Madhav Chavan of Pratham at Asia Society

I heard Mr. Madhav Chavan give a wonderful talk on Pratham and the Read India movement sweeping India. By 2010, 60 million kids will have been reached through the integrated schools program.

The Read India program was started in 1997 and 70 million kids have been impacted by Jan 2007. Pratham asked the government to publish the data on education in India.
In 2005 86% of India was surveyed. And 90% of the children did go to school. But Pratham found that 50% of that school going population was not reading even at a first grade level.

Also the percentage of kids in the Southern states were reading at a lower level than kids in the Northern states.

He compared the Read India program to Teach for America program. He said he had started this project with a simple idea of doing the right thing. This had lead to volunteers agreeing to tutor young kids within their communities. The volunteering made the teachers feel important within the community, by giving them a role and status in the village.

He quoted Lao Tzu, who said about children, love them, build on what they know and let them think they have figured it out for themselves, that is empowerment.

He gave an example of the Read India program in Chattisgarh State, that was successful because of people's initiative and government's participation.

By publishing the ASER report (more about this on an earlier blog post), the governement was brought to task on the quality or lack of good education that it, is providing. Outcomes are as important as outlays. Pratham is successful because they can show what the problem is and help with the solution.

He felt it was important to empower others, without feeling that you were being dis empowered. Pratham needs to be independent of government control, therefore it prefers independent funding.

They have some videos on YOU TUBE Angreezi from A to Z, which shows how they are teaching English to children in Himachal Pradesh.

They also have some bridge programs for children 6 through 14 and they have an adult education program called Siksha Ke Badle Me Siksha. You teach someone for 6 months and we will teach you for 3 months what you do not know. They were also toying with the idea of a finishing school and learning labs. Pratham has a successful mobile library project running in the slums of Delhi.

Indian corporate houses were doing a lot to help Pratham, along with Major American foundations like google. But he felt the corporates could be allocating many more funds than they do.

Mr. Chavan's steps for success were -:

1. Trust people that you work with.

2. Do not try to control things and people.

3. Every step you take is a step against failing. Social capital is where people belong to each other, they feel accountable.

He felt in India change was possible because of less structures, regulations and restrictions.

Asia Society blurb.
United States of America (Press Release) June 6, 2008 -- Education is the responsibility of the government. But, what happens when governments do not deliver? In 2005, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a survey of children’s learning levels facilitated by Pratham, India’s largest non-profit in the area of primary education, revealed that although more than 94% of children were enrolled in school, learning levels were low. In 2007, Pratham launched the Read India movement with the ambitious goal of teaching all children in India how to read, write and do arithmetic by 2009. Pratham has today mobilized volunteers in almost 300,000 villages across India and has formed partnerships with over 15 state governments to improve the quality of teaching in schools. Over 14 million children have benefited from the first 6 months of the campaign.

Dr. Madhav Chavan, Founder and Director of Programs for Pratham, will speak about how ASER and Read India, initiatives led by people, are bringing about social change on a large scale. More broadly, he will speak about how this education movement has become a learning school for a model of democracy in which the government is an effective instrument of the people and not an inadequate master.

Aser Report

Pratham has put out a report on the state of early education in India.

Here is a link to the report.

• The percentage of out-of-school children has further reduced to 4.1%. 98 % of
the rural population now has access to a primary school within a mile.
• Reading fluency has improved across grade levels although it remains low (See
graph). Math ability shows no improvement.
• English reading and comprehension were tested for the first time. 60.9% of
children in Grade 1 cannot read letters in English. 72.1 % of children in Grade 5
cannot read easy sentences
• Pre-school attendance has increased substantially among 3-4 year olds
Visited schools show clear improvements in pupil-teacher ratios. The availability
of functioning toilets, drinking water facilities, and midday meals has improved.

Here is a review of the report by Yamini Aiyar.

The good news from ASER 2007 is that enrolment is up ( 98.5 per cent across the country) and learning levels have improved (the proportion of children in classes 1 and 2 who can recognise letters and read words has gone up from 73.3 per cent in 2006 to 78.3 per cent in 2007). But nearly 40 per cent of children in Class 5 cannot read a Class 2 textbook. Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh have improved while, somewhat surprisingly, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are amongst the worst performers. Still more surprising: Bihar is doing consistently well. In 2007, it significantly improved its enrolment levels.

Before ASER, information of this nature was simply not available. Three years on, we can now measure progress and draw comparisons. We now have tools to analyse what works, what doesn’t and what gaps need to plugged — all of which are critical if we want to improve the quality of public education in India.

How do we measure outcomes and impact on a national scale? This is where lessons from ASER become extremely important.

In 2005, the Centre launched the ‘Outcomes Budget’ — an important step towards shifting focus from outlays to outcomes. The aim was to make the government more performance-oriented by making explicit the objectives and outcomes expected from public expenditures and allocating funds to each of these objectives. Like most government efforts, this has been poorly implemented.

There are two critical elements to a successful Outcomes Budget. First, it requires the identification of clear and quantifiable outcome indicators. But as of now, these indicators are vague and that makes measurement impossible and irrelevant.

Second, for an Outcomes Budget to achieve results, it must be accompanied by increased information on performance against these indicators. On this count, too, the Outcomes Budget has fallen far short of expectations. The budget itself was launched with much media fanfare, but over the years, it has simply disappeared from the public radar. There is no evidence of any proactive effort by government agencies to generate and disseminate information on progress.

The ASER experience offers important lessons that can go a long way in addressing these weaknesses. First, it has successfully identified simple indicators of learning competence — word and number recognition, basic comprehension and basic arithmetic. These are tangible and quantifiable and are applicable all over the country. Most importantly, these indicators are realistic and relevant. After all, it is reasonable to expect that a child in Class 5 can recognise words, do basic math and read a Class 2 textbook.

Second, ASER has developed an inbuilt strategy for information dissemination across the country. This includes the preparation of annual regional reports and simple district level report cards.