Shrikant’s Blog

(via) India Today issue dates Nov 27, 2006, has a cover story on Education. It is an exclusive survey of India’s top schools by Educational Initiatives exposes alarming gaps in student learning, with performance falling way below international levels. Below a letter from Sridhar Rajgopalan MD, Education Initiatives. If you want to know more about the survey and intiatives driven by EI contact Sridhar at sridhar@ei-india.com

Dear All,

Greetings and sorry to spam! Many of you know that our focus in Educational Initiatives (EI) is on bringing about significant improvement in the quality of student learning through research-based means with a special focus on assessment. We want to accurately measure how well children are learning so that this can meaningfully serve as feedback on how our education system is doing as a whole. We are also committed to doing concrete work on actually improving the quality of school education. About 50% of our effort is focused on private, English medium schools, and the balance on the mass government education system. (We are working with the World Bank with rural schools in Andhra Pradesh, with UNICEF in 13 states of India, and also with municipal schools of 30 towns of 5 states.)

At the heart of EI is its focus on “measuring true learning”, i.e., finding out how much children have really understood and can apply, from what they have studied in school. Our experience of assessing kids over the last 5 years through ASSET and our other tests has repeatedly shown us that children even in the BEST schools in India aren’t learning as much as they should. We have a completely false notion as a nation that our kids are learning well in school. The truth is that they may be learning textbook facts and procedures well, but that is about it.

We recently concluded a large scale study of 32,000 students from about 140 of India’s top schools in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata. We benchmarked performance against other countries using EXACTLY the same questions that were used in international tests and found that our best kids are doing poorer than the global averages… The study was part-funded by Wipro and partly by EI itself, and is the cover story of the latest India Today issue.

I would encourage you to read a copy of this issue – it actually carries some of the questions asked and the responses received, and in balance, is quite well written. We will try and get a few complimentary copies and mail them out but would request you to read a copy if you get one and send us comments and feedback. It is relevant to each one of us in a direct personal sense as much as in the greater national sense of where our education system is headed.

The entire study is not covered in the India Today story – for the full report, executive summary, complete question papers and a detailed question-wise analysis, please refer to this link on our website. The full 70-page PDF report (a 2.8 MB file) is also available there. An interesting feature of the study is that we have decided to release ALL the data in the study in the public domain!

Our purpose of doing this study, indeed all our studies, is to trigger a debate on the real status of teaching and learning in our country, and then play a part in a larger movement for change. We are very keen that the study not be used to simply blame teachers and schools (simply because teachers and schools alone are not to blame!) Rather, it is important for all of us to understand that there is a problem; each of us in some way probably contributes to it; and it is only by working together (and not by trying to fix blame) that we can find a solution. We are confident that this is possible and will continue to work towards this goal. We look forward to your thoughts, reactions and support.

Regards

Sridhar Rajagopalan
Managing Director
Educational Initiatives

The Manjunath Shanmugham Trust and Parivartan, an NGO promoting the RTI act, have jointly launched the helpline 9250400100.

This is after a year IOC executive Manjunath was killed in Uttar Pradesh allegedly by the oil mafia enaged in adulterating petrol. The Manjunath Shanmugam trust has been started and is devoted to his memory.

(via Yahoo) Richard Tedlow’s new biography of Andy Grove has a thoughtful subtitle: “The Life and Times of an American.” Our brains have been conditioned to expect one more oversaturated word at the end of phrases like that: American hero, American journey, American icon. But Tedlow, a Harvard Business School professor, does us a favor with his understatement, reminding us that Grove was ordinary before he was extraordinary.

The Five Learnings

The most enduring power comes from knowledge, not from status. Grove is legendary for gathering data until he has his brain around a problem, then making a decision based on what the data tell him. Throughout his life, that has given him the confidence (and, occasionally, the arrogance) to excel in a foreign country, choose a career that was out of the mainstream at the time, and challenge some of the biggest names in business. Perhaps more famously, it helped him choose his own treatment when he got prostate cancer in the 1990s. Grove studied outcomes data for various kinds of treatment and ultimately chose radiation therapy?based on facts he found in the data?even though most doctors recommended surgery.

Knowledge helps you know when it’s time to change. The most pivotal moment at Intel came in 1986, after a decade of spectacular growth and profitability. Japanese manufacturers had started gobbling up market share for memory devices, Intel’s specialty up till then, which led that year to the company’s first major loss. Grove became CEO in 1987 and promptly made the decision that Intel needed to become a microprocessor company, not a memory company. Profits bounced back in 1987, and another decade of record growth followed.

Certainty is deadly. “Andy doubts constantly,” Tedlow says. Grove is well known for driving subordinates ruthlessly?but helping them get it right in the end. And Tedlow insists that Grove challenges his own assumptions as rigorously as those of others. When it finally comes time to make a decision, Grove likes to say, “Dive deeply into the data, then trust your gut.”

Fear is highly motivating. Grove earned his maverick reputation for, among other things, challenging W. Edward Deming’s maxim that good managers should banish fear from their organizations. “That’s absolutely wrong,” Grove has said. “I want fear in my executives.” But he also recognizes the vast difference between the kind of fear necessary to survive in a Darwinian world?described in his own book, Only the Paranoid Survive?and the petty intimidation practiced by insecure managers. The fear that Grove wants his employees to feel is the fear of lurking problems you can’t yet see, of cutthroat competitors, of somebody with a better idea. Whether Grove is right or wrong, Tedlow points out that fear has been a powerful force in his life since the beginning: “If he wasn’t paranoid in the first 20 years of his life, he would not have survived.”

Even geniuses make mistakes. Grove blew it, Tedlow says, in 1994 when a scientist at Lynchburg College in Virginia found a flaw in the brand-new Pentium processor. At the precise moment that Intel was becoming feared and disliked for aggressively cornering the market for microprocessors, Grove chose to have a public, technical argument with his critics. What he should have done, Tedlow insists, is issue a prompt apology and pledge to replace every Pentium. To Tedlow, the huge controversy that mushroomed showed that Grove erred twice: He failed to understand the power of the emerging Internet to rapidly disseminate information, and he failed to realize that Intel had become a consumer-products company answerable to everyday consumers.

Tell ya what, Andy: I’ll overlook that one. Just don’t let it happen again.