Private schools not better than government schools - APF study

An Azim Premji Foundation (APF) 2013 report, "Private Schools Are No Panacea" (PDF; 20 pages - but see Update below) "suggests that contrary to popular perceptions, private schools are not adding value as compared to government schools to the children in the main subjects" (p. 15).

Previous analyses like that by Wilima Wadhwa in ASER 2009, "Are Private Schools Really Performing Better Than Government Schools?" (PDF; 3 pages) did suggest the same: "In the case of reading in the local language, in many cases most of the learning differential disappears once other factors are controlled for – Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. In the case of Madhya Pradesh, the difference is actually reversed – once other factors are controlled for government schools perform better than private schools. In the case of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where government schools had higher learning levels to start with, the gap widens once other factors are taken into account" (p. 3).

APF's School Choice study follows a different methodology. Government school children in 180 villages in Andhra Pradesh were offered a scholarship to study in a private school if they wished to. Then, the scholarship children in private schools, the non-scholarship children in private schools, and children in government schools were all evaluated over a 5-year period (2008-2013).

Analysis of five years of test data shows that:

"1. The scholarship children in private schools (children who were interested and voluntarily shifted to private schools) perform no better than their corresponding counterparts in government schools in the two main subjects - Telugu and Mathematics as also in EVS [environmental science] and English. This is observed consistently across the five years. This implies that private schools are not able to add any significant value in terms of learning achievement of these children.

"2. The learning achievement in general among non-scholarship children in private schools (who would have been in private schools any way) is significantly better than among children in government schools. However, the private school children’s households have a relatively better socio-economic and education profile which may have been a contributory factor.

"3. There are clear and significant differences in the profile of the teachers and the school facilities between the private schools and government schools. The teachers in private schools are younger, less experienced, less trained and with lower educational qualifications and are also paid substantially less. On the other hand, the government school teachers need to handle multi-grade teaching situations.

"4. Interestingly, interviews with parents of the scholarship children in private schools indicate that they are happy with the private schools. A closer look at the responses shows that the parents are possibly evaluating school outcomes on softer factors like uniforms, discipline, attendance in school (both of children and teachers) and social standing in the community.

"It seems clear that, contrary to general perception, private schools are not adding any greater value as compared to government schools to the children in Telugu and Mathematics, the main subjects, as also in EVS and English over five years of primary schooling, after controlling for the background of the households. The reasons for the perception that private schools may be better than government schools may lie in socio-economic, household or other factors. This research has provided rich data on various aspects and there is a need to do further detailed analysis to better understand these complex issues" (p. 1).

This is clearly a report that needs to be more widely known.

Update, July 2018: The report on which this post was based is no longer available on the APF website. It is, however, archived on the Right to Education Forum website here. The APF website has a shorter (6-page) version, "Does school choice help rural children from disadvantaged sections improve their learning outcomes? Evidence from a longitudinal research in Andhra Pradesh". And there is a much shorter (3-page) overview of the research in D. D. Karopady, "Do private Schools Really Ensure Better Learning Outcomes for Children?" Learning Curve, XXV (January 2016). This overview, in turn, draws upon D. D. Karopady, "Does School Choice Help Rural Children from Disadvantaged Sections? Evidence from Longitudinal Research in Andhra Pradesh", Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 51, (20 Dec 2014).

ASER 2013: no significant improvement in learning to read

The provisional Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for rural India is out.

Highlights from the section "The National Picture".

• Enrollment in the 6-14 age group continues to be very high, with more than 96% of children in school. The proportion of out of school girls in the 11 to 14 age group has declined since last year.
• Nationally, there is a slight increase over 2012 in private school enrollment. The proportion of children taking paid private tuition classes has also increased slightly since last year.
• Since last year no significant improvement is visible in children’s ability to read - nationally, 47% of 5th class children in government and private schools were able to read a 2nd class text. Among Std. V children enrolled in government schools, the percentage of children able to read Std. II level text decreased from 50.3% (2009) to 43.8% (2011) to 41.1% (2013).
• Children are still struggling with basic arithmetic.

During ASER 2013, 14,724 government schools with primary sections were
visited across rural India. Observations:

• Teacher attendance holds steady, but student attendance drops.
• The proportion of “small schools” in the government primary school sector is growing (with total enrollment of 60 students or less).
• Compliance with most measurable Right to Education (RTE) norms continues to grow.
• the percentage of schools with no drinking water facility has declined from 17% in 2010 to 15.2% in 2013. In 7 states, more than 80% of schools visited had both the facility and drinking water was available.
• significant increase in the proportion of schools with a useable toilet, from 47.2% in 2010 to 62.6% in 2013. In 2010, 31.2% of all schools visited did not have a separate toilet for girls. This number has declined to 19.3% in 2013. The percentage of useable toilets for girls has also increased from 32.9% in 2010 to 53.3% in 2013.
• steady increase in the provision of libraries in schools that have been visited. The All India figure for schools with no library provision dropped from 37.4% in 2010 to 22.9% in 2013.
• mid-day meal was observed being served on the day of the visit in 87.2% of schools. This year, in 14 states, mid-day meals were seen in more than 90% of schools visited.

The report notes the increasing prevalence of private schools and private tuition in rural India. On this matter, the article in the report by Wilima Wadhwa : "Private inputs into schooling : Bang for the buck?" notes:

"One thing to note here is that while private school learning levels may be higher than those in government schools, children in private schools also are far below grade competency. For instance, in 2013, the proportion of Std. 5 children who could read a Std. 2 level text is 41.1% in government schools. The corresponding number for private schools is 63.3%- indicating that one third of children even in private schools are at least 2 grades behind in reading ability."

English impact in rural India -- Report

A new report has just been published -- Viven Berry (ed.), English Impact Story: Investigating English Language Learning Outcomes at the Primary School Level in Rural India (London: British Council 2013). The 74-page report is available as a PDF on the ASER website amidst several other reports.

This collaboration between ASER, British Council and Pratham consists of the following essays:

• Foreword by Martin Davidson: "There is a growing interest in what the world's children are learning and how this learning can be measured and assessed."
• Message by Madhav Chavan: "Working with children, Pratham has identified another challenge for learning English – the fact that many Indian children have difficulty reading their own language."
• Message by Rob Lynes: "However, research shows that all’s not well with English learning across India, especially at the primary level where the foundations are supposed to be laid."
• Introduction by Ranajit Bhattacharyya and Debanjan Chakrabarti: "While this report is primarily for those involved in the framing and implementation of English language policy in education systems in India, it has wider implications for countries with a similarly wide cache of multicultural and heteroglossic capital."
• "Multilingualism in an international context" by Jason Rothman and Jeanine Treffers-Daller: "They illustrate how being able to communicate using several languages benefits society through fostering intercultural understanding; they also outline the cognitive advantages gained by multilingual individuals who switch between languages on a daily basis." (From the Introduction)
• "An English for every schoolchild in India" by Raghavachari Amritavalli: "It is common sense to use our existing knowledge, including the knowledge of other languages, to help us make sense of what is said or written in the new language. One’s other languages can also help to scaffold expression in the new language."
• "Evolution of the ASER English tool" by Rukmini Banerji and Savitri Bobde: "The evidence generated in all three years points to the fact that language reading skills, both in regional language and even more so in English, need urgent attention throughout India."
• "English language learning outcomes at the primary school level in rural India: taking a fresh look at the data from the Annual Status of Education Report" by Jamie Dunlea and Karen Dunn: "The paper describes the application of various statistical analysis techniques to investigate trends in English as a second or foreign language (L2) reading performance over time, as well as the relationship between first language (L1) literacy and L2 reading ability."
• "Looking back and looking forward" by Barry O’Sullivan: "The view, therefore, that emerges from the three chapters that set the background to this report, is that while English is a hugely important element of the educational process in India, its true value should be seen in terms of its role in the multilingual society that is India."

Edu-crisis a threat to national security

The other day, in a talk at Manthan Samvaad called "India's Faultlines" (reported here), Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management outlined some of the "multiple vulnerabilities" that the country faces. Among them, he noted, is an education system that is failing to impart skills and knowledge.

The evidence that he presented is familiar to readers of this blog. Here is some of the evidence from my article "The English-Only Myth: Multilingual Education in India" (Rao 2013; abstract here).

ASER reports. In 2012, in rural India, only 45% of enrolled students in the fifth grade were able to read a grade two text. That is, 55% are not able to do even that. Over half of the children are at least three grade levels behind where they should be. Further, this is a declining trend -- over 50% students were able to do this task in 2008. This is in rural India, and mostly in the mother tongue (ASER 2013).

The EI-Wipro study. What about India’s “elite” schools? In 2011, Educational Initiatives and the IT company Wipro together published Quality Education Study (QES), a study of 89 “top schools” (as the report called them) -- all urban-Indian, and English-medium. It concluded that “performance in class 4 is found to be below international average.” However, Indian students catch up in the eighth grade, “mainly due to their higher achievement in procedural questions (i.e. questions that require straightforward use of techniques or learnt procedures to arrive at the answers).” (EI-Wipro 2011)

This study also compared students in these schools to an earlier study (conducted by the same organizations). As in the ASER reports (noted above), “learning levels were found to be significantly lower than what was observed in 2006 in the same schools tested and on the same questions.” The fall was highest in maths and English. The study remarks: “our top schools don’t promote conceptual learning in students. QES results show that there has been a further drop from the already unsatisfactory levels of 2006.”

The PISA study. Sahni did not mention this study. A recent international comparison was the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test which compared 15-year-old boys and girls from 74 countries and territories in maths, science and reading; India figured 73rd (ahead of Kyrgyzstan). Students from only two Indian states participated. The report concluded that “the 15-year-old student populations in Tamil Nadu-India and Himachal Pradesh-India were estimated to have among the lowest reading literacy levels of the PISA 2009 and PISA 2009+ participants with more than 80% of students below the baseline of proficiency. Around one-fifth of students in these economies are very poor readers” (Walker 2011: 22; also see Pritchett 2012).

This comprehensive, systemic failure, Sahni concludes is producing large numbers of unemployable young people. He sees this as a "volatile group" whose disempowerment is fertile ground for violence and recruitment into insurgency.

References (all links valid as of October 2013)

ASER (Annual Status of Education Report). 2013b. Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2012. http://www.asercentre.org/education/India/status/p/143.html

EI-Wipro. 2011. Quality Education Study. Educational Initiatives and Wipro. http://www.ei-india.com/wp-content/uploads/Main_Report-Low_Resolution-25-01.pdf

PISA (OECD Programme for International Student Assessment). 2009. Database PISA 2009: Interactive Data Selection. http://pisa2009.acer.edu.au/interactive.php

Pritchett, Lant. 2012. “The First PISA results for India: The end of the beginning”. Ajay Shah’s blog. 5 January. http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2012/01/first-pisa-results-for-india-end-of.html

Rao, A. Giridhar. 2013. "The English-Only Myth: Multilingual Education in India", Language Problems and Language Planning, 37.3: 271-279. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.37.3.04rao. Abstract: http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lplp.37.3.04rao/details

Sahni, Ajai. 2013. "India's Faultlines", talk at Manthan Samvaad, Hyderabad, India, 2 October. Abstract: http://www.manthansamvaad.com/AjaiSahni.html

Walker, Maurice. 2011. PISA 2009 Plus Results: Performance of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science for 10 additional participants. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER Press. https://mypisa.acer.edu.au/images/mypisadoc/acer_pisa%202009%2B%20international.pdf

Test scores and future economic success

Last year's first post was called "India's crisis in learning" and cited the country's poor performance in the international education-comparison tests PISA.

Now, writing in New Scientist MacGregor Campbell tells us that "the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA)."

Worse, "[i]n many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure"! Summarizing a 2007 study, he says,

Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless".

Which is not to say that math, science and language skills are not important. But perhaps we should stop fixating on performance in these tests. For, as Cambell notes:

in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.

Of course, none of this is grounds for any complacency about the education system in India! Let us see what this January's ASER report brings.

India's crisis in learning

The ASER 2011 report and the PISA 2009+ survey -- it's been a harsh January for the Indian educational system. Rukmini Banerji's "The crisis in learning" and Lant Pritchett's "The first PISA results for India: The end of the beginning" provide depressing summaries. Ajay Shah ("Education in India at the crossroads") and Banerji suggest solutions.

Do bookmark Ajay Shah's blogpost "Education in India: A compact reading kit". Also worth watching is this overview "PISA - Measuring student success around the world".

Education in mother tongue essential - ASER

ASER, whom we've met several times in this blog, has a new report Inside Primary Schools: A study of teaching and learning in rural India (PDF). The study tracks about 30 000 children over a period of one year.

For about 10% of those children the school language was different from the home language. They consistently attend and learn less compared to the 90% for whom the school and home languages were the same (see Table 6.14 "Home/School language and children’s learning and attendance", p. 69).

As the authors - Suman Bhattacharjea, Wilima Wadhwa, and Rukmini Banerji - note:

"Children whose home language is different from the school medium of instruction face enormous additional problems at school. Given the lack of bridging mechanisms to enable a smooth transition from one language to the other, these children tend to attend school far less regularly. Whereas across both classes, about half of all children whose home language was the same as the school language were present in school on all three visits, this proportion is far lower among children whose home language was different from the school language (Table 6.14). Learning outcomes for these two groups of children are unequal to begin with and these differences accentuate over the course of one year, both in [class] 2 and in [class] 4." (pp. 68-69)

Here are the key findings of this report (p. 8):

• 20% of children surveyed are first generation school goers. Less than half of all households have any print material available, so children do not have materials to read at home.
• Children are learning in the course of a year, but even in states with the best learning outcomes, children’s learning levels are far behind what textbooks expect. At each grade level, children’s starting point is well below that of their textbooks.
• Children whose home language is different than the school language of instruction learn less.
• Attendance is the most important factor in children's learning.
• The average number of children present in each classroom is low, but in most classrooms children from more than one grade are sitting together.
• Child-friendly practices, such as students asking questions, using local examples to explain lessons, small group work, have a significant impact on children's learning.
• Teachers can spot mistakes commonly made by children, but have difficulty explaining content in simple language or easy steps. Teacher characteristics such as qualification/degree, length of training, and number of years of experience make little difference to children’s learning.

And the key policy recommendations (p. 8):

• Textbooks need urgent revisions. They need to start from what children can do and be more realistic and developmentally appropriate in what children are expected to learn, with clear learning goals and sequence.
• Systems must be put into place to track attendance, not just enrollment, and ensure regular reporting and monitoring of this attendance.
• Mother tongue instruction and programmes for language transition need to be introduced and expanded.
• Teacher recruitment policies need to assess teachers' knowledge, but more importantly their ability to explain content to children, make information relevant to their lives and to use teaching learning materials and activities other than the textbook.
• State teacher education plans should invest in the human resource capacity of academic support structures, like Block and Cluster Resource Centres (BRC/CRC) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET), to enable them to help improve teaching and learning quality via in-service training and classroom visits.
• As per RTE [Right to Education Act], indicators for child-friendly education need to be defined and measured regularly as a part of the markers of quality.
• Libraries, with take-home books for reading practice at the household level, should be monitored as part of RTE indicators. Family reading programmes could also be part of innovations to help support first generation school goers.

ASER studies and surveys have considerable impact. Let us hope some of these recommendations find their way into policy. As the study concludes:

"this study has provided a host of insights about influences on teaching and learning that can help align policy with what children need in order to learn well. As new provisions are put into place for teacher recruitment and training, student assessment and tracking, textbook content, and so on, we hope that these ideas will be debated vigorously and tested in practice."

How many English-speakers in India?

"How many English-speakers in India?" A member of the Esperanto discussion group UEA-Membroj had this question. He went on to say:

"Here's one of the web-pages: WolframAlpha. They assert that in India more than 18% of the inhabitants speak English. An absurd figure... Many years ago I read that [in India] only 0.1% of those appearing for the school-leaving examination succeed in passing in English...."

To which Probal Dasgupta replies: "The truth must lie somewhere between 0.1% and 18%.

Here's my take (in Esperanto):

Perhaps it might be useful to start with David Graddol's booklet English India Next (2010; there are also a couple of video-interviews with him on that page). See, especially, the section "How many speak English?" (pp. 66-68).

He gives some well-known numbers:

- Under 1%: National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation 2006-2009 (2009): "Indeed, even now, no more than one per cent of our people use it as a second language, let alone a first language." (p. 27)

- 3%: David Crystal, English As A Global Language (2003: 46): "A figure of 3%, for example, is a widely quoted estimate of the mid-1980s (e.g. Kachru (1986: 54))."

- 10.4%: Census of India 2001: David Graddol: "the 2001 census data (released in late 2009) reports that 10.4% of the population claimed to speak English as a second or third language" (in the book cited above. I haven't been able to find the relevant table on the census website.)

- 18%: the WolframAlpha website link above. Once again, I haven't been able to find this percentage. As far as I can see, that page gives only native-speaker figures.

- 20%: Encyclopedia Britannica (2002). Cited in Crystal 2003 (above, p. 46).

- 33%: An India Today survey (18 Aug 1997): "contrary to the census myth that English is the language of a microscopic minority, the poll indicates that almost one in three Indians claims to understand English, although less than 20% are confident of speaking it." Cited in Anderman and Rogers, Translation Today:
Trends and Perspectives (2003: 160). The page in Google books: http://bit.ly/lpmnjr

The influential Crystal (2003, above: 47) cited this figure in a footnote ("A 1997 India Today survey reported by Kachru (2001: 411)" -- looks like Crystal himself hadn't seen the survey!). Now it began to be cited often. As far as I know, no one has confirmed or refuted the claims of this survey.

Thus it is that Graddol concludes: "No one really knows how many Indians speak English today - estimates vary between 55 million and 350 million - between 1% of the population and a third." (p. 68)

On the other hand, India's biggest school-education survey ASER (about which I've blogged before) in its 2010 report says that in rural India more and more children (6-14 year-olds) are registering in private schools (i.e. non-government, fee-paying and, for the most part, English-medium: the regional language is one of the subjects taught). The all-India figures of children in private schools grow from 16.3% of all children in 2005, to 21.8% (2009), to 24.3% in 2010. The growth has been particularly striking in South India.

So, during the coming years we will certainly see many more people whose medium of instruction in school was English. But if we ask ourselves about the quality of education, we get a rather different picture.

In government schools in rural India, in 2007, only 57% of the children in the 5th class (~ 10-year-olds) could read a class TWO textbook. In 2010, this proportion fell to 50% -- half of the children couldn't even read a class 2 text! And this was in the main regional language -- the mother-tongue for most of the children (excluding children of linguistic minorities and tribals).

In the same period, for rural private schools, this fall was from 69% to 64%. I wondered what language these private school children were tested in. On querying, ASER Centre, on Facebook clarified that "the children were tested at home. They were tested [in] the language of the state. In [a] multiple language situation the children were given an option of a language they felt comfortable in."

And yet, in private schools in 2010, over a third (36%) of class 5 children were already 3 years behind in their reading skills.

Confronted with such critical gaps, we perhaps should not expect very much by way of English-language capability in these children. Indeed, perhaps capability in any language.... :-(

English from class 1 in Andhra Pradesh

A somewhat alarming February-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle - "English medium proposed in all government schools" - has morphed into a March-25th report - "AP schools to teach English from Class 1". Let us hope that the latter report is not a preliminary to implementing the February announcement. It is fine to "introduce English as a second language from Class 1 in all government schools... from 2011-2012". (It is now being taught from class 6.) But introducing English as a medium of instruction is a bad idea. Here's why.

The state's education system finds it difficult enough to impart education in the mother-tongue. The state's performance in the ASER survey is fairly dismal:

• only 60.3% of class 5 children (~ 11-year-olds) can read a class 2 text; nearly 40% cannot.
• of class 5 children, 18.3% can recognize the numbers 11-99, but cannot do subtraction; 37.7% can subtract, but not do division; 40.5% of class 5 children can divide. Nearly 60% cannot.

Nor is the situation in private schools much better. ASER reports that between 2007-2010, in private schools, some 5-10% more children have been able to do the reading and arithmetic tasks mentioned above.

And all this is in the mother-tongue, Telugu.

(As in other parts of India, in AP too, indigenous/tribal and minority children get only the dominant regional language - in AP's case, Telugu - as the medium of education, except for the small fraction that can afford to send children to an "English-medium" school. Combined with all the other systemic problems, education in a non-mother-tongue results nation-wide in a third of the enrolled children being "pushed-out" before class 5. And in AP, within the first 10 years of schooling, 82% of indigenous children leave school. References in my 2010 paper in Languaging.)

To come back to private schools in AP, their only-slightly better performance hasn't stopped parents from choosing them. As ASER reports, "Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of children (age 6-14) enrolled in private school has increased from 29.7% to 36.1% in Andhra Pradesh."

The March-2011 report in Deccan Chronicle gives even more disquieting figures: "the percentage of enrolment... in government schools... came down... from 82.48 to 55.72 [percent] in primary and upper-primary schools, while private school enrolment increased from 17.52 to 44.28 percent... [between] 1995-96 and 2009-10."

With the quality of education in Telugu being what it is, introducing English as a second language is hardly likely to make much of a difference. And making English the medium of instruction is likely to prove disastrous.

Bihar education report

A new report from Patna, Bihar has some positive things to report on the state of education in that state. The report, due to be released by Amartya Sen on 4 February, is from Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), Pratichi (West Bengal) and Centre for Economic Policies and Public Finance. The following is taken from a "curtain-raiser" in Indian Express; it gives a glowing report to the state government.

"The most startling finding is the phenomenal rise in children's enrolment in Classes VI to VIII, credited primarily to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar coming up with the idea of distribution of free school uniforms in Class V and bicycles for those getting into Class IX, along with midday meals. While earlier only girls were being given the free cycles, even boys are entitled to the same now.

"Parents and students vouch that while the government provides bicycles only from Class IX, it has boosted fresh enrolment from Class VI itself."

While the uniforms and bicycles have no doubt played a role, a more substantial statistic is that there is a "jump in the number of schools — there are now 114.3 schools for every one lakh people in the state, against just 60 three years ago."

The impact on vulnerable groups has been startling. As the ASER report for Bihar [PDF] shows, the proportion of "out-of-school" 11-14-year-old girls has fallen from 17.6% in 2006 to 9.7% (2007), 8.8% (2008), 6% (2009), to 4.6% (2010).

The most critical remark in the Express story is a last-sentence observation: "The report comes hard on the general status of the midday meal scheme, criticising the way it is run."

ASER 2010 released

From the ASER press release:

"Conducted every year since 2005, ASER is the largest annual survey of children in rural India. Facilitated by Pratham, ASER is conducted each year by local organizations and concerned citizens. In 2010, ASER reached 522 districts, over 14,000 villages, 3,00,000 households and almost 7,00,000 children."

For me, the really bad news is that teacher absenteeism is increasing and student attendance has not increased:

"The all India percentage of primary schools (Std 1-4/5) with all teachers present on the day of the visit shows a consistent decrease over three years, falling from 73.7% in 2007 to 69.2% in 2009 and 63.4% in 2010.

For rural India as a whole, children's attendance shows no change over the period 2007-2010. Attendance remained at around 73% during this period. But there is considerable variation across states."

Other key findings:

• Enrollment: 96.5% of children in the 6 to 14 age group in rural India are enrolled in school.
• Out of school girls: 5.9% of girls in the 11-14 age group are still out of school.
• Rise in private school enrolment: Enrollment in private schools in rural India increased from 21.8% in 2009 to 24.3% in 2010.
• Increasing numbers of five year olds enrolled in school: Nationally, the percentage of five year olds enrolled in schools increased from 54.6% in 2009 to 62.8% in 2010.
• Nationally, not much change in reading ability, except in some states: Even after five years in school, close to half of all children are not even at the level expected of them after two years in school. Only 53.4% children in Std V could read a Std II level text.
• Math ability shows a declining trend: On average, there has been a decrease in children’s ability to do simple mathematics.
• Middle school children weak in everyday calculations: About two thirds of all children could answer questions based on a calendar and only half could do the calculations related to area.
• Tuition going down for private school children: A clear decrease is seen in the incidence of tuition among children enrolled in private schools across all classes up to Std VIII.
• RTE compliance: ASER 2010 found that over 60% of the 13,000 schools visited satisfied the infrastructure norms specified by the RTE. However, more than half of these schools will need more teachers. A third will need more classrooms.

More on the ASER website.

Schooling crisis in India

"Struggling to Learn" about sums it up. The 2006 visit by De and colleagues was a follow-up to a 1996 survey of "primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh". A decade later the team found "many signs of positive change": enrolment rates, gender disparities, infrastructure, cooked mid-day meals - all showed improvement.

But quality of teaching remains a big worry: "barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5". These results reinforce the abysmal findings of the ASER 2007 report about which I'd blogged in passing, in November 2008.

De and colleagues report on the continuing plague of insufficient teachers and teacher absenteesim, also noted by filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal in his documentary on the dismal condition of schooling in Rajasthan. Indeed, the Andhra Pradesh government is currently recruiting over 47 thousand teachers - how did they allow such a huge shortfall to build up?

Meanwhile, Krishna Kumar, head of the national education council NCERT, recently revealed that India currently needs 500,000 teachers; a number that he said will shoot up to 6 million in the near future. An April 2008 report in The Guardian said that the "world needs to find and fund an extra 18 million teachers by 2015 to cope with its burgeoning pupil population".

In India's 2009-10 budget estimates, outlay for all education - primary, secondary, higher, technical, agricultural, scholarships - all education, constitutes 7.86% of the total central plan outlay: 326,680 m out of 4,156,910 m rupees. "School Education and Literacy" constitutes 71.03% of the total education outlay, or 5.59% of the total central plan outlay.

Is 5.59% enough to address the crisis?