How India can fix the perennial pandemic of its school system

Our Covid learning loss pales compared to our learning poverty

Ebbinghaus’ ‘forgetting curve’ — the basis of rote learning — suggests new content not practised is lost in a week and memorised content is forgotten in a month. Research suggests that a child who loses a year of learning and doesn’t receive help to catch up can eventually trail by three years. What does this mean for our kids who are returning to school after 600+ days? Covid-19 has painfully exposed pre-existing challenges of capacity, competence and motivation in our school system and we should channelise the current obsession with “Covid learning loss” to tackle the ‘perennial pandemic’ of learning poverty for 90% of India’s students. This needs three interventions — structure, curriculum, and teachers.

First, restructure. India has the largest K-12 education system on the planet; 270 million students in 1.5 million schools, 20 million students joining Grade 1 every year, and 9.7 million teachers. The ‘every 5-km a school’ ambition spreads us thin, averaging 180 students and six teachers per school (China and the US average 500 students and 30 teachers). Our 100% enrollment up to Grade 8 drops to 50% for Grade 10, and 25% for Grade 12. About 80% of schools are not affiliated to any of the 60 central, state or international boards. What are these non-affiliated schools teaching? How do they measure student achievement? Parents often cannot differentiate a school from an education, making the role of the accrediting bodies critical.

Schools need daily management intervention for discipline, performance management, and a tone from the top about learning culture. Reorganising schools around accreditation and size would focus resources, reducing the number of schools by half, but improving learning outcomes. Over time, a binary accreditation status should evolve into a qualitative rating, with an expert body taking a deeper look at processes, capacity, commitment and competence. Partnering weak schools with stronger ones, as suggested by NEP 2020, will create management capacity. Further, we need the equivalent of ‘udaan’ (a subsidy scheme that created air connectivity for small towns) in education in the form of scholarships. Essentially restructure around quality, resources and sustainability.

Second, reimagine the curriculum. Teaching textbook content ignores imagination and individual learning needs. Board exams assessing textbook content are summative assessments, and 12 years are too far away. Continuous formative assessment, constant review of student achievement vs desired learning outcomes needs, and foundation skills must drive school curriculum.

Content is forgotten, skills are forever. We have considerably advanced our understanding of how skills can be identified, nurtured, and developed. ASER’s 15 years of data on learning across India has challenges but insightfully suggests that only 10% of students in Grade 2, 20% in Grade 3, 30% in Grade 4 and under 50% of Grade 5 students can read a Grade 2 text. Teaching content in the absence of the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy not only delivers poor outcomes but breeds disengaged learners and high dropout rates. Reading is a core skill, but too many children read poorly. A strong reading programme covering fluency, comprehension and inference needs two hours a week.

Established models of teaching at the right level (like Pratham’s TaRL, tested briefly in UP) can help children “catch up” quickly. Learning to read so kids can read to learn when older needs tweaks to resource allocation, time tables, assessments and teacher capacity. Strong readers become strong writers and this becomes the basis for expressing understanding, disciplinary thinking, etc. We need rigorous diagnostic assessments, frequent progress checks, and progressive achievement assessments that measure knowledge, skills and understanding.

Third, retrain teachers. Pedagogy is the art and science of teaching, often ignored in India’s rote learning-driven textbook system. Both primary teachers (to build foundational literacy and numeracy) and secondary teachers (to build disciplinary thinking) need new competence. Teachers need to move from being content deliverers to being planners, assessers, thought-provokers, observers and questioners of learning. A teacher who reads can build the skill in children with resources and assessments.

Technology is a requirement — not for ed-tech in student learning, but for training teachers and assessments. Computer-aided teaching is not possible for younger children without regular supportive human intervention. But computer-adaptive assessments are the only sustainable future for our large and spread-out system. What gets measured will be taught. Centralise assessment and decentralise skill development using technology to retrain and certify teachers, deliver resources and document assessment data centrally to measure progress.

Education is an endeavour of profound optimism, equality, and flourishing because it can’t be taken away. Policymakers are thinking hard about repairing the learning damage due to the Covid pandemic. It would be better if they seized the opportunity to reinvent schooling and end the perennial learning pandemic.

(The writer is Head of School, Neev Academy)