’s education policies, including the most recent Right to Education Act 2009 (RTE), focus primarily on inputs. For the first time, the 12th Five Year Plan talks about ‘student learning’ as the primary goal of education and yet makes no mention of how we’ll go about measuring this goal.

At Central Square Foundation (CSF), we are pushing to make ‘Quality’ the focus of education policy and practice in India. During the last few months, we have met numerous elected leaders and senior bureaucrats focused on education at various levels of government. Their interest in improving the quality of education inspires optimism in us and we are working on a number of policy initiatives to increase quality.

What do do about that?

Read how Ashish and his team are tackling the issues.