IIT's Bid to Improve Indian Education

We entered the gates and left behind India’s street noise, and actually, India. I could have been at Stanford.

“There are over 300 deer here, every professor and student lives on campus, it’s about creating an environment for learning,” Hari told me, the Vice President of Development for Congruent, one company who is helping us build the Curriki platform.

We were on our way to meet with Dr. Mangala Sunder Krishnan, the IIT Professor who has spear-headed the IIT open source movement. IIT is the exclusive engineering school where .74% (just under 3,000) of the 350,000 applicants are accepted each year. The rest of the applicants go to second tier engineering schools throughout the country, sometimes schools where the faculty has no direct experience and have been hired on the spot to meet the huge demand for computer degrees.

Mangala said there were two driving forces that brought open source IIT to his attention. The first (and the concern I have heard over and over) was the incredible challenge being faced by today’s famous Indian technology firms, the 300,000 engineering graduates they tried to hire each year were simply not qualified – only 10% were directly employable (see past blog on trust your teachers). They were taught the concepts through rote learning but could not apply nor create with their education. All companies have to invest 6 – 12 months of re-training for these graduates before they get any value out of them. And the challenge appears to be the faculty at the non-IIT universities; they just don’t know how to teach conceptual understanding and application (in addition the Board Exam that gets these students into the university only tests rote learning). So why not take IIT’s famous curriculum and give it to the thousands of engineering universities and faculty to at least give them a jump start in changing the way they teach?

The second driving force was watching the success of his colleagues at MIT – OCW is perhaps the most advanced open source curriculum offering available today. He could leverage the learnings of his MIT colleagues in motivating the hyper-competitive 7 IIT’s throughout India to collaborate and develop their shared curriculum for open source. After 3 years, he has 120 courses in engineering and 600 more planned for math and science over the next year.
Most of my conversations have included major concerns over the future of India due to the “dismal” universities and government education system for primary and higher ed. If you’re interested, perhaps the best read on this is from the Financial Times, the author forecasts a halt to the 7-8% Indian growth and an impending demographic disaster due to the poor infrastructure, healthcare and education system. Perhaps Mangala’s work at IIT will help soften this recession if the seers are correct.

To the Principal's Office.

“Who are you and what do you want,” was my greeting for my first Principal appointment with three of the top schools in Chennai, in fact, in India.

“Ummm..” I stammered, having flashbacks to my own time in the Principal’s office, “Bala set up our meeting, to discuss the Curriki opportunity at PSBB.” Our goal was to try and get these leading schools to load their curriculum so other schools could benefit from their IP.

“Ah yes, so sorry, it is mid year exams and as you can see we are very busy here.”

Which was an understatement. I felt like we were at an Indian market, after 22 people came through her office interrupting our conversation for her signature or her direction on a discipline problem, I stopped counting. I have never seen anything like it, ordered chaos. The Principal managed to give me some clear direction on her opinion of Curriki between her loudspeaker announcement over the microphone to her right and calls with parents on the telephone to her left. Her comments were echoed in my additional meetings that day. First, focus on 8th standard and down, this is where schools have the most flexibility as they don’t have to prepare students for the Board Exam (which decides the rest of the students life, and is the root cause for the criticism of Indian education not promoting application and creativity). All teachers in primary school develop their own activities and worksheets and this is what we should consider putting on Curriki. There must be a certificate of completion for all teachers (this whole certificate, diploma thing is big in India). There should be a contest where Scott McNealy comes and gives an award to the best curriculum developed by a school.

And all of this sounded very positive until I met with a contact of mine that evening who knows all of these principals.

“The Principal of PSBB? She doesn’t make any decisions, it’s the Dean who makes all of the decisions there. You know that computer next to her desk? She doesn’t even know how to turn it on. But I am sure she told you to follow up in a week, in India, we never say no. We just keep giving excuses as “no” is impolite.”

I reflected on my thousands of no’s to shop owners, rickshaw drivers, dinner offers, etc. over the last two months, I must be a very impolite American.

Never Say Die.

If you’ve ever read Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, you know there is one consistent rule in this very inconsistent place – desire. Every morning when I showed up 30 minutes early to prep for the NGO teachers, all of them were already present. Each evening when I said it was time to shut down and go home, I had to repeat myself four times – their favorite response to my urges to end the day was “Never Say Die.”

After days of teaching Curriki, Kid Pix, LeapFrog, blogging, Google documents and Teaching with the Internet – the teachers asked me for more. And it wasn’t just me, they asked each other for more – more resources, more learnings from their own teaching at NGOs, more focus if people were talking out of turn, more of themselves to share. They loved Curriki because the could access endless learning for their students, and more importantly, now it was their turn to share their own resources with the world – my favorite quote: “I spend hours finding worksheets and activities online and re-purposing them for my students, now I can showcase my own work.”

Most of these teachers are the first to be educated in their family, earn a higher-income than their peers, and are empowered by their NGOs to make change (which is much more common in an NGO than at a government school). And, as a result, they are making different choices. They want to move out of their parents house so they will stop bugging them about marriage, some bought their own car, others are putting themselves through University. All of them know that every piece of knowledge is a stepping stone to a better future.

Generosity Fuels the Momentum

The concept of hanging out in India for a few months and testing if a concept like Curriki can take hold seemed pretty implausible, especially given the diversity of the Indian education system (private schools, government schools, private government schools, NGO schools, International schools and the list goes on...I could stay here until I am 100 and continue learning about the nuances of this system). Fortunately, its not as far-fetched as it seems.

The generosity of our contacts makes this endeavor entirely possible. We meet with our contacts (business associates, friends of friends, founder’s contacts, Board of Director contacts, etc.), they provide us excellent feedback, sometimes consider piloting Curriki, but always gave three or four names to follow up with. And not just after the fact. They pick up their cell phone in the middle of our conversation and ask their own contacts when they could meet with us. My favorite example was meeting with a good friends father who was an Indian Ambassador. Over lunch in Mumbai discussing the Curriki concept, he scheduled a post-lunch meeting for me with a superb contact and tried to confirm a morning meeting for my Executive Director in Delhi. Why don’t Indian trains work this way?

In a way, our experience mirrors the approach of Open Source Curriculum. We introduce the concept to our own community, they take ownership and reach out to their communities, during our conversations their communities adapt and localize the concept to their own needs – be it NGO, private wealthy school, etc. – and the momentum begins.

Some Hope from Hope School.

Last year I took a vacation to train twenty Room to Read affiliated teachers in Delhi – all incredible teachers with a passion for education and helping out those most in need, as they once were. These teachers work for various NGO’s in the Delhi slums (where 1/3 of the population lives) and Room to Read supplies them with libraries, computer labs, professional development, etc. It’s an excellent model - the NGOs have the relationships in the community while Room to Read, headquartered in San Francisco, has built relationships with various local publishers and lots of rich people back in the states (their Executive Director, John Wood, is a brilliant fund-raiser and his recently published book is a good read – Leaving Microsoft to Change the World).

We all know that volunteering can be hit or miss for both parties – do our skills map to the organizations needs? Are we giving anything of value? Is the value we provide sustainable? Surprisingly, after just 3 days of training these teachers and 3 more days of visiting their various NGOs, my answer was a resounding yes. And its not because of me, its because of these teachers and their exponential multiplier effect. Their hunger for knowledge, desire to make an impact on their thousands of students, lack of resources (which motivates them to squeeze every last drop of value out of their teaching tools) and “just make it happen” focus creates change.

This year we held our training at the Hope School. Hope School was founded 27 years ago to provide education to those girls who were not permitted to go to school for various reasons – (1) they needed to beg, (2) they needed to work, (3) they needed to raise their siblings, or (4) their parents didn’t believe girls should be educated. So Hope School provides a unique curriculum around their working hours, a day care for their younger siblings, and social workers who regularly (at least once a month according to the Executive Director) visit parents to educate them on the value of education and make sure their children stay in school.

I was greeted during my first day of training this year with a presentation from last year’s teachers on how their skills impacted students throughout the year. One of my favorite stories was from a primary teacher, Nishent, at the Hope School who used Kid Pix with street children who were not allowed to enroll at Hope (their parents, if they had any, would still not allow them to attend school). She introduced computers to the children by using Kid Pix software, apparently the students returned day after day to play for hours with Kid Pix. One year later, eight of the street children are now enrolled full-time at Hope School – after the parents saw their work on the computers they enrolled them hoping this was a chance for better opportunity.

Each morning on the way to training, the Hope School story gives me my own hope as I walk with my entourage of uneducated street children. My free pens and rupees can’t change their lives, but the teachers I work with can and do.

Trust Your Teachers.

I was itching to get back to India, and reminded of this when I arrived for my flight at Suvarnabhumi and discovered complications – something about Air India not properly booking my flight on Thai Airways. My 30 minutes with Thai Airways left me with the answer – “Good luck, I can’t help you...” repeated eleven times to my various questions. I arrived at Air India desperate as I had a 9 am meeting in Bangalore the next day. After 5 minutes with the manager at Air India I had the flight I needed as well as some avuncular advice – “When there is a roadblock, we learn to go around, fly above or dig under. In India and in life, there should be no roadblocks.” I walked away with my ticket and yet another affirmation that I love this country.

I returned to full days in Bangalore pitching Curriki to various corporate leaders, foundations and schools with the Curriki Executive Director, Bobbi Kurshan, and another volunteer, Barbara Bauer (an executive for Sun who recently has taken a career break as well). I’ve been fortunate to work with some brilliant people in my career, and these women were no exception. Both are passionate, creative, innovative and the list goes on – but more than anything they have perfected the art of balancing “heart” with “bottom-line.” And the caliber of our meetings proved this as they were all set up based on their relationships – the Azim Premji Foundation (unfortunately Azim Premji was out of town on business and couldn’t meet with us), MindTree, Microsoft Education, etc.

Perhaps the most memorable afternoon was at MindTree, a company that specializes in technology innovation 3 years ahead of where the market is – if you are using Blue Tooth technology you are using their innovation. Encouraging creativity is the essence of their culture. They have adopted a school for spastic children and held a contest among the children to develop their logo. As you walk through the halls, the children’s art is blown up as murals (see above). They have set up their offices to mirror Indian villages – teams sit in pods of seven (the average size of an Indian household with grandparents, etc.), families make up neighborhoods and eventually a floor is a village with its very own replicated tree at the center where they hold village meetings. Everyone we met with had lived in the US at one point and all of them chose to return to be part of this culture, and, I assume, part of the IPO which is schedule for Q1 07.

MindTree is run by Ashok Soota who sets a high-standard for his 4,000 employees where learning is a vital part of their competitive advantage to innovate. Mr. Soota’s major challenge is hiring talented employees – intelligence isn’t the problem (Indians out-test most in education). The challenge is developing creativity and application skills, something that isn’t embraced in the Indian education system. Often corporations are forced to send new employees to “finishing” schools to learn these skills.

We heard this sentiment echoed during our meetings with executives at Wipro – who sponsored a ground-breaking study on this challenge just a week ago. The study is unique in that it focuses on the “top” private schools and discovers the same challenge often associated with only the government schools – teaching emphasizes rote learning as opposed to true understanding and application.

No one disagreed with this challenge in Indian education. But we did find two disparate parties on Curriki as an approach to solving this challenge. Curriki, by its very essence, embraces three philosophies (1) trust your teachers, (2) believe they are capable of modifying and improving the curriculum and (3) the more open the platform, the more valuable it will become.

The first camp, usually the technology leaders, live these philosophies with their own employees and were enthused about Curriki’s potential – empower teachers to create and you will foster creativity and application skills in the students. And usually these people had first hand experience with the power of collaboration, communities, wikipedia, etc. and their success.

The second party just couldn’t get past the vision of Indian teachers modifying curriculum – less than ½ of India’s teachers have a university education, how can they be trusted to change curriculum. I wanted to ask a larger question – how can you trust them to teach your future if you don’t invest in their creativity? Especially when your country embodies the philosophy of "go around, fly above or dig under."

An Education on Indian Education

A few nights ago I was eating dinner and chatting with Rajesh, the restaurant owner, about what is “right and wrong” with Indian government education. I was peppering him with questions about his sister’s life (who could not go to school as she took care of the children), his level of engagement in school, the quality of his teachers, etc. The man next to us asked where I was from and held up the book he was reading “Indian Education Philosophy.” This country works in amazing ways.

Rishal joined in our conversation and I quickly learned his family had opened two schools in Delhi. He is a recently graduated intellectual property lawyer from Delhi who received an excellent boarding school education at the Doon School as well as a squash scholarship to Brown University. He wants to affect change in the Indian education system by developing a curriculum that mirrors his experience at Brown – “teaching to think, not teaching to follow like the Indian education system does.” We quickly exchanged numbers and planned a breakfast meeting.

My visits to the two local schools and conversations with other Indians left me very confused on the challenges with government funded education – teacher training and support, literacy levels, the impact of the 8th five year plan, the average ratio of 46 students to one teacher, the mystery of this “ghost children” – all of this seemed strangely fine with the teachers and the Indians I spoke with… I spent an hour prior to my visit with Rishal doing some research.

Rishal quickly informed me that my research was crap. Perhaps in Kerala – a communist state (“Communism is clean in India, democracy is dirty,” Rishal said) - but none of the other numbers were true; in a country with 33 official languages and 1,652 “mother tongues” how can anyone do a proper census on the reality of education? Here in Karnataka, most of the village children will speak a local dialect, they will then learn Kannada to do trade or interact with other city people, they will learn Hindi if they are being educated (or come from a Hindi family) and finally they will learn some English at school and only fluently if their parents speak it at home with them as well. This helped me understand why Rena couldn’t write her name, and also why Ashish was first in his class and intends to be a doctor at age 12 – parental involvement.

According to Rishal, teacher training and professional development doesn’t exist – Indians think any young girl knows how to take care of kids and therefore will be fine as a teacher. Curriculum used in schools is based on memorization and not creative thinking. Creativity and developing your own approach is also not supported in the home, most Indian parents think there are three jobs – accountant, doctor and lawyer.

“Indians feel most comfortable following a road that another man built and taking less money as a result. If India is to succeed it must start learning to build its own roads (literally, you realize if you’ve ever been to India) and the only place that’s happening today is in the private sector. Change in India happens in the private sector, the government sector is too corrupt with baksheesh and NGO’s are not well respected at the top level to make change – unless they are funded by rich men,” Rishal informed me.

Thus, his sister decided to build a private school. About 15 years ago, Gurgaon, an area just outside of Delhi, was a “no-where-land.” No city person would even consider moving there. KP Singh, soon to be the richest man in India after he takes DLF public, started buying up land in Gurgaon as he realized the exponential population growth in Delhi would motivate middle class and up Indians to find a cleaner, roomier place to live. He built 30 shopping malls, high-tech centers, sound roads and infrastructure and today land in Gurgaon is some of the most expensive in Delhi. Ten years ago Rishal’s family bought some of this land and his sister, frustrated as well with the Indian approach to education, decided to build two primary schools with highly-educated, well paid teachers and constructivist approach to teaching. Rishal hopes to learn from his sisters approach and after a few years of law focus full time on private education and institute a “robin hood” approach – the rich pay more, the poor go for free or with government tax rebates.

I pushed again – so there is no way in your opinion to affect change in the public sector? He laughed, “There is no partnership like there is in America. The government is controlled by very smart, highly corrupt and usually uneducated men – like Bal Thackeray…” I told him he didn’t need to go any further. During my last visit to Delhi I read Maximum City and had to finish it at home as it was coloring my Indian experience too much, I was terrified to even set foot in Mumbai.

Rishal went on to tell me about Lalu Prasad Yadav, apparently he makes George Bush look like Einstein. Because of coalition politics Lalu runs the richest natural resource state, Bihar, and is now, get this, the Indian railway minister in his strive to become a minister. I quickly decided to eliminate train transportation this trip.

“No,” Rishal concluded, “change will not happen in the public sector. The way change is now happening is in the private sector and many NRIs (Non-resident Indians) are returning to India to make they change they have seen in their time abroad. They understand that we must educate the masses, that a rising middle class should be a right and a dream for all Indians and private education is the only way to make this happen.”

“What is the Indian opinion on over-population and the magnitude of a rising middle class, who dreams of an “American-style” life with cars and refrigerators and consumption and the affect on not just the air you breathe here but the world environment?” I asked.

Rishal laughed, “No Indian politician has mentioned the word “over-population” since Indira Gandhi convinced her son on the castration rampage over 30 years ago. And similar to your leaders, no politician is going to talk about oil and the environment until its cool too. India will advance and rise anyway it can, that’s the Indian way.”

Making Quality Education Universally Available

Ok, back to the “But what happens to all of the knowledge these teachers have when they decide to retire? And what about teachers still in the profession – how do we open up the binders on their desks and start sharing their magic? And what would happen if those heroes were able to start sharing their best practices with each other and start brainstorming on the perfect way to teach the Pythagorean theorem? And what if any great group of teachers could put together a textbook And what if any teacher with access to a computer anywhere in the world could get access to this?”

Could this make a dent in some of the staggering problems we see in education? 100 million children without access to primary school, in India 40% of children will not complete 4 years of school, in the US 40% of students in the lowest economic quartile drop out by high school

Curriki is all about solving this “Education Divide” by delivering quality learning resources developed, published and continuously improved by those that have the biggest stake in education – the education community themselves.

The Curriki mission is simple. Empower people worldwide through OSC (Open Source Curriculum) to eliminate the Education Divide by moving learning into the Participation Age. This curricula will range from K-12 to higher education and lifelong and life skill learning. The initial focus will be on K-12 curricula in the areas of literacy, languages, mathematics, science and technology; and universities and organizations that develop curricula for K-12.

It was founded by Sun Microsystems in 2004 and became an independent 501(c)(3) organization in 2006 – renaming itself from GELC to Curriki. Scott McNealy, Sun’s founder, has some great ideas on education and put together an extremely talented team with depth in publishing, education technology and teaching to make this vision a reality.

And how do we make the movement happen?

Create a portal with publishing and collaboration tools
Build a community of educators at the grass-roots level and with ministries/departments of education
Build a repository of open source curricula
Engage a global community

Sounds simple.

But complex with so many user types – public, private and not-for-profit administrators, teachers, students, parents, university professors and students, independent publishers, for-profit publishers – from anywhere in the world. How to generate awareness to all of these constituents? How to create a system that meets all of their needs? How to motivate other partners to publish their own IP and help close the Education Divide?

How do we increase computer access worldwide to reach those most in need? How do we develop new business models to motivate the Big 4 publishers (who own 90% of the revenue) to participate? How do we develop new intellectual property licenses to support the vision?

Any ideas? Please comment...

God Bless America(n Teachers)

After the sixth time that my mother asked me to describe exactly what type of volunteer work I was doing on my careerbreak, I decided I needed to simplify the message. My Mom is a very talented teacher – substantiated by the holiday cards she would receive after years of teaching a first grader, receipt of the Teacher of the Year award for her school district, and perhaps most poignant for me the countless hours she spent crafting the perfect lesson plan, perusing children’s books, grading papers, tutoring students, calling parents - all while miraculously being “mother of the year” to her kids.

I don’t know how she did it. And after 6 years spent researching US teacher psychographics, behaviors, challenges and needs – I don’t know how any of them do it. And some of them, like my mother, do it brilliantly.

Teaching today in the US is fraught with complexity. There are three factors, which, when combined, make teaching the perfect storm – Federal Teaching Mandates, Reality of the US Classroom and Availability of Quality Learning Resources. (Hint, the only thing we can affect is the “Availability of Quality Learning Resources” but I think its important to get a grasp of the bigger picture before we dive into the solution.)

First, there is the bi-partisan supported mandate passed in 2001 – No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I’ll leave my own opinions on NCLB out of the mix for a moment as I could be here all night. Just the facts. The 1100 page document boils down to a few rules:
1. All students must reach a level deemed adequate by the state in 180 days – for short, we call this Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Simply, the teacher needs to make sure all 30ish of her students – despite language level, special needs, or socio-economic background get a sufficient score on their standardized test taken for one day towards the end of the school year. And its not just the three smarty-pants pulling up the average. AYP is measured by subset – so ELL (English Language Learners), Special Needs and Title 1 student test scores are disaggregated and measured as distinct groups. And as we know Genius George and Smarty Susan usually aren’t part of these student populations. I promised no opinions on NCLB in this post, but you can draw your own conclusions as to how this changes the Teachers approach to teaching.
2. All teachers must teach to the standards developed by their state (or in some cases by their district) as this is what is measured on the standardized test. This follows the belief that all states, and in some cases school districts and even schools approach learning and teaching differently. This is all well and good if the tools they used in the classroom aligned perfectly to the state standards….stay tuned on this topic.
3. All schools and districts (if using federal education funds) must purchase scientifically researched instructional tools. This means that publishers must invest heavily in developing a sound research approach to testing a control group and test group to prove their product increases test scores. Good in theory, but in practice. Oops, I slipped up, no opinions.
Simply, according to the Fed, on day one of the school year the teacher and the students are on a single mission - to ensure all the kids score well on the one day test at the end of the year.

Now, let’s apply the Fed’s vision to the realities in the classroom today:
Over twenty percent of all school-age children will come from homes in which the primary language is not English (with few ELL prepared teachers)
In the 2003–04 school year, almost half of all students with disabilities were in regular classrooms 80 percent or more of the day
US Teachers put in more planning hours than their counterparts in Japan and Germany –working most evenings and weekends
Teaching salaries have remained flat for the last few years, with starting salaries hovering at $30,000
No wonder 16% of teachers turned over during the last year of measurement. Here’s why they left: The five most commonly reported sources of dissatisfaction among teachers who transferred out of the profession were lack of planning time (65 percent), too heavy a workload (60 percent), too low a salary (54 percent), problematic student behavior (53 percent), and a lack of influence over school policy (52 percent)

Finally, lets take a look at the “access to quality learning resources” factor. First is access. This is less of a challenge in the US than it is in developing countries (see next blog), but the funding for instructional materials does vary dramatically by district and even school.

Next is quality – is it appropriate, proven, engaging and relevant? Appropriate - so back to that “must be aligned to the standards” rule. Most publishers do a good job covering the standards, but even the best sometimes can’t figure out what chapter aligns to what standard. And even those publishers that do provide a scope and sequence usually don’t provide a clear alignment to the standards. And even those very few that do align their instructional materials to the standard usually are outdated by the next school year when the standards change. I won’t accept the illusion that “proven” is only defined by scientifically-based evidence that it raises test scores. There are hundreds of high quality materials out there that didn’t undergo a rigorous (read expensive) academic study that improve test scores. The problem is they are often times difficult to learn how to use and deploy quickly in a classroom to make a difference in 180 days.

And finally – are they engaging and relevant. I want to work in this industry again so I’m not going to give my opinion on the $6.5 b publishing industry controlled by the “big 4 publishers.” We can all go back to Econ 101 to learn that disaggregating a monopoly improves quality (I mean how is it possible that over 95% of the funding goes to print and when we hit the “real world” over 95% of our time is usually spent in a digital world?). I’ll leave it at that. Bottom line, “access to quality learning resources” does happen in pockets across the country – but it is far from the norm.

As you can see, this perfect storm is not for the faint of heart. There are heroes out there every day sailing the stormy seas and landing their students perfectly on that warm sandy beach of AYP. But what happens to all of the knowledge these teachers have when they decide to retire like my Mom did? And what about those heroes still in the profession – how do we open up the binders on their desks and start sharing their magic? And what, if we could dream, would happen if those heroes were able to start sharing their best practices with each other and start brainstorming on the perfect way to teach the Pythagorean theorem? And what if any teacher with access to a computer anywhere in the world could get access to this?

So I now understand why my mother keeps asking what this volunteer stuff is. I haven’t even gotten to the solution yet and I’m ready for bed…Curriki will have to wait until tomorrow’s post.