Ensuring Children Learn Hyderabad

ASER 08

ASER, the Annual Status of Education Report is a survey on the qulaity of elementary education in India which is conducted each year since 2005, by an organisation known as Pratham.




ASER 08

State of elementary education in India: 100 students to a class, 67 to a teacher

Anubhuti Vishnoi
Posted online: Oct 18, 2008 at 0120 hrs


New Delhi, October 17 : In yet another proof of the poor state of elementary education in India, latest data shows that school rooms in many states have as many as 100 students to a class, with a single teacher in-charge of 67 or more.
The District Information System for Education (DISE) data on elementary education in India, compiled by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), reveals that Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh have one of the highest Student Classroom Ratios (SCRs).

In case of primary schools, Bihar, Jharkhand and UP have SCRs as high as 92, 79 and 53 respectively. The 2006-07 NUEPA report says Assam at 45 students per classroom, Madhya Pradesh at 43 and West Bengal at 50 are also on the higher side. As many as 16.45 per cent schools have SCR of 60 and above.

“These states should look into the matter without delay. Otherwise it would be difficult to retain children in school and may also be difficult for a teacher to handle all the children,” says the report, which lauds Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir for their ratios of 15 and 14, respectively.

A higher SCR has been observed in primary schools, and has been termed as needing “immediate intervention” by the NUEPA report.

Bihar scores low on another count as well — the number of female teachers, a priority under Operation Blackboard. Bihar (27.65 per cent), West Bengal (28.31 per cent), Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Tripura have the least number of female teachers, while Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Punjab have over 60 per cent female teachers. Bihar and Jharkand also stand at the bottom of the Educational Development Index (EDI).

Another key indicator that influences classroom transaction is the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR), and there too the same set of states is at the end of the tally. Against a comfortable average of 40:1, Bihar has a ratio of 67:1 in government schools. Interestingly, the case is even worse in privately managed schools, with the ratio standing at 71:1 in aided schools and 67:1 in non-aided schools.

Uttar Pradesh is no better, with a PTR as high as 55:1. As many as 12 per cent primary schools in UP have a PTR of 100, against just 0.02 per cent such schools in Kerala. However, overall the country has shown an improvement in PTR, with the ratio dropping from 36 to 34 per from 2005-06 to 2006-07. States like Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Delhi reported ideal PTRs, ranging from 16 to 25.

The data on teacher qualification shows up more shocking details.

“The qualification of a good number of teachers (2.92 per cent) is below Secondary level,” says the report. As many as 44.71 per cent teachers who impart elementary education in the country are Higher Secondary and below. While in many states the minimum qualification prescribed is Secondary, a few teachers are even below this level. Just over half (54 per cent) teachers across schools in rural and urban areas are graduates and post-graduates, with the number higher in urban areas.

However, amidst all the red marks in the NUEPA report card, there is good news as well. There is a definite improvement in school infrastructure in the country, and enrolment is also increasing gradually. The move towards modern education is also discernible, with 13 per cent, or over 1.6 lakh schools, with computers now. Maharashtra leads the tally. Only 7.6 per cent schools had computers in 2003-04. More schools have kitchen sheds, ramps, drinking water facilities and toilets.

The NUEPA report has for the first time also compiled data on Muslim children and it shows that while enrolment from the community is 9.39 per cent at the primary level, it drops to 7.52 per cent at upper primary level. The NUEPA hopes to expand this exercise and have more details next year on.


http://www.indianexpress.com/story_print.php?storyid=374878

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We are glad to inform you that Naandi Foundation was metioned in the article published by The Times of India under the initiative called 'Teach India.'

Chapter on Elementary Education ( SSC and Girls education) for the 11th plan working group report

Chapter on Elementary Education ( SSC and Girls education) for the 11th plan working group report

Still Separate, Still Unequal

Mother died, What about the child?

Dt; 14-08-2008

Name of the Village:- Giriliguda Prepared by :- Babu Rao AV

Vanthali Janaki from Griliguda, Andhra Pradesh found Naandi as the substitute for God in her pregnancy. Her family members were contented with the attitude shown by Naandi towards Vanthali . Naandi team meticulously made the entry into the family and considered it as their basic responsibility to look after the pregnant lady. Vanthali gave birth to her child under the close observation of Naandi team. Vanthali's family members were elated and were all praise for the Naandi team who did splendid job by taking all precautions for safe and hygienic delivery.
After two months of delivery, Vanthali decided to visit her parents . In her parents House Vanthali suffered from fever, where there was no one to look after her. Naandi doesn't have any operation centre in the area where Vanthali had gone . One day on their service to Giriliguda, Naandi Team members enquired about Vanthali, where her husband, Hari gave them information about her. Naandi suggested Hari to bring his wife back as soon as possible. The negligence of family members resulted in Vanthali's death.Everyone in her family is feeling dejected. All are concerned about the fate of new born baby and his future.

2007 report - Strong foundations: early childhood care and education-Telugu edition

2007 report - Strong foundations: early childhood care and education

Education set to become your right

8 Aug 2008, 0016 hrs IST, Akshaya Mukul & Mahendra Kumar Singh,TNN
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Education_set_to_become_your_right/articleshow/3339174.cms
NEW DELHI: After a wait of more than four years and a lot of dithering and resistance from finance and law ministries, the Union Cabinet will finally take up the Right to Education Bill for consideration on Friday. The bill promises free and compulsory education to children between 6 and 14 years of age by making it a fundamental right.

The proposed enabling legislation, first mooted by the Kothari Commission in 1964 and later passionately argued for by former education minister M C Chagla, will come before the cabinet six years after the 86th Constitutional Amendment making free and compulsory education a fundamental right. Earlier, it was part of Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution.

The proposed bill is expected to be introduced in the Monsoon session of Parliament and is unlikely to meet any resistance since both NDA and Left have been demanding it for a long time. The constitutional amendment was done during the NDA regime but it would be notified only after the enabling bill becomes a law.

The right to education will cost the exchequer Rs 12,000 crore a year. Private unaided schools will also be in its ambit as the school will be required to reserve 25% of seats for poor children in the neighbourhood.

Parents to be part of school panel
To ensure that parents have equal stake in the system, the bill provides for school management committees in all government and aided schools. It would monitor and oversee the working of the school, manage its assets and ensure quality. There is also a provision that teacher vacancy should never exceed more than 10% of total strength.

To monitor the implementation of the law, the bill proposes a national commission for elementary education to be headed by a chairperson who would be appointed by a committee consisting of the PM, leaders of opposition in both houses, HRD minister and Lok Sabha Speaker.

In 2004, when UPA came to power, HRD ministry had asked a committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education headed by Kapil Sibal to do the costing of providing right to education. It had estimated that the RTE cost would hover between Rs 3,21,196 crore to Rs 4,36,458 crore. Government then developed cold feet on the project.

Later, PM Manmohan Singh set up a high level committee under HRD minister Arjun Singh and consisting of finance minister P Chidambaram, Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia and economic adviser to PM, C Rangarajan.

Looking at the cost involved, the committee after many meetings proposed that instead of a central law, state governments should enact their legislations to implement the constitutional obligation. Centre was only willing to provide a model bill. Unanimous protests by the states saw the PM swing into action again.

On its part, HRD ministry brought the cost down. One, it realized that already a large section of children in the age-group of 6-14 are covered under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Two, the ministry also studied child population figures and found that there is reverse growth in this age category. HRD brought the cost down to Rs 2,28,674 crore over six years. Still not convinced, finance ministry wanted further cost-cutting.

Lessons from Friere, an excerpt from Pedagogy of the oppressed chapter 2

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Chapter 2
by Paulo Freire - 1970
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students) .The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration-contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence - but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:
(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly;
( e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings, The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness would result from their intervention in the world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and is an influential theorist of education.