The Value of Early Childhood Education

The other day, I attended a talk in Delhi by the Nobel Laureate James J Heckman, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago (he of the Heckman Equation).  Organised jointly by the University of Chicago and the Centre for Civil Society, Heckman's discussion focused on the value of investing in early childhood education, a proposition long recognised but sorely neglected not just in our country, but in many parts of the world.

 

It is almost universally accepted in theory that the early years of a child determine her progress and well-being in later life.  Good, wholesome nutrition, appropriate medication and supplements, and preparatory education are all equally important for development of the child.  Equally significant, a lack of appropriate stimulation in early childhood can have a lasting impact on the individual's mental and physical development.

 

Heckman’s work has shown that investing in early childhood education can lead to a 7-10 percent rate of return for society per annum, in terms of greater productivity, reduced health costs, lower crime rates, etc.  However, in his view, merely establishing preschool education centres is not always the most appropriate solution; he believes that a substantial part of early stimulation should originate through a closer bond with the parents, who need to be helped to play their role more effectively.

 

In India, it has frequently been observed that children who have had some form of preparatory education before the age of six years are more likely to continue on to elementary and secondary education, and less likely to drop out before completion.  The importance and impact of early education has been acknowledged by thinkers and policy makers, and finds mention in the major policy discourse; here too, the link between the pre-school and the family has been discussed and emphasised.  Acharya Vinoba Bhave described it best, stating that for effective learning, “home should enter the school and school should change into home”.

 

The 12th Five Year Plan also articulates the importance of preschool education, saying that “...research from around the world highlights the importance of early childhood education, and suggests that high-quality early childhood education may have the highest long-term returns in terms of improved human development.  The Twelfth Plan will therefore place a high priority on universalising pre-school education and improving school preparedness – especially for historically and economically disadvantaged children”.

 

The primary government vehicle for early childhood education remains the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, launched in 1975 to address the problems of malnutrition and disease among young children, and to ensure their holistic development through preschool education.  However as a departmental committee examining this issue in 2004 noted, the number of children enrolled in preschool centres through ICDS and allied programmes was not more than 20 percent of the total eligible children in this age group; the rest were either enrolled in private preschools, or not enrolled at all.  This position has not changed substantially in the ten years since.

 

One of the problems is that ICDS tends to focus more on the nutritional aspects of the programme, to the detriment of the education component.  The government’s Allocation of Business Rules place education policy in the Ministry of HRD, and early childhood education in the Ministry of Women and Child Development; as a result, the latter often tends to fall between two stools, with neither department paying much attention to it.

 

The original Directive Principle under Article 45 of the Constitution enjoined the State to “endeavour to provide free and compulsory education to all children below the age of fourteen years”, thus accepting the importance of early stimulation before the beginning of formal education in Grade 1.  However when the Constitution was amended in 2002 to make elementary education a Fundamental Right, it was restricted to the age group of 6-14 years only.  This was largely due to financial reasons, but also perhaps because the sponsoring Ministry (HRD) was not directly concerned with the subject!

 

Although ICDS has now been “universalised”, its focus remains on the non-educational aspects of the programme.  As with other government schemes, it is plagued by allegations of mismanagement, leakages, and downright corruption.  And the preschool component remains weak.  Superficial universalisation, of the “mile-wide and inch-deep” kind so beloved of our politicians, carries with it more risk of damage than not doing anything at all.

 

Today, preschool education is largely in the hands of private managements; in itself, this may not be a bad thing, but it does limit the availability of preschool services to only those who can afford to pay for them.  No permissions are needed to start a preschool; as long as you have the necessary space, even if it is within your own home, you can start a preschool for children below six years.  Naturally this has implications, including those of safety, security and the quality of care and education delivered to the child.

 

Given the research of Heckman, Robert Lynch, and others, it is clear that the social, economic and financial benefits of government investing in early childhood education are extraordinary.  One can only hope that the next government will give this area the attention it so desperately needs.

To Sir (or Ma'am) With Love

What does it say about a country where only 2 percent of 750,000 teachers holding a formal Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) degree or a Diploma in Education are able to clear a simple Teacher Eligibility Test that would make them eligible to teach Grades 1 through 8?  Where the results for this year are actually viewed as an improvement over last year, because there was a reduction in those who failed from 99 percent to 98?  Would you really have any hope for that country's education system, or for the future of its children? 

Welcome to India in 2014.  The fact that CBSE's Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) held in January witnessed such dismal results should be a wakeup call for anyone interested in the country's education system. 

As the number of schools in the country, both in the government and private sectors, has increased rapidly over the last decades, the demand for quality teachers has increased exponentially.  Unfortunately, the number and type of teachers needed are just not available.  Implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (more commonly known as the Right to Education Act) alone requires an estimated 1.4 million additional teachers in our classrooms, for just Grades 1 to 8; this doesn’t include the already existing 500,000 vacant positions.  And the teacher training institutes currently available are just not up to the task.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that with the exception of B.El.Ed degree courses or some correspondence courses, most of our regular B.Ed or D.Ed programmes are of one year duration, as compared to other countries where such programmes take at least 3-4 years to complete.  This means that the student's knowledge of her subject is assumed, and the course concentrates – in the limited time it has – on the skills required to be a teacher in the classroom.  Given the reality of most undergraduate degree colleges in the country, this assumption is dangerous, as in many cases graduation is no guarantee of either understanding or knowledge of the subject.  The poor state of higher education thus has its impact on school education, which in turn sends poorly prepared children (from those who remain in the system) to participate in college education, thereby reinforcing the vicious cycle of mediocrity and ineffectiveness.  The situation is compounded by the fact that anyone with a secondary school education is also eligible to sit for the CTET, as long as they have completed, or are in the final year of, a 2-year D.Ed or 4-year B.El.Ed programme; in the former case, there is clearly not enough time to acquire the required subject knowledge.

While there has been much discussion of school education and learning outcomes in recent years, teacher education has not been the focus of that discussion as often as it should have been.  We need to recognise that the teacher is a crucial component of the school system, and that without providing a renewed sense of professionalism, education and self worth to those who take up teaching as a career, we will be hard pressed to make progress in the classroom.  It is time to reinvent teacher education and indeed, teaching as a career, from the ground up, if we are to witness dramatic change in learning outcomes.

The majority of school teachers in India are employed in the government sector, since nearly 85 percent schools are under government management.  Yet it is not as if the issue of quality is confined only to this group.  With few exceptions, most private schools also suffer from the same problems.  During the time that I ran the premium Millennium schools, it never failed to surprise me that senior teachers (and sometimes even Principals!) could be so careless, sloppy and unprofessional.  I sat through a number of classes in various schools, and came away appalled at the fact that teachers of this standard were actually allowed to stand up in class and influence young minds.

What then do we need to do to bring about meaningful change?  There are several possibilities, but the following would probably be good first steps:

·         There is a strong case for partially decentralising teacher education to the States, and allowing them to determine the curriculum and duration of the B.Ed courses conducted in their jurisdictions.  This would allow more contextually relevant degree courses to develop, with training colleges free to create a cadre of teachers focused on the needs of their State.

·         The duration of B.Ed courses needs to increase, in line with international practice, and in order to incorporate some subject learning as well.  This would ensure that students graduating from the programme would also carry with them the much needed subject skills.

·         Under training teachers need more practical exposure to classrooms and children, in order to develop their teaching and management skills.  This means a much closer relationship between schools and colleges and/or teacher education institutions.

·         The number of teacher training institutions needs to increase drastically; at the same time, ensuring quality remains a strong concern.  We need to review the multi-zillion clearances needed to start such institutions and move towards a system of single-window approvals.

·         As in any other profession, intensive periodic in-service training programmes need to be planned that allow teachers to hone their skills and revise basics; as in the US, we may eventually consider a licensing system and periodic examinations that keep valid a teacher's license to teach.  It may be noted that the kind of superficial 20-day in-service training practiced under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) certainly does not meet the needs of continuing education for teachers.

·         We need to find ways to reduce the social and economic distance between teacher and taught; this means more emphasis on recruiting local teachers, who come from the community they teach. This would additionally have the advantage of ensuring more or less regular availability of the teacher in the classroom; if she belongs to the area, there are fewer incentives for her to go AWOL.

·         Bring back the school inspectorate system that we have systematically destroyed through projects and disuse.  The Schools Inspector played a very significant role in ensuring that quality in the classroom was maintained; we need to recreate a similar system of regular monitoring to ensure enough time-on-task as well as improvements in outcomes.

·         Stop just talking about closer linkages between the District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) and SSA structures and actually do something about them.  In addition, project structures like SSA need to eventually move into the State Education Departments so that there is greater ownership of the education bureaucracy, and a single, holistic approach to school education.

·         Move away from seniority as the only criteria for promotion and career advancement to a system that takes merit and performance into account, and make teaching an attractive profession for bright young people.

Teachers are the backbone of the education system; if they are dysfunctional, so is the system.  The time to make these changes is now.  Otherwise we will see many more anguished letters like this one – http://goo.gl/gjqh66.  To me, this is a heart-breaking example of everything that is wrong with our schools and teachers.

Assessments - Clearing the Exam

Over the last few years, there have been increased calls for more stringent assessments of learning outcomes, notwithstanding the elimination of conventionally understood examinations thanks to the decisions to do away with Board examinations in Classes 8 and 10; the former because of the RIght of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the latter thanks to the CBSE imperative to reduce pressure on school children.  Like much else about our education system, the few national assessments carried out so far reveal contrary results - while the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) carried out by Pratham with the help of volunteers and other NGOs has consistently indicated falling levels of learning, NCERT's own studies seem to contradict this data; the former's survey shows that despite increased government spending on education, more than half of Class 5 children unable to read a simple Class 2 text, while the latter in its most recent report claims that two out of three children in Class 3 were able to correctly answer grade appropriate questions.  And the performance of the two historically most advanced States in PISA 2012 was nothing short of dismal.

On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago, there were reports of Class 12 children in UP who committed, or attempted to commit, suicide because they were unable to pay the bribes demanded by their respective Principals (no less!) to allow them to cheat in the exam.  The cases of teacher-assisted cheating in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and other cities in the US have already been documented; in every case where teacher performance or compensation were linked to student performance, there was a strong incentive for those teachers to "help" their students do well in assessment tests.

In principle, it is hard to argue with the need for outcome measurement; at the end of the day, what gets measured, gets done.  In a recent article, Prof Lant Pritchett and Gulzar Natarajan argue for different types of measurement reports, depending on the end user of the information (see http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/one-report-card-is-not-enough).  The trick lies in calibrating systems to ensure that while they provide an  accurate picture of our children's achievements, they don't end up either discouraging everyone, or lend themselves to gaming.

Ideally, we need to find a method of low stakes testing that serves as a diagnostic tool, enabling teachers and administrators to take corrective steps well in time; paraphrasing Robert Stake, we need more tasting of the soup during preparation, i.e., more formative assessments.  This means a middle path between the extremes of the high stakes testing of the No Child Left Behind Act in the US and the no-tests-at-all philosophy of the Sudbury Schools.

What should worry us all is the fact that learning levels are consistent across school managements; regardless of whether a school is run by the government or a private entity, learning outcomes seem to be uniformly poor.  The difference, as Prof Kartik Muralidharan of the University of San Diego has shown, is that private schools achieve these poor results at about one-third the government rate because their input costs are much lower!  Clearly it is time to more beyond the public vs private school debate to look at the best way to help our children learn.

A country that claims to be on the verge of benefitting from the demographic dividend needs to make greater effort to ensure that all its young get an equal opportunity to participate in building the nation.