What is a good school?

Printed in the Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2010
Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/06/23/india-journal-what-is-a-good-school/
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What is a good school?

What is the definition of a good school?

For more than a year since coming to India to manage a high school, I have been trying to find an answer to this question.

On trips around the country, I asked principals, teachers and parents what they thought to be the defining characteristics of a good school. Some pointed to glimmering swimming pools and shiny computer screens. Some others relied on quantitative measures like the number of students or year-end results. Some even used heuristics like the size of the school plot, its brand name and the number of prominent families enrolling their kids.

In the myriad answers that were presented to me—one principal even boasted that he could identify a good school by how it smells—I failed to see a set of standard and measurable metrics that could be applied to compare one school in India against another. For parents looking to choose between a handful of schools, this lack of information can be an irritating inconvenience. For school leaders and policy makers, however, it presents a far larger problem.

As India races to implement education reforms, school leaders like me need vital information on where they stand with relation to other schools and, indeed, with schools around the world; what measures they can take to improve performance and upgrade infrastructure; and what metrics they can use to ensure they are on the right track. Some examples of such metrics include performance in standardized tests, parent feedback interviews and curriculum evaluations.

Consider the newly implemented Right to Education Act, where private schools are mandated to provide a reservation quota for low-income students. How will the government ensure whether the program is working or not? How will schools be benchmarked for their performance vis-à-vis other schools? How can we make sure the program is having its desired affect of providing a high quality education instead of merely working as a coupon system for poor students?

In the corporate world, the answers to such questions are provided by third-party auditors and management consultants, who provide independent and unbiased opinions on the soundness of a company’s financial records and ensure that performance is up-to-the-mark. By showing companies a mirror, these third-party inspectors and advisors set up benchmarking standards and allow for easy comparison between one corporation and another.

The idea of auditing schools is one actively followed in countries like the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates, where the local governments hire third-party professionals to evaluate schools on measures ranging from academics to sports. Not only does this provide policymakers accurate and timely information, it also presents school leaders with a roadmap for how to plan the progress of their school. Unlike in India, where some schools are chasing glamorous infrastructure and some are pressing for higher examination scores, such a roadmap encourages schools of all types to conform to a minimum standard of teaching and learning.

In the recently completed education audit in Abu Dhabi in the UAE, the government found that some local schools put considerable emphasis on rote learning. It devised a plan to upgrade the curriculum in these schools and train teachers more efficiently. In other schools with infrastructure-related issues, the government knew exactly which problem to tackle and how to go about doing so.

A similar approach would work wonders in India’s public and private schools. The use of third-party inspection agencies will provide government officials and school owners much needed metrics on how their performance relates to other comparable schools. It will also ensure that the task of inspecting a new and improving bunch of schools is not placed in the hands of old-thinking government officials but well-trained education experts. Finally, by placing unbiased private auditors between schools and government regulation agencies, this system will ensure a degree of professionalism and expedience.

By pressing for a common set of performance metrics I don’t press for schools to converge on the quality of education they provide or on the types of facilities they provide to students. This is, after all, a decision that should best be left to school leaders to decide based on their target audience, budget, land space, etc. All that such metrics will do, however, is provide a floor for educational performance and act as a beacon for schools wanting to become better.

In education reform, parents are a problem

It seems that even educated parents seem to be a road-block to education reform in India. My article in The Wall Street Journal from a week ago.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/06/09/in-education-reform-parents-are-a-problem/tab/comments/
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“They will ruin our children!” an angry passenger seated next to me at Delhi airport muttered, shaking his head incredulously. His eyes seemed fixed on the headlines of a daily newspaper, which showed a few young students in school uniform holding hands and laughing cheerfully.

I remembered the article instantly, having read it before leaving for the airport. Delhi’s schools had just declared their CBSE results for Grade X students a few days before and the article examined the unusually low number of students who had failed or were given “compartment” results that allow for retesting.

The article attributed a large part of this success to CBSE’s newly introduced system of Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, one which many educationists had seen as long overdue in our archaic system of education. Under CCE guidelines, students were—for the first time—awarded grades instead of numerical scores in their recently completed board exams.

“Can you believe this?” said the passenger, a middle-aged man with large spectacles whom I later learned was an IT manager. He was clearly anxious to share the source of his anger. “When we were students, giving board exams was a serious affair. It has become a joke now. What will happen to India without competition among students?”

The man’s frustration was one I had witnessed before—just a few days ago a hapless parent had called me complaining that his son, a consistent top-ranker, had received only a grade and not a numerical average which could be advertised as a mark of his intellectual prowess.

Despite this, I wondered about the critical role that parents play in the upkeep and reform of our system of education. As if bureaucracy, lack of funding, poor training and tight regulations were not enough to push for an urgent facelift in our schools, even educated parents seemed to be a road block to education reform.

On the one hand, I could pretend to empathize with the passenger. On the other hand, as someone who had lived through the excruciating years of board exams and tough competition, I knew this was not an option.

The idea of grades was one used in countries the world over with measurable benefits. Even the British, after whom we shadow our education system, replaced numerical marks with grades over 40 years ago. How could I ignore the mass suicides and murders that have wracked our society in the name of competition? And with growing reliance on team-work, multi-culturalism and extra-curricular talent, was it right to shoot down a system that promoted these concepts?

Even then, I realized the answer lay not in indignantly turning down the man. Many Indian parents today believe that ruthless competition will drive their sons and daughters towards success. As leaders in the business and education world, perhaps our ideas should focus as much on educating our parents as on educating our children? As educationists, we are at a cultural cross roads which we cannot hope to cross without the support and understanding of our parents.

“Be patient, sir,” I said to the man, looking at the laughing students. “Their time is not far away.”