Essay 8

What are the issues at the national level?

What I did find remarkable was how closely the problem areas that Girin calls out in the global architecture mirror those at the national and local level. Prioritisation, performance monitoring, and accountability are exactly the key interlinked and deep-rooted constraints that affect the ability of the Indian education system to equip most of its children with foundational skills by grade 3. As papers by Lant Pritchett2 and Stuti Khemani,3 and Girin’s essay, suggest, the low visibility of primary learning outcomes is key to why politicians and bureaucrats do not focus on them but focus instead on more tangible and easily moved indicators. It is why every village in India has a primary school with a teacher or two within a kilometer or two, with no regard for the (mostly deleterious) impact such an infrastructural setup has on actual learning.4Another recent case in point is the treatment of higher grades when it comes to COVID response. India’s institutions—government, courts, and media—were all focused on what happens to higher grades which have school leaving “board” exams. School reopening plans consistently prioritised those grades, with next to no attention to the fact that primary grades were shut for the entire year, and scheduled to remain as such in the coming months. While sterling efforts by ASER over the past decade and a half have put primary school outcomes on the civil society and research map, these are still not electorally relevant because they are still invisible to the vast majority.

Performance monitoring naturally follows prioritisation, and, predictably, information systems are geared towards measuring inputs. Annual reporting exists at the national level on measures of school buildings, toilets, teachers, and students. The National Achievement Survey, a sample survey intended to highlight outcomes, is conducted only once every three years, and on the three occasions it has been held, has not been comparable over time, with difficult-to-parse results that independent observers do not consider reliable.5 At the state level too, the story of what gets monitored is similar with some variance, and even where learning is monitored, most state officials and teachers will freely admit in private that the data is heavily inflated, and of course, there are independent measurements to that effect.6 To some extent, the paucity and poor quality of data feeds back into the issue of prioritisation, allowing many politicians and bureaucrats to simply deny that there is a problem that needs to be solved at all.

Accountability is perhaps the most broken of these areas, even on the much more limited definition offered by Girin in his essay: “to take periodic stock of progress, to reflect on the reasons why we are or aren’t making any, and to alter the course of our action as required.” This too is closely linked to the other issues of prioritisation and performance monitoring. If politicians face no electoral pressure on learning goals, and have no good measures for them, who will take stock of what and why?

How can the global community help?

I will once again echo Girin’s call for more prioritisation around FLN. While politicians focus primarily on the local electorate, clear and focused international mandates can also be useful motivators for governments. This is even more important for the bureaucratic and technical communities, which often look to international counterparts for professional norms. As Girin points out, the sharp focus on very specific and basic metrics like infant and maternal mortality in the MDGs went a long way in coalescing national efforts in health systems, and this success is ripe for replication in education.

I cannot stress enough the need for robust data to support performance monitoring and accountability, and I offer my view on what is needed. While truly independent data can be accurate, it is also often treated within government as not being legitimate; for example, poor performance on both ASER and PISA is typically dismissed defensively by the government (see for e.g Kumar, 2019; Vishnoi, 2012).9 The pressure to show good results on the other hand, skews education department data to the point where it is simply not useful. What we need is a compact via which governments can introduce data reliability processes with independent checks that allow them to measure and improve the quality of their data and be celebrated for honest (albeit low in levels) outcome reporting by both international and local constituencies. This is something that the global architecture can help with, by prioritising the introduction of independent checks to help improve data, as well as prioritising generation of high-quality data as an indicator.

Girin also calls for active funding for research-and-evaluation-type public goods, giving the example of the Tusome evaluation, and proposes that public goods tend to not get used in part because they do not answer the questions that policymakers are asking. Here I will differ from him not in the call to action, but in the implication of the earlier diagnosis. Policymakers, at least in the Indian context, and at least in my experience, are typically not asking questions that sustain long enough to be answered by research, especially in the absence of appropriate prioritisation, which is the context we face in education. I do not see that changing in the near future. The research agenda will thus have to be determined via some combination of interaction with advocacy priorities and gaps in the literature. Ideally, inputs from policymakers who are known consumers of research and engage with it deeply would also help shape the agenda.

While it may be possible that Girin and I are in agreement because we are partners in co-funding CSF, I am more partial to the view that we are partners because the evidence independently leads us to agree on what we believe is an inescapable conclusion: that achieving broad-based FLN in developing countries is a critical and urgent first step to bettering the human condition via education. This is why at CSF our ‘North Star’ is to halve learning poverty in India by 2030.