Rural Education #2: Solutions

In the previous blog, based on Prof. Karthik Muralidharan’s Accelerating India’s Development, we went into the problems with India’s education system. This one is based on solutions he proposes and/or has seen to work.

 

Contract teachers often work out well. Because they are not permanent (unlike government teachers), they can be fired or replaced, which incentivizes them to work harder. Also, they are usually from the community, which means they care more, know the kids personally, and thus produce better outcomes.

 

Take the ITK (Illam Thedi Kalvi) programme in Tamil Nadu. During COVID, in 2021, around 2 lakh volunteers were paid a modest stipend (₹1,000 per month) to conduct remedial classes at schools for 60-90 minutes a day. Anyone could come free of cost. ITK was scaled up to cover 30 lakh students within a year. Studies showed it was “highly effective in bridging learning losses”, and the benefits far exceeded the money spent. In addition, it added to women in the workforce at reasonable and safe hours, an unintended benefit. Imagine that – just a ₹1,000 per month stipend achieving so much. Remembering income levels is critical, the amounts needed to move the needle can be tiny in rural areas.

 

Data has shown that even a modest bonus based on performance works wonders. Teachers in rural areas are often quite poor, so even a small bonus matters to them. (On the other hand, a flat increase in salary doesn’t result in any improvement since it’s guaranteed!) The additional cost to the government is tiny compared to the overall, long-term benefit to the country.

 

Teacher training courses are vital. How to teach. How to teach children of different ages. As any parent can tell, neither of those are correlated with one’s own subject matter knowledge. These are practical skills that need to be taught.

 

School sizes, esp. in rural areas, are often too small. The Right to Education, while well intentioned, has led to a proliferation of “sub-scale” schools in the desire to have one in every village. But a school with just 50 students (across all classes) will end up with just a couple of teachers who will teach all grades and all subjects – a guarantee for terrible learning outcomes. We need school consolidation, i.e., setting a minimum student size for schools. It would translate to more teachers, who could be specialized for different ages and subjects. Of course, that approach would create the need for school buses to transport kids across villages. But that is a small cost that could be paid for from the much larger savings of closing down sub-scale schools. Such a consolidated school in a slightly bigger town may also attract slightly better teachers, not many of whom would have wanted to go to the smaller villages.

 

Technology can help too. Education software customizes itself to individual students, and moves to the next level only after a student is good enough at the current level. It help kids learning at different speeds. Data shows that while the absolute improvement in learning is the same across all levels of students, the relative improvement is the most for the weakest students. And since it is the weakest who run the risk of falling too far behind, this is a god send.

 

One size doesn’t fit all, fine tuning and customized policies are critical. Take the scheme to give bicycles to school going girls in Bihar. It worked very well (enrolment, girls taking 10^th standard exam, girls who passed 10^th standard). Dig deeper, and there are a lot of details to it. One, the CM cared for the scheme which reduced corruption. Two, bicycles addressed a genuine need of getting to far off schools. Three, bicycles were given in public functions at schools, making it “socially costly” to just sell them off. Four, secondary school girls could cycle in a group, which helped address patriarchal concerns as well as safety concerns.

 

It's heartening to see so many approaches that are practical, cost-effective and/or have proven to work.