Education Alliance is trying to fix India's failing govt school system

If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s the motto the 45-year-old CEO of the Education Alliance (EA), Amitav Virmani, appears to have adopted to fix the government school system in the country. Although he has embarked on his work in Delhi, he’s not thinking one city or the other — he has his sights trained on nothing less than the entire country. Further, he wants to eventually push for legislation in India where the government agrees to fund non-profit organisations that can run government schools.

Sounds madly ambitious? That’s because it is!

But it’s not as if Virmani, a Doon School and St Stephen’s alumnus, has pulled a brand new rabbit out of his hat. He has studied the charter school model adopted in the US and the academy model in the UK extensively, and he’s out to prove that the two models can work as well in India if given a decent chance. There are 7,000 charter schools across 42 states in the US; the UK has around 3,300 academies. In both systems, the schools are owned by the government but are run by private operators. The idea is to bring the management systems, accountability and flexibility of innovation offered by private operators to government schools, but backed by state regulation and public funding.

Virmani worked for six years as the head of the UK’s Ark, an international charity that attempts to transform lives through education, as its India head. That experience convinced him that all initiatives, small and large, taken by individual NGOs and organisations will eventually come to naught since the government system lacks all accountability. His own work in the NGO sector showed him that most initiatives — teacher training, leadership development, capacity building — make a temporary difference and then once the project ends, so does the reform. “Things simply revert to status quo the moment the project is over,” he says. Virmani actually started programmes and then went back a year later to find no trace of them.

Thus, Virmani believes, the only real way ahead is to force the government’s hand and get it to improve what it offers at a national level. The execrable quality that currently exists in the government school system has led to a situation where, over the last decade, government schools are losing enrolment at the rate of 2.5 per cent per annum. By 2030, it is estimated they will be left with just 33 per cent of the students studying in government schools, according to the Central Square Foundation (CSF). Of the existing 900,000 government schools in the country, over 350,000 have 50 students or less even — when the infrastructure can house 500. “50 kids in the school across 12 grades, one teacher — no teaching or learning is happening whatsoever,” says Virmani.

Getting his first project off the ground was a challenge as he ran into all the usual bureaucratic hassles. After two years or so of futile knocking against the doors of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC), Satish Upadhayay, chairman of the BJP education committee at the time, agreed to give him one school to demonstrate his model. Upadhyay said he couldn’t give him any money but agreed to allow Virmani to prove his thesis at a government school in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. 

Virmani brought in the NGO Ark and, within three months, the school strength went up from 9 to 120 students. From simple things like raising the height of washbasins in bathrooms to allow small children to wash their hands independently to introducing robotics classes to improve critical thinking, the NGO running the school brought in new teachers, thoughts and techniques to get the students to “engage” more. Lack of engagement is one of the primary reasons for high dropout rates across the country. Today the school has 400 students with 16 teachers and runs like any good private school. 

Once the model was demonstrated and they were able to dispel the myth that “gareeb bachche toh seekh hi nahin sakte (poor children are not capable of learning)”, government officials asked Virmani’s Education Alliance to take over 100 schools. Virmani flatly refused, arguing that growth has to be sensibly paced. Moreover, his ability to take over and run schools is limited since the government has not yet offered any funds. EA has raised external funds to support its work.

With the further support of a few enlightened government officials — Meeta Singh, IRS and additional commissioner of the SDMC, and Puneet Goyal, IAS and commissioner of the SDMC, in particular — Virmani took charge of 12 schools in 2016 and stretched it to 30 schools in 2017.

The results have been quick to come. Parents are queueing up for admission and enrolment in the schools has picked up, leading to an increase of 62 per cent to 6,100 students in 30 schools. Encouraging academic gains have been observed in the 12 schools that have completed one year of intervention. In students progressing from Grade 3 to Grade 4, the observed academic gains in English and Math scores were an increase of 17 basis points and 9 basis points, respectively, according to an external evaluation done by Gray Matters India, an educational assessment company. In comparison, the average annual academic growth observed in students (government/ army public schools) on this scale is typically 5 basis points. 

“The change is marvellous to witness. We have been able to dispel the myth that poor students can’t learn. If taught well, they can learn and perform as well as any other,” adds Virmani, who is also on the board of the Central Square Foundation.

There are many possible hurdles in what Virmani is attempting. One, finding the right NGOs is a challenge in an environment where the word “NGO” is very nearly a term of abuse. Two, government officials and teachers are likely to protest once they realise that they are losing control over the system. Three, changing mindsets, which is the biggest challenge: not at all states and politicians will be convinced that the private sector can do a better job despite evidence that their own system is failing.

Yet support for EA has poured in from all over. A large number of donors, both individuals and groups, have come forward to finance EA. These include the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Omidyar Network, CSF, Ark UK, British Asian Trust, Amit Chandra, Sidharth Lal, Dhruv Choudhrie, Tech Mahindra Foundation and the Children Investment Fund Foundation. The list of NGOs who are pitching in to run the schools is also growing, and currently includes Katha, Muni, Peepul, Learning Links Foundation, Vidya, Gyan Shala, Study Hall Education Foundation, Simple Education Foundation, Deepalaya, I am a Teacher and LEAD Schools. 

Bikkrama Daulet Singh, managing director of CSF and one of EA’s funders, says that for them the monitoring of progress that EA brings to the table was one of the deciding factors. EA constantly monitors the NGOs and in the second year itself four NGOs who failed to deliver were removed from the alliance. “Being selective about the partners they are working with and being able to introduce their own teachers into the system, at least in Delhi, has allowed EA to show results,” he adds.

But Delhi is not India, small is beautiful and it’s early days as yet for EA. As of now, at a state level, only Rajasthan has recently embarked on a pilot project to offer 300 government schools with a 25-75 per cent urban-rural mix through the PPP model. 

Can what Virmani is attempting be replicated on a large scale across 28 states in India? Your guess is as good as ours, but we can all wish him luck.

New initiatives in government schools

 

> Vedic mathematics for fast computation  

> Music classes to improve literacy and numeracy

> Robotics classes to improve critical thinking and scientific inquiry

> Teacher/student storytelling to boost listening, recalling, confidence

> Group activities to improve peer learning

> Contextual songs to improve correlation skills

> Push for critical thinking through summarising stories

>Concrete, pictorial, abstract methods to teach numbers

> Use of kids’ currency to understand transactions in 

daily life

> Value-based education through class and school values

> Assigning class roles to understand responsibilities and relate to them

> Jodogyan material to better understand mathematical concepts