1. P R E PA R E D B Y
K . P O O R N I M A
D . S A I K U M A R I
D . S R AVA N I
K . S A N U J A
A . S R I A M O O LYA D E V I
ENHANCEMENT
OF
PRIMARY EDUCATION
2.
3. Two Challenges in education
(1) Bring children to school
MDGs for education seek to get 100% participation in primary school and gender equality in education participation
more general
(2)Teach them something when they are there.
4. The situation in India
(1) Progress has been made on the first goal
• Rapid improvement in enrollment rates, at least in primary school
• Situation for girls and in some states can still improve
• Secondary school?
(2) Quality is a disaster:
• Absence rate: 24%--Teaching rate 50%
• Pratham’s ASER survey: 60% of children aged 7 to 12 cannot read a simple paragraph
• General dissatisfaction: Fraction of children in private school in India is higher than the Netherlands and Chile (Murgai
and Pritchett)
6. How to make progress?
Faced with these two challenges, one is tempted to come up with silver bullets (teacher training; funding ;rural-
education;school committees; vouchers; etc.)
There is probably no silver bullet, one needs to learn from experience what has worked and what has not worked
and try to reproduce what has worked.
7. How to form the comparison group?
In general, program beneficiaries are specially selected (poor, motivated, etc…) and are thus not comparable to non-
beneficiaries
Comparison between beneficiaries before and after receiving the program is not informative: many other things happened
over time
One solution to this problem--Experimental approach: the program is randomly assigned within a given group, creating
strictly comparable treatment and comparison groups (in education randomization usually done at school level)
8. HOW TO IMPROVE EDUCATION AT PRIMARY LEVEL
1.Funding:
India has problems with corruption and funding.
India must not only improve its funding for primary
education, it needs to insure that the money is going
where its meant to go. Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City:
Bombay Lost and Found" and Ramchandra Guha's “
India After Gandhi“go great lengths to assert the
expanse of corruption in India. Many civic projects
are left unfinished because the funding ends
up in the pockets of bureaucrats.
9. • To quote The Hindu newspaper, "The World Bank has approved two projects worth $1.05 billion for India, aimed at
expanding the reach of primary schools and the quality of engineering education in the country."
•This sum could drastically improve primary
• education in India, but only if it ends up
• in the right place.
10. 2.Rural Education
• Rural education is significantly less
but improving the quality of education in
rural areas is essential.
• The nonprofit organization CARE conducted a
survey on rural education in Gujarat state,
concluding: "47% of children in the second
through fifth grades cannot read simple
paragraphs with short sentences.
• Approximately 54% of children in the same
grades cannot solve basic subtraction or division
problems. The education sector is also fraught
with issues of quality, which leads to poor
learning outcomes, especially among children in
primary school, who, without a good foundation,
continue to be at a disadvantage in later years.“
11. 3.Teachers
Absentee teachers is a major problem in India.
•According to the report "Teacher Absence in India:
A Snapshot", produced by Harvard University and The World Bank, and published in the Journal of the
European Economic Association, the average Indian school is missing 25% of its teachers on any given day.
• The report asserts: "Only 45 percent of teachers were actively engaged in teaching at the time of the visit."
• This means that, on a daily basis, 37.5% of the teachers in India are teaching, and fewer in poor areas,
where teacher absence was as high as 42%. To improve this situation, political power must be wrested from
the teachers to improve primary education.
•The report concludes: "The study suggests it may be worth exploring a variety of potential reforms.
•These range in political difficulty from improving school infrastructure; to increasing the frequency of inspections;
to experimenting with new, potentially more effective forms of local control or contracting with teachers;
to such fundamental reforms as increased use of private schools."
13. Conclusions: Challenges ahead
How to implement system-wide reform.
What will happen to secondary education?
As the number of primary school graduates increases (and hopefully their competency level), the next frontier will be
secondary school.
Providing quality secondary school education to a large number of students will be very expensive, since in a growing
economy there are many other competing uses for the types of people who can make good secondary school teachers
(Banerjee)
It is essential to think proactively and develop now the programs we will need in a few years: either experiment within large
programs (SSA) or start more nimble and try new things until it has been shown they work.
