Improving Elementary Education in India

An arithmetic class at Government Primary School Kandoli Raipur in northern India. The school is part of an effort to improve elementary education underwritten by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro.

Nine-year-old Arjun takes his turn keeping the shoes and slippers outside his classroom in order. His school, Government Primary School Nagla, is included in the Premji Foundation's efforts to overhaul the way students are taught and tested at government schools. 

Children at the Nagla school have fun acting out a poem. Students are encouraged to write stories and pursue independent projects, rather than perform rote exercises out of textbooks.  

Dhananjay, 10, sketches during a group story-telling session at the Nagla elementary school. Within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.  

Ten-year-old Mehroon, during a math class at  Government Primary School Ramjeevanpur, a school participating in the Premji Foundation program. Only about one-third of fifth graders in India can perform simple division problems in arithmetic, and most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

In a math class at Government Primary School Ramjeevanpur, Jasmine, 10, offers an answer to her teacher. Education reformers in India point to success in China, where 94 percent of the population is literate, compared with 64 percent in their own country.  

Pankaj Malik teaches arithmetic using a  tool designed to develop reasoning through play. New efforts to train teachers and provide adequate equipment are under way. 

The curriculum at Government Primary School Ramjeevanpur is break from traditional public schools in India, where students have long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful year-end exams that many children fail.    

Time for home for these Ramjeevanpur schoolchildren. Mr. Premji said he hoped his foundation would eventually make a difference for tens of millions of students in India by focusing on critical educational areas like exams, curriculum and teacher training.  


Source: NYT

Skipping Rote Memorization in Indian Schools...!!!

PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.

Dhananjay, 10, sketches during a group story-telling session at the Nagla elementary school. NYT

But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.

That might seem commonplace in American or European schools. But such activities are revolutionary in India, where public school students have long been drilled on memorizing facts and regurgitating them in stressful year-end exams that many children fail.

Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.

For Mr. Premji, 65, there can be no higher priority if India is to fulfill its potential as an emerging economic giant. Because the Indian population is so youthful — nearly 500 million people, or 45 percent of the country’s total, are 19 or younger — improving the education system is one of the country’s most pressing challenges.

“The bright students rise to the top, which they do anywhere in any system,” Mr. Premji said over lunch at Wipro’s headquarters in Bangalore, 1,300 miles south of Uttarakhand. “The people who are underprivileged are not articulate, less self-confident, they slip further. They slip much further. You compound a problem of people who are handicapped socially.”

Outside of India, many may consider the country a wellspring of highly educated professionals, thanks to the many doctors and engineers who have moved to the West. And the legions of bright, English-speaking call-center employees may seem to represent, to many Western consumers, the cheerful voice of modern India.

But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.

In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply — to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.

But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.

Mr. Premji said he hoped his foundation would eventually make a difference for tens of millions of children by focusing on critical educational areas like exams, curriculum and teacher training. He said he wanted to reach many more children than he could by opening private schools — the approach taken by many other wealthy Indians.

Mr. Premji, whose total wealth Forbes magazine has put at $18 billion, recently gave the Azim Premji foundation $2 billion worth of shares in his company. And he said that he expected to give more in the future.

Those newly donated shares are being used to start an education-focused university in Bangalore and to expand and spread programs like the one here in Uttarakhand and a handful of other places to reach 50 of India’s 626 school districts.

The effort’s size and scope is unprecedented for a private initiative in India, philanthropy experts say. Even though India’s recent rapid growth has helped dozens of tycoons acquire billions of dollars in wealth, few have pledged such a large sum to a social cause.

“This has never been attempted before, either by a foundation or a for-profit group,” said Jayant Sinha, who heads the Indian office of Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm set up by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Although the results in Uttarakhand are promising, they also suggest that progress will be slow. Average test scores in one of the two districts where the foundation operates climbed to 54 percent in 2008, up from 37.4 percent two years earlier. (A passing mark is 33 percent or higher.) Still, only 20 of the 1,500 schools that the Azim Premji foundation works with in Uttarakhand have managed to reach a basic standard of learning as determined by competence tests, enrollment and attendance. Nagla is not one of the 20.

“We are working with the kids who were neglected before,” said D. N. Bhatt, a district education coordinator for the Uttarakhand state government. “You won’t see the impact right away.”

The Azim Premji Foundation helps schools in states where the government has invited its participation — a choice that some educational experts criticize because it seems to ignore fast-growing private schools that teach about a quarter of the country’s students, including many of India’s poor.

Narayana Murthy, a friend of Mr. Premji and chairman of Infosys, a company that competes with Wipro, said he admired the Premji Foundation’s work but worried it would be undermined by the way India administers its schools.

“While I salute Azim for what he is doing,” Mr. Murthy said, “in order to reap the dividends of that munificence and good work, we have to improve our governance.”

Mr. Premji says his foundation would be willing to work with private schools. But he argues that government schools need help more because they are often the last or only resort for India’s poorest and least educated families.

Mr. Premji, whose bright white hair distinguishes him in a crowd, comes from a relatively privileged background. He studied at a Jesuit school, St. Mary’s, in Mumbai and earned an electrical engineering degree at Stanford.

At 21, when his father died, Mr. Premji took over his family’s cooking oil business, then known as Western Indian Vegetable Product. He steered the company into information technology and Wipro — whose services include writing software and managing computer systems — now employs more than 100,000 people. He remains Wipro’s largest shareholder.

While the foundation has been welcomed by government officials in many places, the schools in Uttarakhand provide a glimpse of the challenges it faces.

After visitors left a classroom at Nagla school, an instructor began leading more than 50 fifth-grade students in a purely rote English lesson, instructing the students to repeat simple phrases: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good night. The children loudly chanted them back in unison.

Another teacher later explained that the instructor was one of two “community teachers” — local women hired by a shopkeeper to help the understaffed school. Although under government rules Nagla should have nine trained teachers for its 340 students, it has only four.

Underfunding is pervasive in the district. But so are glimmers of the educational benefits that might come through efforts like the Premji Foundation’s.

Surjeet Chakrovarty, now a 15-year-old secondary school student, is a graduate of Nagla and still visits his old school regularly. The son of a widower who is a sweeper at a local university, Surjeet aspires to become a poet and songwriter — something he attributes to the encouragement of his former teachers at Nagla.

“My teachers here gave me so much motivation to write,” he said.

One of those Nagla teachers, Pradeep Pandey, shared credit with the Premji Foundation, and its assistance in developing new written and oral tests.

“Before, we had a clear idea of the answers and the child had to repeat exactly what we had in mind,” Mr. Pandey said. “We can’t keep doing what we did in the past, and pass them without letting them learn anything.”

Source: NYTimes

A Bid to Redefine Indian Education...!!!

By JAMES BROOKE

Facing final exam pressures common to all boarding schools, students here have found an uncommon way to unwind. Following the bouncing ponytail of Al Blackhorse, their history teacher, Indian students hop, skip and dip in a clockwise whirl of the Navajo grass dance.

It's spiritual, social and a stress reliever," Mr. Blackhorse said after the taped chants and drumbeats of the late afternoon powwow faded from the brand new campus of the Native American Preparatory School.

For decades, the words "Indian boarding school" could conjure up fearful, Dickensian images: cold showers barracks where white teachers cut Indian boys' braids, burned their traditional clothing, handed out English names and forbade them from speaking the language of their parents.

Richard Pratt, founder of the first Federal Indian boarding school, set the tone in 1892 when he lectured a congress of educators: "Kill the Indian in him and save the man."

One century later, on a 1,600-acre campus dotted with pinon pines and cut by the Pecos River, a group of white and Indian educators are starting what they hope will become a model for a different kind of Indian boarding school education for America's next century.

"We are saying, yes, we are native people, but we are also connected to the rest of the world," said John Anthony Reyna, a Taos Pueblo who teaches art here. Operating from modern adobe buildings originally built for a resort, the new school is believed to be the only privately financed boarding school for Indian students in the United States.

After seven years as a summer school, the Preparatory School moved in August into its new, $6 million campus here in high mountains 40 miles east of Santa Fe. In this setting, the school offers a rigorous, traditional curriculum coupled with studies of Indian literature, art and history, as well as weekly visits by Indian leaders, artists and professionals.

The idea is to offer bright Indian high school students the kind of elite education that privileged white children have long enjoyed at New England boarding schools. But instead of paying an annual tuition valued at $16,000, Indian families pay only $900.

"We want to fill the American Indians' educational hole -- doctors, scientists, educators, business leaders," said Richard Prentice Ettinger, the chairman of the school's board. The son of a founder of the Prentice Hall publishing house, Mr. Ettinger has made the family foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the school's principal financial backer. With an annual budget of $1.7 million, the school is almost entirely privately financed.

The need for improved Indian education is clear. Scoring at the bottom of America's five major racial groups, only half of Indian students graduate from high school and only 3 percent graduate from college.

At the same time, Congress shows little interest in increasing Federal investment in Indian education. In its most recent version of the Federal budget, Congress calls for a 10 percent cut for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency that maintains 187 schools.

Closer to home, Congress this year cut in half, to $5 million, the budget for Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts, the nation's only arts college for Indians. With Congress debating an end to Federal financing altogether next year, the Institute's President, Perry Horse, resigned on Nov. 21.

Here, on rolling hills of the western Plains where Pecos Indians once hunted buffalo, the Native American Preparatory School may be forging a formula for improved educational results. A followup study of 50 students from the 1988 summer session found that five years later three-quarters were enrolled in college.

The school not only combats the low expectations that traditionally handicap teachers of Indians, but it also combats the low self-esteem that traditionally handicaps Indian students. In Mr. Reyna's art class, students work on baskets and masks under a wallboard that proclaims: "I am talented, skillful and intelligent! I look, act, think and dress like a winner!"

For some Indian teen-agers, accustomed to undemanding reservation schools, the educational atmosphere here is too hot.

In early September, only a few days after the first freshman class of 50 students arrived, a mini-riot erupted on campus, leaving a trail of broken lights and wounded feelings.

"Everything around here says you are in a resort, then you get nailed with homework," Norman E. Carey, the head of the school, said as he strolled the grounds on a recent afternoon. "Some of the students never had homework before. A great deal of anxiety contributed to the flare-up."

The school closed for 10 days as a result of the disturbance. When it reopened, two teachers and eight students did not return.

But, as the school nears the end of its first term, many of the 40 students expressed enthusiasm in interviews.

"Time goes by so fast here -- one day you think it's Thursday and it's already Saturday," said Nikki Nez, a 14-year-old who wore a Navajo-style choker, fashioned from bone, brass beads and artificial sinew.

"Back in Santa Fe, I felt like I wasn't working hard -- and I was getting A's and B's," she continued. "This is a big change, from easy to real hard."

The daughter of a woodworker who dropped out of high school, Nikki said she was "hoping to go to Stanford or Berkeley."

Teachers here say they work to draw Indian children out of their traditional classroom reticence that stems from the students either viewing the teacher as an elder, worthy of rapt attention or being intimidated by non-Indians in the class.

Fred Leon, a 14-year-old from Laguna Pueblo, discussed his new assertiveness in an interview a few minutes after he addressed the student body about his fall-term art projects.

"At home, I was mixed with Anglos and Mexicans -- the others dominated the class, and I felt left out," he recounted. "Here, it's Native Americans. You get attention, you get called on."

After three months, Fred, the son of a small rancher, said he was still in awe of the school's creature comforts. "There's only two to a room," he said, "and you get a big old bed all to yourself."

With plans to steadily expand until it has a traditional four-year student body, the school is starting a $20 million capital drive to raise money to build additional housing for faculty and students, a library, a gymnasium and a science laboratory.

Although only a tiny fraction of Indian students will ever have the opportunity to attend a school like this, school officials believe they can set a model for Indian education and provide role models for tribal populations. Already, this drop in the bucket is making some local splashes.

"At home on the reservation, there is only TV and drunks," said Denisa Livingston, a 14-year-old from Shiprock, Ariz. "When I go home now, people look at me as a model."

And for students who want to know how the old Indian boarding schools were, they need only to ask Mr. Blackhorse, a 33-year-old veteran of the war in the Persian Gulf.

"Everything was very regimented -- you marched around campus, there were bunk beds, open bay showers all together," the teacher recalled of his New Mexico boarding school of 25 years ago. "Everything stressed the assimilation process. I was always getting intimidated by the Anglo teachers. I didn't want to ask questions in class."

Here, school directors encourage close family ties. Students can go home every other weekend. Telephones in their rooms can receive incoming calls. Parents can work off their tuition bills by spending weekends as dorm monitors.

The other evening, after students had drifted out of the cafeteria after dinner, Mr. Blackhorse recalled how old-style Indian boarding schools used to handle the family unit.

"I remember my grandparents dropping me off at the school, when I was 4 years old," he recounted. "I remember seeing their old car going down the road and running for the door. The older boys stopped me."

Source: NYTimes