Thoughts on blogging

I am in my second year of graduate school here at Oxford.  I blogged pretty regularly last year.  I blogged on travels, on my studies, on my thoughts, what I was reading, seeing, and more.  This year, I didn’t blog throughout the fall.  I got to India in December and resolved to blog regularly.  If you read through the records of the blogging, though, I blogged once, saying I was going to blog regularly, then didn’t do it at all.  Why not?

Blogging is a funny thing.  When I was blogging every day, I was blogging what I was thinking.  But it’s a weird balance between wanting to share what I am thinking, and realizing that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to get too personal, because anyone in the world could read it.  So it was an odd balance of wanting to be personal enough to be interesting but cautious about just throwing any old thought out there.  I thought I did it well.  And it took a lot of thought, energy, and creativity.

This year, as Twitter and everything is exploding, I ask the question I asked when I was blogging regularly last year: “Who cares?”  Who cares what 140-word updates I would post on Twitter?  Or what I would write in a blog?  The answer is maybe a lot of people.  I had family and friends who would regularly read my blog last year.  Or random links.  But maybe it’s no one…maybe it’s like standing on a street corner, shouting.  I don’t know.

The best blogs to me are those that I care about.  Those that are collators of information, or those that present me with articles, thoughts, arguments, pictures, etc. that I had never seen or confronted before.  But since I don’t necessarily have a grasp of my readership, and I do know that the vast majority of the world wouldn’t be checking in to see what I am doing or thinking every day, blogging seemed to me to be somewhat of a vain exercise.  But to my family and friends that did care, it was a nice way of updating them on what was happening.  That was my thought, at least.

This year, for some reason, I don’t have the same motivation to blog.  I am busier, and blogging takes a lot of time and energy.  I also don’t have as much solitary time for reflection.  I also am out of the habit.  I also am less convinced that people care what I post every day.

So if you want me to keep blogging, let me know.  Or just send me an e-mail.  When I start my full-time job in July, I probably will find blogging relevant again–for the spread of information and ideas.  So I may pick it back up again.  But no promises!  I will only blog so long as I find it making a contribution to other people.  Which I think it can, but I’m not feeling it right now!

Ross

 

“Monimentum Aere Perennius”

All,

After a while, I’m back!

What do I mean by “aere perennius?”  And what am I up to?  After an exciting fall with the campaign in the US, and a month back at Oxford, following my school, I am back in India now working with the global education project and back to writing this blog.  The most exciting thing about the projects I have been lucky enough to be involved with this year are the innovative ideas and the tireless people who are changing the world for the better.  When I was younger, I was obsessed with Latin and Greek (and being in Italy last week, I reminded myself that I still am).  Human ingenuity, the Greeks and Romans argued, was the greatest thing on earth.  One of my favorite Latin poets is Horace, and in what is arguably his valedictory ode, he reflects on his own life’s work:

“Exegi monimentum aere perennius/ regalique situ pyramidum altius…” translated: “I have built a monument more lasting than bronze/higher than the site of the pyramids of the royals…”

His poetry and his creativity, Horace argued, was more lasting than bronze.  And that is the human spirit: I have seen people apply their gifts to fundamentally change parts of the world in ways that will last longer than any bronze could.  This blog will hopefully cover what we come across as the most exciting ways this happens.

I am back in India now with the Indian School Finance Company, which when I last left you, was still in the exploratory phases.  Now, the company has made its first two loans, and has over 50 schools potentially in the pipeline.  Relationship managers are visiting schools every day to scout who needs what support where.  And the private education industry here is booming.

Over the next month, I will keep you posted on where I am going and what I am doing.  It’s good to be back.

ERB

 

Pictures (more to come)

The women of the city college of Ibrahimputnam (equivalent grades 11-12)

 

What we can learn from a rickshaw ride

Yesterday, I was looking for a building for a meeting.  Street addresses in India are rare; if you need to get a place, the provided street address is more of a suggestion then a location.  My general strategy when I’ve had a meeting, therefore, is this: I show up about half an hour early, ask around for where I need to go, talk to about twenty people (no one ever says they “don’t know”), and take the average of the difference.

Yesterday, I went to the Naandi Foundation, an organization that works closely with government and private schools across Andhra Pradesh, and the only address I had was “Imperial Towers.”  I followed the general pattern of asking 20 people and splitting the difference.  Along the way, I met a man named Mohammed who stopped everything, walked me around, and ensured I got to the office correctly.  We chatted, exchanged numbers, and he invited me to his house for dinner.

I met him later on at a pre-arranged meeting point, and we got in an moto-rickshaw.  I take these everywhere in Hyderabad.  Usually, they are about 50 cents for a 15-minute ride.  This time, though, we paid about 12 cents for a 20-minute ride, but shared it with three other people.  Hyderabad has no public transportation system to speak of; they have an erratic and inefficient bus system.  In its place, a pseudo-public transit system of auto-rickshaws has cropped up.  The very poor pay very small amounts to travel commonly-traveled routes; to get to Mohammed’s house, we “changed lines” once at a large intersection and paid about 15 cents apiece.  The route is affordable, even for the poorest, and the route is highly profitable for the driver.  Instead of taking one rider paying 75 cents, he takes seven riders who pay, in total, $1.  Over the day, that adds up for a larger profit.

This is the concept behind what we’re doing.  In the developing world, sustained income won’t happen, the thought goes, if you rely on the generosity of foundations and the fickleness of marketing budgets.  There are many dedicated NGOs who do wonderful things, but to get massive amounts of capital/investment in the developing world, many companies and investors need to have a profit-driven incentive because they have the bottom line in order.  This rickshaw example shows how, by creatively packing people into a rickshaw and going on high-demand routes, the rickshaw driver can make a greater profit than he would have otherwise ($1 vs 50 cents) and each rider, though very poor, still can afford the traveling fee.

School finance is not a profitable business taken school-by-school.  But in large amounts, if smartly executed, we can give a ride to millions of students and do it in such a way that investors will want to make that capital available.

 

Private education for the poor: A visit to the Indian village

In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “I am convinced that if India is to attain true freedom, and through India, the world also, then sooner or later it must be recognized that people will have to live in villages, not towns; in huts, not palaces.” The concept of “the village”—romantic, agrarian, simple, complete—has captured the imagination of the Indian government ever since independence. This is a controversial concept, as in many ways, the village life has reinforced poverty and caste distinctions—Bhimrao Ambedkar, a Dalit (“Untouchable”) who first gave India’s lower castes an opportunity for freedom and mobility, said, “The love of the intellectual Indian for the village community is of course infinite, if not pathetic…What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, and communalism?” The village is both.

The government has put in billions of dollars over the years supporting village life. Even those who have moved to the city talk with great longing of their “native place”—the village. (When you are an American traveling in India, people do not ask you where you are from, they ask you what your “native place” is.) So I visited the villages yesterday, naturally, to see what the schools were like.

Rural India is set up in a kind of satellite structure: there is a mundal—a district—that has a town as the head of it. But outside the town are dozens of villages. Each village has its own school, its own post office, and its own unique culture—but for work, often, people go to the town. We went to the town of Ibrahimputnam, at the center of the district, and first visited a women’s college. “College”, in India, is similar to what Americans would know as grades 11-12. (Traditional “government schools” go from Levels 1-10, and after “College” comes University). This college was a women’s college in the town, and very few of the women were from the town originally. Most of them lived in the surrounding villages, and took the bus as much as 30 miles twice a day to come to the college. At the college there were aspiring doctors, engineers, and teachers—a lot of teachers—but most of the women wanted to return to their villages after graduating. (And, I was reminded, the concept of “choice” is not the same in India as in America—most women will live where their husbands say they will). I asked the women in each classroom a litany of questions, such as what they wanted to be when they grew up and what their favorite subjects were, and I did, in attempting to investigate this project, ask them whether they had gone to private school or government school before attending university. A few women raised their hand for private school (and many more shyly raised half-a-hand, not wanting to stick out in a classroom of 75), but almost everyone went to government school.

“There are no private schools in the villages,” the headmaster of the college abruptly told me. A nearby official confirmed this. “Every village has a government school. You will almost never find a private school in the villages.” This came as a surprise to me, given the number of budget schools I saw in the city of Hyderabad, but I took them at their word. We left the college, and began to drive from village-to-village. If there were no private schools, I wanted to, at least, see what the government schools were like.

In our first ten minutes after leaving the village, we drove past a school that read on the side, in bright yellow letters on a red sign: “NAGARJUNA HIGH SCHOOL, NURSERY-LEVEL X, ENGLISH MEDIUM, ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS NOW.” A private school. And given the location—in a shoddy storefront—and the location—villagers are not rich—I guess that this is a budget school. I take a picture, and we keep driving. (I am a guest of another foundation, so sadly I don’t have the opportunity to go in and interview them.) We drive through several villages, and I see another budget school at a crossroads, 5 km from any town. This one is nursery-4th, but contains the same signs: “ENGLISH MEDIUM, ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS NOW.”

We then reach a village, and I go to check out the local government school. Compared to government schools I visited in the city, the village schools were much better conditions. The school only had five teachers (and one had not shown up that day). Compared to the government school that had 7 teachers for 800 students, 5 teachers for 80 students seemed to be more manageable. The class sizes were between 10 and 12, and of the 80 students in this primary school, 50 would go on to 8th grade, 20 would go on to college, and between 5 and 10 would eventually reach university. The school had a “kitchen” with rice and eggs for lunch (the students did receive their mid-day meal). On the plus side, the class sizes were small and the teachers I met were very nice, and very sharp, too. (All of them cited “job security” as the primary reason they became a teacher). On the minus side, 30% of the students were absent and the teachers (half of whom lived in Hyderabad, and sometimes didn’t make the hour-and-a-half journey to school) were not always reliable. When I asked the teachers about English classes, they said, unprompted, “Many parents send their students to private schools. We teach in Telugu medium. They want English medium so they send their students to private schools to learn English.”

After singing songs with the kids and hearing nursery rhymes, we went on to meet an education officer for the sector, Dr. Reddy. His primary role was to inspect the government schools to ensure they were complying with the mid-day meal program. He said that almost all the schools were, though with high absenteeism rates, the number of students to whom the school could provide meals was manageable. Then I asked him about private schools. He gave a different answer than I heard in the town.

He said that in his district (encompassing about two dozen villages), there were 11 high schools, 10 Upper Primary schools, 29 Primary schools, and 5 private high schools. All of the private high schools, he said, had tuition of between 150-300 rupees/month (about $4-$7.50). These private schools, he said, were popular because of the English-medium instruction. “Parents, even if they are illiterate, know that English has better job opportunities,” he said. The new airport in Hyderabad was roughly 45 minutes away from this village, which he said still affected land value. “People are selling their land so that the children can go to private school.” And it’s a feedback loop, he said. Communication between villages, even, is hard to come by. People know to send their children to private school because they hear about other children going, and watch the children speaking better English. “The more children going to private school, the more that start enrolling.” These private schools ranged from local operators to a “Concept School” run by a foundation that works with budget schools that we’ve been in touch with in Hyderabad.

If parents wanted their children to speak English, then why did the government teach in Telugu, I asked? He responded that in the larger district, there were roughly 1200 schools. In response to the rise of budget schools, the Andhra Pradesh government had introduced pilot English-medium schools. In a district of 1200, 60 schools had been scheduled to start English-medium that year. He said that the schools were mostly still Telugu, though, because of teachers’ unions. Teachers who had been in the system for years did not, understandably, want to start teaching in English. The government did, but could not legislate how the teachers were teaching in the classroom. So the English-medium schools were English-medium in name only.

The government schools, to be sure, he said, had better teachers. It is difficult to qualify as a teacher. But because of the high job security and high restrictions of the government schools, the government school teachers were less motivated. As a result, the private school teachers, though they were not as well-educated, in many cases gave the students better attention.

After leaving the education official’s office, we went to another village for lunch. The woman hosting us had toned down the spiciness of her normal cooking for my sake—which I appreciated. We toured the village—an amazing ecosystem of subsistence farming and development projects (including a gas grill that ran on cow dung)—but the biggest revelation came from when I was talking with the women in the village. Several of the women were involved in microfinance as loan officers or heads of women’s groups or the foundational work as community representatives. And every single woman who had some connection to life outside the village that I talked to sent their kids to a budget school—and cited the English medium as their primary reason for doing so. At around 4:30 PM, a big yellow bus pulled into town, and the kids of these women bounded off. It was the local budget school delivering its students from village to village. The village life in India, in many ways, is the agrarian ideal of Gandhi. But there are many infrastructural, social, and economic barriers that keep those growing up in the village from having opportunity. The bus bouncing from village to village, delivering poor children to local budget schools, is one tangible link of the potential of this movement to the future of the Indian village.

ERB

 

One Thing Nonprofits Could Do For Budget Schools

Joey writes, “It’s about time for another blog post.”

Easy, easy!

So the answer to the title of this post:

The Mid-Day meal.

The history of mid-day meals in government schools is well-documented. Country-wide nutrition surveys as early as 1980-81 revealed that food deficiency seriously impacted learning outcomes among low-income Indians. Starting July 1, 1982, Tamil Nadu began a “Mid-Day Meal” program, which fed children ages 2-9 in schools in rural areas. In 1982, the program extended to urban areas. Starting in 1984, the scheme extended to urban areas, too.

After Tamil Nadu began seeing growth in student attendance, literacy rates, and test scores, other states began adopting the mid-day meal schemes—mostly the states with larger resources in the South (including Andhra Pradesh). Tamil Nadu is one of the most literate states in India, with a rate of 73.5%, and studies cite the mid-day meal as one of the major causal boosts for that program. In 1995, citing supporting statistics showing the invaluable contributions of the mid-day meal to educational outcomes, especially in Tamil Nadu, the state of greatest implementation, the central government of India announced the “National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education.” All government schools in India, under this program, were given support to deliver cooked meals to children. In the next five years, however, the transition was still not made. In 2001, the Indian Supreme Court, citing the effectiveness of the mid-day meal, directed government schools to provide mid-day meals to the very poor across the state.

Though implementation has been shoddy and imperfect, the staggering results of the mid-day meal are hard to contest. Since its introduction, mid-day meal has boosted school attendance as much as 50 per cent in rural areas and as much as 19 per cent in urban areas. Girls, especially, are more likely to attend school when there is a mid-day meal. As one report notes, “Parents are not generally opposed to female education, but they are reluctant to pay for it. School meals could make a big difference here, reducing the private cost of schooling.”

The average increase in school enrollment across India has been a steady two per cent per year over the past thirty years, but in states after the introduction of a mid-day meal for the poor, there is a striking and sudden increase. One of the major reasons of student absenteeism, cite school operators, are finances. Many students simply disappear if the parents cannot afford to pay the monthly tuition bill.

Many Indian children, particularly those who attend budget schools and government schools, arrive to school on an empty stomach. In the budget schools that I have visited, the school has a lunch break where children go home for lunch, but the principals at the schools I visited admitted that many to most of their students do not get food at lunchtime. Surveys on the effect of mid-day meals in the classroom showed, according to teacher testimony, fewer children falling asleep in class, better attention, and higher classroom control.

Of course, mid-day meals have their problems. Government schools receive inadequate funding for the program, and often corruption and mismanagement do not deliver the mid-day meal funding directly to the schools. Moreover, schools have inadequate facilities—one government school that I visited had a classroom as a kitchen, and a teacher boiling water to cook rice in her off-period. But current NGOs on-the-ground are delivering quality mid-day meals to students, especially in Andhra Pradesh, and it is worth exploring to figure out how to deliver this crucial element of school competitiveness and student performance to budget schools.

The Naandi Foundation, with which we have a relationship, has started a unique public-private partnership to deliver mid-day meals to government schools. Naandi runs sixteen mid-day meal kitchens across India, including one in Hyderabad that serves 964 schools and 106,000 schoolchildren a day. Though Naandi’s involvement is limited to government schools, it is worth exploring through Naandi and foundations like it the prospects for meal delivery to students in budget schools. As we have established, children in budget schools often come from the same socieconomic background in government schools, yet no similar systematic mid-day meal program within budget schools. One way that we could meet a potential need, as well as strengthen the budget school sector, is to explore with Naandi and other potential partners the potential of a mid-day meal for budget schools.

One potential option for action with the mid-day meal program is to work with Naandi or other partners to start a small-scale meal delivery operation to budget schools that fit within the legal limits of the for-profit/non-profit divide of this venture, and to follow Naandi’s model in its own kitchens of starting small and pushing the meal program in a scalable way to encompass potentially interested budget schools.

ERB

 

The Budget School

Happy Fourth of July!  It is something else to celebrate this holiday abroad.  This evening, the small American crowd in Hyderabad is going to Senor Pepe’s, the lone Mexican place in town, for a July 4th dinner—Mexican is the closest thing to American we could find.  No fireworks, sadly, but we try the best we can.

In the past few days, I visited several budget schools.  These schools charged between $1-$5/month, and the quality was, in fact, seriously better.  Most of these schools were started, and are completely controlled, by the owner and founder.  All of the founders I met went to government schools themselves.  Much of the literature surrounding budget schools focuses on entrepreneurs—people founding schools as a business opportunity.  But these schools are only marginally profitable.  Most of the people involved in this (and in education worldwide—look, for example, at teachers in America) view this as a vocational calling.

These school owners are amazing.  They often have built the schools literally and figuratively, and exist from month-to-month, tuition-payment to tuition-payment.  The two biggest differences I have seen between the budget schools and the government schools: English-speaking ability of the students, and school discipline.  Maybe the biggest reason, I’ve found, why parents send their kids to private schools is the English-speaking medium.  Almost no government schools teach in English; they teach in Telugu, the local language.  Most parents’ primary priority is having students learn the English language.  English is a huge status symbol, and business opportunity, in India, which is a class-obsessed society.  When I have been with Indians who speak fluent English, they will speak English to waiters, taxicab drivers, and more, even if the person they are speaking to obviously does not speak good English.  English is the language of business, and is everything.  India has heavy amounts of local pride, and for patriotic reasons, the local government teaches in the local language.

The second-biggest difference is the discipline of the students.  In the government schools I have visited, the kids have come running out of the classrooms, seeing the white guy walk in.  They have swarmed me.  In the budget schools, the kids have politely waited in their desks.  We have chatted, and we shake hands, but the kids don’t go anywhere.  Very noticeable.

These budget school owners are desperately proud of their students and their school.  I visited one school that fit 300 kids in one room the size of half a basketball court, with makeshift concrete blocks dividing grade from grade.  Another school wanted a new bus.  Another wanted a science lab.  All these, they think, will increase their profitability.  Let’s hope we can work together.

ERB