ASER 2014 - Looking Back Over a Decade

(This piece appears in ASER 2014, which was released earlier today in New Delhi; reproduced here by kind permission of the publishers, ASER Centre.)

Ten years ago, an ambitious and audacious idea was floated – why not have a people’s audit of government expenditure on education and produce a report for the common man?  In a conversation shortly after the 2% Education Cess was  introduced in 2004, I recall Madhav (Chavan, co-founder and CEO of Pratham) first proposing the concept, arguing that the people had a right to know where the Cess was being spent, and how effective it really was.  At the time, I was with the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and grappling with the concept of the Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh (PSK), a non-lapsable fund we were trying to convince the Finance Ministry to create, in order to ensure that Cess revenues remained with MHRD to support elementary education.  In that context, Madhav’s idea seemed like a good one, but I had no inkling then of the scale at which he was proposing to execute it.

When it was finally carried out, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2005 covered some 490 districts and 3.3 lakh children, who were tested by volunteers from all walks of life, at home, in school, on the streets and in the fields, and just about everywhere in between.  Today the scale and scope of the reports have widened significantly, but for a first time exercise, it was bold and unparalleled in scale; quite simply, nobody had ever attempted anything like it before.  Most striking of all was its intent, captured by the “Preamble” to the report.  “We, people of India, from different states and regions, speaking different languages, sat with our children and looked within, inside our homes, at our villages, into our schools, and prepared this report for ourselves, to build a better India”.[1]  This was what set ASER apart from donor-funded or government surveys – it was a report of the people, by the people, for the people.

In 2004, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the government’s programme for universalising elementary education, was in its third year of implementation.  Our concerns in MHRD at the time were primarily around provisioning and ensuring that all children were enrolled in school, in order to meet the first goal of the programme, viz., all children in school/EGS centre/bridge course by 2003.  It was already evident that the 2003 enrolment milestone had not been met, and all our efforts were thus concentrated on catching up.   When the findings of ASER 2005 were shared with us, some days before the formal release of the report, it was heartening to learn that the survey had estimated that just over 93% children of the appropriate age group were enrolled in school; this accorded well with the data being reported by the states, and seemed to indicate that SSA was having a successful impact on the ground.

The focus of most of the debate after ASER 2005 was more on the national enrolment figures; learning levels had also been tested, and the results did not fully match either popular perception, or the available NCERT data.  Later reports, treating the question of enrolment as more or less settled, have emphasised learning levels of children, testing among other things, to see where they stand, and exploring the differences, if any, between public and private schools.  These reports have also examined the availability of facilities in schools vis-à-vis those mandated by the Right to Education Act, and collected some basic economic information about households, such as possession of mobiles and TVs, etc.

The numbers coming out of the ASER 2005 survey also validated the results of another study commissioned by government and carried out by IMRB.[2]  The latter study estimated that some 1.34 crore or 6.94% children were then out of school, which approximated the ASER estimates of 1.4 crore or 6.6%.  The importance of the ASER results lay of course, in the fact that unlike the IMRB exercise which had been funded by government, they were an independent and non-partisan estimation.  While the IMRB report could conceivably be questioned as a "government statistic", the results of ASER were not so easily open to multiple interpretations.  Both the IMRB report and ASER 2005 were used extensively by government to provide evidence of the impact and effectiveness of its universalisation programme, at least in terms of improved enrolment figures.

While the enrolment data emerging from ASER has generally been viewed as encouraging, this has not always been the case with figures related to learning.  NCERT and several state governments disputed many of the findings, questioning both the methodology and the process adopted to determine learning outcomes.  In some cases, the hostility extended to actively banning Pratham from working with their schools, a challenge the latter overcame by working directly with village communities instead.

Somewhere around the fifth ASER report, a suggestion was made that perhaps there should be fewer reports; possibly one report every 2-3 years instead of a regular annual publication.  Many others who work in this sector no doubt shared my relief that this was one suggestion Pratham did not accept.  An annual ASER exercise and report have now become an integral part of the education landscape, serving to educate and inform stakeholders in the system and the public at large.

What impact has ASER had on the Indian education environment?  First, just the introduction of the concept of a "people's audit of education" was a game changer in itself; the People's Report on Basic Education (PROBE) was a one-off exercise and had not, at the time, been repeated, nor was it anything like ASER in its scope.  ASER reports have regularly held up a mirror to society, informing us of how much (or how little) our children have gained in terms of improved education levels, access to better schooling, and removal of inequities.  Note that its original purpose has not changed – ASER is still aimed at anyone who has an interest in education, not just policy makers or academics or other standard stakeholders in the system.

Second, the single most significant finding of ASER year after year has been the fact that learning levels across the country, whether in public or private school, have not improved.  Clearly, even after spending crores of rupees on delivering a Right to Education, our efforts have not succeeded as well as they should have; the policy prescription for shifting attention away from inputs to outcomes could not be clearer.

Third, and directly as a result of the above finding, ASER has succeeded in bringing the issue of learning centrestage; from a focus on ensuring that children are enrolled in school and that adequate infrastructural and teaching facilities are provided to them, the debate has now moved to a place where inputs are assumed, but the interest is in outcomes.  For the first time, the 12th Five Year Plan acknowledged that "there is a need for a clear shift in strategy from a focus on inputs and increasing access and enrolment to teaching learning process and its improvement in order to ensure adequate appropriate learning outcomes”,[3] explicitly agreeing that a more-of-the-same approach focused only on provisioning will not necessarily work.  While there will always be discussion around methodological approaches and whether ASER follows this or that method as opposed to others, the fact is that successive ASER reports have compelled us all to sit up and take notice of what is really happening inside schools.

Additionally, ASER has pushed both the central and state governments into commissioning their own assessments and analyses of the status of education in their schools, often in a move to defend policy and/or practice.  In many cases, these assessments do not produce the same results as ASER, partly since they are not comparable in terms of what is measured and who is covered, and there is often much controversy and hand wringing over the discrepancies, yet it is a moot point if such assessments would today be considered so essential if public perception had not been influenced so profoundly by ASER.

Fourth, ASER has been successful in highlighting an important trend in school enrolment – from only 16% children enrolled in private schools when ASER 2005 was carried out, the percentage has increased to nearly 30% in the last report.  Present trends seem to indicate that this number will increase to 50% by the end of the current decade. Given that this increase has taken place in rural areas, where much of the money spent on SSA and other programmes has been concentrated, this is not an encouraging development, and is one that merits serious reflection on the part of policy makers.

What should one now expect after a decade of this exercise?  Ideally, the annual reports should continue to raise the uncomfortable questions that they do today.  Perhaps there is now a case for a somewhat more sophisticated analysis of learning; not necessarily one that substitutes for say, a PISA or TIMSS, but one that develops a more rigorous indigenous model of assessment, feeding even more closely into policy making and thus potentially making a difference to learning in schools.  For there is no doubt that unless we get this piece right, any illusions of benefiting from a "demographic dividend" in the future are unlikely to be realised.

Personally, I would also like to see greater dissemination of the results of the report, not just at the time of its release, but continuously through the year.  Pratham and ASER Centre have of course, been disseminating the results at district and State levels all these years, but what we need in this country is a continuous and sustained debate about the education of our children.  Data from ASER is used regularly by the media to illustrate their reports; perhaps the next question to ask could be around ways to deepen this engagement in order to keep a discussion going.

Whatever direction the report takes in the coming years, ASER can rightly claim the credit for having changed, over the course of the last decade, the manner in which school education is discussed and understood in India; for that one achievement alone, Pratham deserves our thanks.

---

[1] Pratham Resource Centre, Mumbai, Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2005 – Rural, 2006.

[2] http://bit.ly/1xCn3RO accessed 31.12.2014

[3] Planning Commission, Government of India, Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017) – Faster, More Inclusive and Sustainable Growth, Vol III, 2012.

Acknowledging The Other Half

In the morning newspaper, I came across this article by my old friend and colleague, Rukmini Banerji of Pratham.  Rukmini makes the very strong case that having addressed the issue of providing access to most children, we need to focus on ensuring that children receive quality education; merely enrolling children in school is obviously only half the job done.  More importantly, all children must receive quality education as part of the Right to Education Act, and not just the ones who go to government schools.

Of the 1.3 million schools in India, only about 300,000 are in the private sector; the rest are run by government.  Yet according to some estimates, these 300,000 schools account for fully 40 percent of all enrolments; the schools themselves range from unrecognised budget schools to very high-end premium schools.  Clearly, the non-government sector accounts for a very significant chunk of the total child population.

Rukmini’s argument is a simple one – in a country where such large numbers of children attend schools managed by agencies other than government, can we afford to focus only on the needs of only those who attend government schools?  This is why the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) brought out by Pratham makes it a point to survey children at home and not in the classroom, so that as many children as possible can be covered, whether enrolled in any school or not, whether attending or not.  On the other hand, the NCERT’s Assessment Survey (NAS) includes only children enrolled in and attending government and aided schools.  Naturally, the results of both surveys are vastly different.

But the point of this piece is not to get into the debate about survey results or methodology.  Rukmini’s article set me thinking about the way education, particularly at school level, is viewed by the political establishment.  I decided therefore, to take a closer look at the manifestos of the major political parties to understand their respective positions.

Not surprisingly, I found a singular lack of vision or understanding across the board.  Almost all the manifestos repeat tired old clichés about generally strengthening the education system, revamping the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) scheme, universalising secondary education or improving skills development, without providing any details.  And only the Grand Old Party talks about a possible role for the private sector, committing itself to “exploring possible partnerships with the private sector in the delivery of education”.  Perhaps because they remember that the 12^th Five Year Plan categorically states that “...private providers (including NGOs and nonprofits) can play an important role in elementary education.  Their legitimate role in expanding elementary education needs to be recognised and a flexible approach needs to be adopted to encourage them to invest in the sector”.

The other major party, which released its manifesto yesterday, promises to increase budgetary allocations to 6 percent of GDP (a long standing demand of activists), but makes no mention of the private sector at all.  And for the rest, the fact that nearly half the children in this country attend a school under private (including NGO) management is clearly not good enough reason to improve the environment in which they function.  Indeed, two of them – the Party-Not-On-The-The-Right, and it’s competitor, the newest entrant into electoral politics – actually talk about increasing supervision and control over private schools, as if things weren’t bad enough already!

In many ways, this is a reflection of the way in which education has been viewed within the establishment all these years.  In a reaction to the opening up of the economy post-1992 and the acceptance of international aid for funding the District Primary Education Programme (and similar projects in the States), the education establishment moved to the far left, arguing that it was the sole responsibility of government not only to regulate and supervise, but also to deliver education services to its citizens.  This position has hardened further in recent years, even as growth of the economy resulted in the creation of a middle class with increased aspirations for their children that caused them to move away from poorly performing government schools to private ones that were more accountable.  Even the judiciary has succumbed to the persuasion of this argument, holding in innumerable judgments that private schools have little or no entitlements at all.  The result has been increasingly stringent regulation and the imposition of unreasonable standards and rules, all leading to increased rent collection at various levels, but little actual improvement on the ground.

The trouble is that the so-called private sector in education is mostly disorganised and disunited, as is normal when agencies are in competition with each other and not colluding.  In such circumstances, they lack a strong enough voice that would enable their concerns to be heard.  But does this mean that parents who choose to send their children to these schools – and indeed, the children themselves, all 120 million of them – also have no rights and can be ignored?

The school education landscape today has been divided into two distinct camps – the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of the government and non-government sectors, which allows government policies or national bodies like NCERT to target only children enrolled in the former.  In turn, this is mirrored in the manner in which policy is decided, with decisions affecting private schools taken with almost no contribution from them.

As we look forward to the formation of a new government at the Centre, this is an opportune moment to consider the manner in which we would like to heal the school sector, and get both the government and private agencies to work together.  The country urgently needs a vision for education that enables rather than restricts, treats the private sector as an equal partner, and leads to the fulfilment of every child’s right to quality education.  Indeed, this would be a good time for the new government to articulate a national education policy, given that the last one was published in 1986 (and amended in 1992).

The manner in which the new government addresses the problems of school education, and in particular, the privately managed parts of the sector, will also be an instance of resolving that classic dilemma of modern democracy – how do you conduct majority rule while protecting the rights of the minority.  In education, as in other sectors, the question before the new government will be one of safeguarding those rights, while “avoiding the tyranny of the majority[1]”.  Sadly, I do not see that vision in any of the manifestos I’ve read so far.

Disclaimer – It is not my intention to express a preference or otherwise for any of the parties contesting the elections; this blog post does not endorse any candidate or party for the ongoing General Elections.

---

[1] John Adams

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.