Mixing Them Up at School

In India, people will send their kids to schools at the other end of town if that’s where the good schools are. And costs in good schools are high too. In the West, on the other hand, schooling is free provided you send your kids to the neighborhood school. That provision has led parents in the West to want to live in areas with good schools, which in turn drives up real estate prices in those areas.

But I am guessing you knew all that already.

That leads me to what Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg ask:
“Which sorts of investments in education give the greatest bang for the buck?”
In the West, due to the neighborhood school model I described above, the choices were:
a)     Increase spending in schools; or
b)     Increase economic integration in schools.
Option (a) is self-explanatory, so I’ll skip that. Option (b) requires making cheap housing available even in the more affluent/middle class areas. If you did that, (more of) the poorer kids would end up going to middle class schools.

So which option would produce better results? Montgomery County in the US tried option (b); and it has produced “far greater academic gains for poor children”. Why? Chancellor and Kahlenberg cite the following reasons:
a)     Peers: Having classmates who do their homework and generally value education has a positive influence on the poorer kids.
b)     Parents: Middle-class parents are more involved and come to PTA meetings. They are also the “squeaky wheel”, demanding the best for their kids from schools.
c)      Teachers: The best teachers don’t exactly seek out poorer schools. They tend to teach at the better/middle class schools.

So maybe the much reviled Kapil Sibal was right after all in trying option (b) back home. Having the poorer kids go to middle class schools does increase the odds for those kids. Of course, it is still essential that the middle class kids far outnumber the poorer ones; otherwise, the school flips and becomes a government school. And Sibal’s ratio does ensure that the flip doesn’t happen.

I never thought I would ever write a blog supporting anything Sibal ever did!

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 24, 2017 at 3:54 PM

    I am not sure which Sibal scheme is referred in this blog. I am not very knowledgeable on this subject, I admit.

    There was one scheme in which Sibal directed schools to make students do many, many tests and keep the record of all performances, to the effect exam marks are no longer the criteria. Virtually a kind of "every week (or at best every fortnight) is one semester"!

    Who will do all the clerical drudgery involved became a big question. Government will only say, "Do it, will you". Helpless school managements will ditto these words to the teachers, for they are not allowed a 'say' on education. Anyway, what happened was teachers more or less became clerks. They were rendered dispirited with the profession, which by itself has the potential to offer job satisfaction and joy of teaching. At any rate, all the teachers we knew hated not only the scheme but also its perpetrator! All of them, I am inclined to believe, must have voted for BJP for just this reason alone! :-)

    If some other marvelous scheme of Sibal is being addressed here in this blog, maybe another blog can highlight its details and merits. I do not recall any, but do accept many good schemes are surely possible at policy making level and might have been promoted too.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more