Dear Rockstar Campus Ambassadors,

Hope you have all gone through the Teach For India website FAQs page at  http://www.teachforindia.org/tfi_faq.php . In addition, here is a series of FAQs and some answers in detail in order to enable you to inform people about Teach For India and inspire potential candidates to apply by giving them a depth of knowledge about the organization and the movement. Please find below the second question:
Question of the Day 02:
What is the achievement gap? Why does it exist? How is it eradicated? If not, what is the result?

a.     What: The achievement gap is the difference in the grade level and skill level of the student. There are rigorous ways to measure the level of a student in both Language and Math. It has been observed that students in underprivileged schools are at an average between 1 and 4 grade levels behind their actual grade level. For example, in a 4^th standard class, the students may be reading at an average 2^nd grade level, which is an achievement gap of 2 years.

b.   Why: It exists for a number of reasons: absence of English-language abilities among English-medium teachers, rote-learning as the only way of imbibing knowledge, corporal punishment and intergenerational illiteracy. The 1999 nationally representative PROBE survey conducted all over India found that over 90% of poor urban and rural parents value education and think of it as a tool for economic emancipation. What they don’t have is faith in the government system of education.  Anyway, main point is that many times parents want to educate their children, but they themselves are uneducated and hence cannot understand a)whether the child is learning in school and b) help the child after school lack of proper nutrition or exercise, bad living conditions, social apathy and antipathy, lack of role models. Even those who do manage to complete higher grades, for example standard 10, are so severely under-skilled that they cannot find any jobs commensurate with their education and have to rely on menial work for their living.

c.   How: The achievement gap is eradicated by increasing the level of the student by a minimum of 1.5 years in an academic year. If the student’s level is improved by only a year, the gap will remain the same. Hence Teach For India tries to remain with the same pupils for 6 years, in order to make sure that every last child has been able to remove this gap and is at grade level.

d.    If not:  If this gap is not removed, like a stretched rubber-band that finally snaps, the student is completely unable to cope with the class-work and drops out of school. Social pressures, e.g. Marriage for girls and economic responsibilities for boys exacerbate the situation.

Teach for India---1

1.       How does Teach For India believe in solving the problem of educational inequity?

 Teach For India has a two-step approach to solving this problem:

•  Short term and immediate intervention: by providing underprivileged children with committed and talented Fellows as teachers, TFI aims to ensure that students achieve grade appropriate learning levels in two years. TFI Fellows also work with the community to bring about change on a deeper level be it through changing the community’s attitude and approach towards education or by solving an actual education related problem in the community. At a systemic level, it creates a culture of giving back through education in a very direct way.

• Long term change: Teach For India hopes to build a movement of leaders that will champion the cause of educational equity in India. Currently, the education sector remains crippled due to massive lack of political will. India currently spends about than 3% of its GDP on education which is less than what even Kenya (7%), Vietnam (5.3%) and Nepal (4.6%) spend [source: CIA world factbook]. By bringing talented and promising individuals into the Fellowship program, Teach For India hopes to create a future pipeline of leaders in multiple sectors who will be connected with the education cause in direct and indirect ways. In addition, Teach For India also aspires to build thought partnerships. The long-term change also includes platform creation. Through efforts like the InspirEd conference (an annual education conference bringing together organizations and schools throughout the education field – InspirEd (innovations in teaching; 2^nd-4^th September 2012) and Headmasters Forum during MCGM project, Teach For India seeks to proactively participate in the creation of platforms where our countries educators and policy-makers can come together, share from each other, learn best practices and ultimately solve the problem. In a way we care piecing together a puzzle: we address some aspects of the problem. Teach For India has an open information-sharing policy throughout the organization. We also have knowledge-sharing sessions throughout the year with a variety of groups (e.g.: Pratham and Umeed).

Engineering in India

I wrote this article to be published in RENESA. Some how to the guy who was to select this said it was a "CRIBATHON". This can be expected in India. So finally  i am posting it on my blog.

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Consider these facts

India produces the largest number of engineers in the world.

 and

India is the largest arms importer.

Whom would you blame for this? The government, the Institutes or engineers like you and me or our inefficient growing population?

Now have a look at another piece of information which I have taken from my elective book of Personnel Management.

“According to Asia-Pacific head of Kelly Services, the world’s fourth largest recruitment company, people efficiency in India in 2007 was barely 50-60% against a global average of 80-90%. Only one fifth of 2 million graduates churned out by Indian universities every year are employable. Of these only 30% of IT graduates, 25% of engineering graduates, 15% finance and accounting professionals and 10% of other professionals are suitable to be employed in multinational companies. This they say is knowledge and skill set gaps.”

Some how all this points to our educational system and the amount of instability that we face. In this country with 1.4 billion population we desire for a well settled job as quickly as possible and that inhibits many talented people from going into research. But the root of the problem is much as a result of our past. Even after having high educational standards prior to the British advent we raced for western education. Western education became important as it provided good job and a secure future in those vulnerable times. What is insightful is that it was not aimed at producing great innovators or thinkers but clerks who could faithfully reproduce without questioning and the education system was designed and oriented keeping this in mind by the Britishers. This is possibly one of the reasons why we haven’t seen adequate number of Nobel laureates from our country that constitutes one fifth of the world’s population. We do not have a single institute that has a policy on plagiarism in India. Research may be a big word but practically it means copying from many resources.

Engineering designs are not prepared in India. For example Maruti Suzuki cars are not designed in India. They are designed in Japan and finally the design is sent to India for mass production. That’s the same that happens with the reactors that are made in L&T plant in Hazira for nuclear reactors in America. We just make lakhs and lakhs of copies of it and export it and say that are economy is growing  at 10% p.a.

It is understandable that labour has to be cheap but that should not label as just manufacturers. We should as engineers not let our country down. Our farmers helped attain self-reliance for India in terms of grain production. It’s time that we take responsibility and make our country self-reliant in its efforts towards having a secure place to live and if possible attain the status of being a superpower.