Cuemath doesn't do fintech. It isn’t a consumer-Internet startup either. The company that has given big returns to its early investors is into education instead.
Wait. Big returns? Are we really talking education?
Believe it. Education is sucking in VC dollars. That’s not all. The diversity of investors in the segment is also greater than in other sectors, with philanthropic and CSR capital also involved. The big hope is that as these investors see returns, more will come, helping startups scale and create real impact on learning outcomes.
Not all the action is in fancy ed-tech.
Take Cuemath, which runs a unique after-school math-learning programme. The company started in 2011, initially with founder investment and a small angel stake. In 2014, Unitus Ventures backed it with a INR1 crore cheque.
Radha RK, investment director at Unitus Ventures, says Manan Khurma, founder of Cuemath, had a “strong product and a pure vision” to make math a life skill, and fun for children.
“His model of distributing [the programme] through highly educated women micro-entrepreneurs made the idea scalable with strong unit economics. As it grew, the scale attracted investors like Sequoia and Capital G. This scale will, in turn, drive more impact,” Radha says.
Unitus has reaped outstanding returns on its small early investment. By 2017, with the entry of Sequoia and Capital G, its post-round holding at 12.9% translated to a return of over 20x.
“Exits are the key to measure success in the VC world. Education has seen very few of them,” says Radha. “There have been a few strategic acquisitions by corporates like S. Chand or Info Edge. A few by Byju’s. So, exits by secondary sales like the kind we saw in Cuemath is a great confidence booster for VCs to continue investing in the sector.”
Ed-tech’s lengthening shadow
As education becomes more like a product underpinned by technology,more and more traditional VCs are rushing in.
For instance Simplilearn, which provides online professional courses, saw its early institutional investment from Kalaari Capital, after angels gave it a headstart. Later, Helion Ventures, Mayfield, and India Venture Partners came in.
According to Tracxn, with a cumulative investment of INR56 crore so far, the net worth of Simplilearn has gone up to INR504 crore. Through secondary share transfers, Kalaari, Helion, and Mayfield are set to realise returns.
In the case of Embibe, an online test-preparation company, angels paved the way for East River Partners, Lightbox Ventures, and Kalaari Capital. This year, Reliance Industries came in to acquire 68% of the company. With that, the funds realised a combined return of over INR900 crore.
Of course, there are polarising views on ed-tech, as it has been called for its exclusive focus on technology-led solutions. Critics say the tech obsession often makes startups (and, by extension, their backers) ignore more fundamental challenges around improving learning outcomes or school infrastructure.
However, given the Indian education system's humongous problems, and woeful state funding, there's room for solutions (and money) of all hues.
Too big too ignore
The bounty is huge: Education in India is a USD100 billion market, addressing the learning needs of 260 million children going to school, and over 300 million youth who will need jobs.
The government is the biggest investor. After all, education is a public good. However, India’s budgeted expenditure on education isn't comparable with peer countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The budget isn't even close to the Kothari Committee recommendation of 6% of the GDP.The bulk of the government funding has been around Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and financing infrastructure and incentives in primary schools. Then there are teacher salaries, which claim a large proportion of the states’ education budgets. This leaves little to be spent on teacher training, curriculum and pedagogy, monitoring, or community engagement. To overcome the funding constraints, states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab have experimented with public-private partnership (PPP) models.
Besides funding, allocation and accountability are other issues that keep getting debated, as our students show scant improvement in learning outcomes. We wrote about India's dismal PISA results here.
Unesco has estimated that the annual cost of ensuring that every student can access quality primary and secondary education will increase from USD149 billion to USD340 billion over the next 15 years. No matter how much the government steps up, there will be a gap of more than USD30 billion according to estimates.
Can philanthropic capital step in to help?When impact meets risk capital
Many high net-worth individuals are personally passionate about education and have committed funding for the cause either directly or through investments in funds, family foundations, and the like.
Corporates too have been increasing CSR funding towards education. In FY16, Sattva Consulting, which helps its clients scale their social-impact initiatives, reported a spending of USD419 million through CSR from 1,158 companies. This was based on data from 151 companies running 567 projects.
A Sattva report says, “Major CSR expenditure has been in primary education, followed by secondary education. Early childhood education, vocational education, and inclusive education have been relatively unexplored. We saw just about six CSR projects that support overall education-ecosystem interventions, with a spend of just USD7.4 million.”
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has invested in companies like Khan Academy (free education for anyone, anywhere), Pratham Books (reading platform), Million Sparks Foundation (teacher capacity building), Central Square Foundation, and the like.
The traditional view was that private investment in education would come from impact investors, who believe in impactful, inclusive, and affordable education, without an eye on returns. So, what then are Reliance or Kalaari doing here? Making money and hoping for impact. The table above highlights the top risk-capital investors in education over the last two years. The ones in green can be considered as impact investors. The rest, a majority, are not. Corporates such as S. Chand, Reliance, Times Internet, Info Edge, TeamLease, CL Educate, and Orient BlackSwan have also been active investors in education.
It has not been an easy market for private investment. Of the 4,000-plus ed-tech companies tracked by Tracxn, only 328 are funded, with 53 of them at Series A+ level and only three at Series C+ level.
In terms of investments, Byju’s leads the pack with USD244 million so far and another large round in the offing. Tutorvista, an online tutorial provider, and now a part of Byju’s, comes a distant second with USD88 million. Next Education, MindTickle, Unacademy, Simplilearn, Meritnation, Toppr, Cuemath, and iProf round off the top 10.
The largest cheques have gone to the higher education, exam preparation, and supplemental learning platforms either because those are faster to scale or because integration with institutes can be managed more easily. These spaces are also less regulated than K12 core-curriculum areas.
But the market is only being created now. Given a few good exits and more mainstream investors pouring in capital, scale will push impact.
Is there a need for more innovative financing models? More on that soon.
(Disclaimer: Times Internet, which owns ET Prime, is an investor in Byju's.)
The Economic Times Prime
Venkata Subrahmanyam Voruganty
• HOME
• BROWSE
• AUTHORS
EDUCATION
Between 'ed' and 'tech', where do India's education fundamentals lie?
What does true education mean? Since 2000, the globally respected PISA tests have been asking this question of students from over 70 countries. India has a forgettable record at PISA, and for things to change, our disruptive startups need to change focus.
ShareGift this article
Debleena Majumdar
24 Aug 2018
GIORDANO POLONI/IKON IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
We do need some education (may be not thought control), but the Indian education sector has a serious challenge: Government spending on education has been consistently falling and is now at less than 4% of the Union Budget.
Recently, there’s been some good news. The sector, specifically ed-tech, has caught the fancy of a wide array of private-sector moneybags. Publishers such as S. Chand, corporates (Reliance Jio), private-equity funds (Gaja Capital), and tech investors (Tiger Global) — they all have a bit of education in their investment mix.
Since 2015, the sector has raked in USD150 million-USD200 million in annual investments.
Byju’s, MindTickle, Next Education, and Simplilearn have received the lion’s share of this funding.
Together, these companies are changing the notion that education can never be a fundable, scalable business.
Now, let’s return to the bad news, because there’s a lot more of it.
While ed-tech solutions focus on areas like test prep, gamification, and AI-driven personalised education, their impact on improving learning outcomes is questionable, as we had argued earlier.
The big black hole in Indian education lies in helping each child learn smarter and truly improving their learning outcomes. India has 260 million children, and one out of every five school-going children in the world is from India. But, in spite of all the private participation, India’s education system continues to draw a blank when asked one fundamental question: How do we know our children are really getting educated?
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been asking this question since 2000. PISA is a series of research-backed assessment tests administered every three years to 15-year-old students in 70-plus participating countries. It focuses on the students’ ability to apply their knowledge and skills rather than memorising facts.
Reading is a critical skill assessed by PISA. To make reading assessment relevant to our times, PISA has been expanding its definition of reading literacy to encompass both basic reading and digital-reading skills. Here’s how the definition has evolved:
2000: Reading literacy is understanding, using, and reflecting on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, develop one’s knowledge and potential, and participate in society.
2009, 2012, 2015: Reading literacy is understanding, using, reflecting, and engaging with written texts.
2018: Reading literacy is understanding, using, evaluating, reflecting on, and engaging with texts.
India has a forgettable history at PISA. When it last participated in the assessments, in 2009, it ranked 74 out of 75 countries. After this dismal performance, it pulled out of the exercise altogether. Until now. While it’ll be very optimistic to assume that things have improved miraculously, India has decided to resume participating in PISA from 2021.
In the golden age of Indian ed-tech, can we expect things to be different?
Mission 2021 is nearing, but India is still living in denial
Last year, at a Niti Aayog Conference of Governors on “New India @2022”, a grand plan was laid out to focus on development as a mass movement to create an India free from poverty, corruption, dirt, casteism, terrorism, and communalism.
One small point under the heading “Social development required to build a poverty-free India” was on education and skill building. It was here that the government announced its plan to rejoin PISA.
You’d expect preparations to be on at war footing. But there’s still a lack of awareness. And perhaps more damagingly, there is a complacent lack of acknowledgment that a serious problem does exist.
Argument #1: We are doing well. PISA is wrong.
A former senior government official ET Prime reached out to for a comment sounds categorical: “Just because we ranked low in PISA 2009 doesn’t mean our education system is lacking anywhere. The most common data shared by people who believe in this school of thought is around education access. Hasn’t our enrolment rate gone up beyond 90%? [So] we have made progress.”
But is PISA telling us anything we didn’t already know?
According to Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report 2016, only 42.5% of children in grade III could read textbooks of grade I level, up marginally from 40.2% in 2014. Reading levels at grade V remained the same between 2011 and 2016. And by grade VIII, the set of students who could read a grade-II text actually declined from 74.7% to 73.1%.
There is a significant lack of understanding of how private-school children fare in comparison. This year, the English-reading app Stones2Milestones released its FAST Reading Assessment report after working with over 20,000 private-school children.
Here is what the report highlighted.
In unaided private schools surveyed, 10.9% of the children in grade IV couldn’t even demonstrate the most basic reading abilities.
For grades V and VI, the number was even lower: less than 3%.
Pranav Kothari, vice-president, large-scale educational programmes, at Mindspark, a company working on assessment frameworks in India, says the key strength of PISA is that it offers an international benchmark. “While a few schools in India can match up to that benchmark, they are the outliers. Take any measure of summarisation: mean or median or mode — true literacy skills are still lacking in many children in our country. It’s a fundamental issue. And saying PISA is wrong doesn’t change the fundamentals,” Kothari says.
Argument #2: PISA is not relevant for us.
There is a belief that PISA is not relevant in the context of our education system, hence the poor results. Let’s take a look at some sample PISA questions.
1. Do the sentences below make sense? Yes or no?
The red car had a flat tire.
Airplanes are made of dogs.
The happy student read the book last night.
If the cat had stayed out at night, it would not have been in the house at 2 am.
The man is taller than the woman and the boy is shorter than both of them.
2. What are your views on space exploration?
Model answer: Ana – I feel that we should take care of what is going on in our own world before we blow all our money on space exploration. I understand the importance of some exploration but I think disease and famine need to be helped out of this world first.
3. Read the poem below and share why you think the writer started with a question.
Have you ever woken up feeling that something was wrong?
It was a day like that for me.
I sat up in bed.
A little later I opened the curtains.
It was terrible weather — the rain was pouring down.
Then I looked down into the yard.
Yes! There it was — the motorcycle.
It was just as wrecked as last night.
And my leg was starting to hurt.
The context in these questions isn’t too far removed for an Indian student. It’s just that these questions test application more than rote learning.
Why should 15-year olds not be able to answer these?
Sujatha Rao, founder director of Viridus Social Impact Solutions and faculty at Azim Premji University and Indian School of Development Management, says, “There are two ways to interpret such benchmarks and plan for it. One approach is the one adopted by Finland, which has done away with standardised assessments and instead focuses on a child-centred integrated approach to pedagogy and curriculum.
“Or, you can follow the US model of ‘No child left behind’, which constantly puts pressure on teachers to keep teaching to tests, assuming that test results are the most explicit measures of quality in the school-education system.”
Which of these different school systems fare better? PISA’s reading scale offers a hint.
The top-performing countries reading literacy include Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. Finland is also part of the list. The US, on the other hand, has been falling in the test scores.PISA also shows that across countries, students who enjoy reading the most perform significantly better than students who enjoy reading the least. But, PISA says, on average, across countries that are part of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 37% of students do not read for enjoyment at all.
Of course, in countries that score well, children know more than reading. They know how to comprehend and summarise information — life-skills in today’s information-overload world.
PISA shows students repeating grades or going through frequent school transfers perform poorer than others. And scoring students just by subject-level ability again leads to lower scores. Schools selecting different learning programmes for different learning needs at a young age show differences, even for students from a less privileged background.
What does this mean for India?
PISA 2021 is a reality, whether we like it or not. Instead of wringing our hands, we need to figure out how to move the discourse towards quality education for all.
Parth Shah, president, Centre for Civil Society, a think tank that advocates for social change through public policy, says, “Given our low level of public spending on education and the rise of private schools, [PISA] is a great way to create a benchmark for all and move towards actual change in fundamentals in education, not mere statistics.”
Education startups and their financial backers should realise that downloads and time spent are still a poor proxy for determining whether they are actually making their user “educated”. That road is a long and winding one.
(Disclaimer: Times Internet, which owns ET Prime, is an investor in Byju’s.)
Wait. Big returns? Are we really talking education?
Believe it. Education is sucking in VC dollars. That’s not all. The diversity of investors in the segment is also greater than in other sectors, with philanthropic and CSR capital also involved. The big hope is that as these investors see returns, more will come, helping startups scale and create real impact on learning outcomes.
Not all the action is in fancy ed-tech.
Take Cuemath, which runs a unique after-school math-learning programme. The company started in 2011, initially with founder investment and a small angel stake. In 2014, Unitus Ventures backed it with a INR1 crore cheque.
Radha RK, investment director at Unitus Ventures, says Manan Khurma, founder of Cuemath, had a “strong product and a pure vision” to make math a life skill, and fun for children.
“His model of distributing [the programme] through highly educated women micro-entrepreneurs made the idea scalable with strong unit economics. As it grew, the scale attracted investors like Sequoia and Capital G. This scale will, in turn, drive more impact,” Radha says.
Unitus has reaped outstanding returns on its small early investment. By 2017, with the entry of Sequoia and Capital G, its post-round holding at 12.9% translated to a return of over 20x.
“Exits are the key to measure success in the VC world. Education has seen very few of them,” says Radha. “There have been a few strategic acquisitions by corporates like S. Chand or Info Edge. A few by Byju’s. So, exits by secondary sales like the kind we saw in Cuemath is a great confidence booster for VCs to continue investing in the sector.”
Ed-tech’s lengthening shadow
As education becomes more like a product underpinned by technology,more and more traditional VCs are rushing in.
For instance Simplilearn, which provides online professional courses, saw its early institutional investment from Kalaari Capital, after angels gave it a headstart. Later, Helion Ventures, Mayfield, and India Venture Partners came in.
According to Tracxn, with a cumulative investment of INR56 crore so far, the net worth of Simplilearn has gone up to INR504 crore. Through secondary share transfers, Kalaari, Helion, and Mayfield are set to realise returns.
In the case of Embibe, an online test-preparation company, angels paved the way for East River Partners, Lightbox Ventures, and Kalaari Capital. This year, Reliance Industries came in to acquire 68% of the company. With that, the funds realised a combined return of over INR900 crore.
Of course, there are polarising views on ed-tech, as it has been called for its exclusive focus on technology-led solutions. Critics say the tech obsession often makes startups (and, by extension, their backers) ignore more fundamental challenges around improving learning outcomes or school infrastructure.
However, given the Indian education system's humongous problems, and woeful state funding, there's room for solutions (and money) of all hues.
Too big too ignore
The bounty is huge: Education in India is a USD100 billion market, addressing the learning needs of 260 million children going to school, and over 300 million youth who will need jobs.
The government is the biggest investor. After all, education is a public good. However, India’s budgeted expenditure on education isn't comparable with peer countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The budget isn't even close to the Kothari Committee recommendation of 6% of the GDP.The bulk of the government funding has been around Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and financing infrastructure and incentives in primary schools. Then there are teacher salaries, which claim a large proportion of the states’ education budgets. This leaves little to be spent on teacher training, curriculum and pedagogy, monitoring, or community engagement. To overcome the funding constraints, states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab have experimented with public-private partnership (PPP) models.
Besides funding, allocation and accountability are other issues that keep getting debated, as our students show scant improvement in learning outcomes. We wrote about India's dismal PISA results here.
Unesco has estimated that the annual cost of ensuring that every student can access quality primary and secondary education will increase from USD149 billion to USD340 billion over the next 15 years. No matter how much the government steps up, there will be a gap of more than USD30 billion according to estimates.
Can philanthropic capital step in to help?When impact meets risk capital
Many high net-worth individuals are personally passionate about education and have committed funding for the cause either directly or through investments in funds, family foundations, and the like.
Corporates too have been increasing CSR funding towards education. In FY16, Sattva Consulting, which helps its clients scale their social-impact initiatives, reported a spending of USD419 million through CSR from 1,158 companies. This was based on data from 151 companies running 567 projects.
A Sattva report says, “Major CSR expenditure has been in primary education, followed by secondary education. Early childhood education, vocational education, and inclusive education have been relatively unexplored. We saw just about six CSR projects that support overall education-ecosystem interventions, with a spend of just USD7.4 million.”
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has invested in companies like Khan Academy (free education for anyone, anywhere), Pratham Books (reading platform), Million Sparks Foundation (teacher capacity building), Central Square Foundation, and the like.
The traditional view was that private investment in education would come from impact investors, who believe in impactful, inclusive, and affordable education, without an eye on returns. So, what then are Reliance or Kalaari doing here? Making money and hoping for impact. The table above highlights the top risk-capital investors in education over the last two years. The ones in green can be considered as impact investors. The rest, a majority, are not. Corporates such as S. Chand, Reliance, Times Internet, Info Edge, TeamLease, CL Educate, and Orient BlackSwan have also been active investors in education.
It has not been an easy market for private investment. Of the 4,000-plus ed-tech companies tracked by Tracxn, only 328 are funded, with 53 of them at Series A+ level and only three at Series C+ level.
In terms of investments, Byju’s leads the pack with USD244 million so far and another large round in the offing. Tutorvista, an online tutorial provider, and now a part of Byju’s, comes a distant second with USD88 million. Next Education, MindTickle, Unacademy, Simplilearn, Meritnation, Toppr, Cuemath, and iProf round off the top 10.
The largest cheques have gone to the higher education, exam preparation, and supplemental learning platforms either because those are faster to scale or because integration with institutes can be managed more easily. These spaces are also less regulated than K12 core-curriculum areas.
But the market is only being created now. Given a few good exits and more mainstream investors pouring in capital, scale will push impact.
Is there a need for more innovative financing models? More on that soon.
(Disclaimer: Times Internet, which owns ET Prime, is an investor in Byju's.)
The Economic Times Prime
Venkata Subrahmanyam Voruganty
• HOME
• BROWSE
• AUTHORS
EDUCATION
Between 'ed' and 'tech', where do India's education fundamentals lie?
What does true education mean? Since 2000, the globally respected PISA tests have been asking this question of students from over 70 countries. India has a forgettable record at PISA, and for things to change, our disruptive startups need to change focus.
ShareGift this article
Debleena Majumdar
24 Aug 2018
GIORDANO POLONI/IKON IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
We do need some education (may be not thought control), but the Indian education sector has a serious challenge: Government spending on education has been consistently falling and is now at less than 4% of the Union Budget.
Recently, there’s been some good news. The sector, specifically ed-tech, has caught the fancy of a wide array of private-sector moneybags. Publishers such as S. Chand, corporates (Reliance Jio), private-equity funds (Gaja Capital), and tech investors (Tiger Global) — they all have a bit of education in their investment mix.
Since 2015, the sector has raked in USD150 million-USD200 million in annual investments.
Byju’s, MindTickle, Next Education, and Simplilearn have received the lion’s share of this funding.
Together, these companies are changing the notion that education can never be a fundable, scalable business.
Now, let’s return to the bad news, because there’s a lot more of it.
While ed-tech solutions focus on areas like test prep, gamification, and AI-driven personalised education, their impact on improving learning outcomes is questionable, as we had argued earlier.
The big black hole in Indian education lies in helping each child learn smarter and truly improving their learning outcomes. India has 260 million children, and one out of every five school-going children in the world is from India. But, in spite of all the private participation, India’s education system continues to draw a blank when asked one fundamental question: How do we know our children are really getting educated?
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been asking this question since 2000. PISA is a series of research-backed assessment tests administered every three years to 15-year-old students in 70-plus participating countries. It focuses on the students’ ability to apply their knowledge and skills rather than memorising facts.
Reading is a critical skill assessed by PISA. To make reading assessment relevant to our times, PISA has been expanding its definition of reading literacy to encompass both basic reading and digital-reading skills. Here’s how the definition has evolved:
2000: Reading literacy is understanding, using, and reflecting on written texts in order to achieve one’s goals, develop one’s knowledge and potential, and participate in society.
2009, 2012, 2015: Reading literacy is understanding, using, reflecting, and engaging with written texts.
2018: Reading literacy is understanding, using, evaluating, reflecting on, and engaging with texts.
India has a forgettable history at PISA. When it last participated in the assessments, in 2009, it ranked 74 out of 75 countries. After this dismal performance, it pulled out of the exercise altogether. Until now. While it’ll be very optimistic to assume that things have improved miraculously, India has decided to resume participating in PISA from 2021.
In the golden age of Indian ed-tech, can we expect things to be different?
Mission 2021 is nearing, but India is still living in denial
Last year, at a Niti Aayog Conference of Governors on “New India @2022”, a grand plan was laid out to focus on development as a mass movement to create an India free from poverty, corruption, dirt, casteism, terrorism, and communalism.
One small point under the heading “Social development required to build a poverty-free India” was on education and skill building. It was here that the government announced its plan to rejoin PISA.
You’d expect preparations to be on at war footing. But there’s still a lack of awareness. And perhaps more damagingly, there is a complacent lack of acknowledgment that a serious problem does exist.
Argument #1: We are doing well. PISA is wrong.
A former senior government official ET Prime reached out to for a comment sounds categorical: “Just because we ranked low in PISA 2009 doesn’t mean our education system is lacking anywhere. The most common data shared by people who believe in this school of thought is around education access. Hasn’t our enrolment rate gone up beyond 90%? [So] we have made progress.”
But is PISA telling us anything we didn’t already know?
According to Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report 2016, only 42.5% of children in grade III could read textbooks of grade I level, up marginally from 40.2% in 2014. Reading levels at grade V remained the same between 2011 and 2016. And by grade VIII, the set of students who could read a grade-II text actually declined from 74.7% to 73.1%.
There is a significant lack of understanding of how private-school children fare in comparison. This year, the English-reading app Stones2Milestones released its FAST Reading Assessment report after working with over 20,000 private-school children.
Here is what the report highlighted.
In unaided private schools surveyed, 10.9% of the children in grade IV couldn’t even demonstrate the most basic reading abilities.
For grades V and VI, the number was even lower: less than 3%.
Pranav Kothari, vice-president, large-scale educational programmes, at Mindspark, a company working on assessment frameworks in India, says the key strength of PISA is that it offers an international benchmark. “While a few schools in India can match up to that benchmark, they are the outliers. Take any measure of summarisation: mean or median or mode — true literacy skills are still lacking in many children in our country. It’s a fundamental issue. And saying PISA is wrong doesn’t change the fundamentals,” Kothari says.
Argument #2: PISA is not relevant for us.
There is a belief that PISA is not relevant in the context of our education system, hence the poor results. Let’s take a look at some sample PISA questions.
1. Do the sentences below make sense? Yes or no?
The red car had a flat tire.
Airplanes are made of dogs.
The happy student read the book last night.
If the cat had stayed out at night, it would not have been in the house at 2 am.
The man is taller than the woman and the boy is shorter than both of them.
2. What are your views on space exploration?
Model answer: Ana – I feel that we should take care of what is going on in our own world before we blow all our money on space exploration. I understand the importance of some exploration but I think disease and famine need to be helped out of this world first.
3. Read the poem below and share why you think the writer started with a question.
Have you ever woken up feeling that something was wrong?
It was a day like that for me.
I sat up in bed.
A little later I opened the curtains.
It was terrible weather — the rain was pouring down.
Then I looked down into the yard.
Yes! There it was — the motorcycle.
It was just as wrecked as last night.
And my leg was starting to hurt.
The context in these questions isn’t too far removed for an Indian student. It’s just that these questions test application more than rote learning.
Why should 15-year olds not be able to answer these?
Sujatha Rao, founder director of Viridus Social Impact Solutions and faculty at Azim Premji University and Indian School of Development Management, says, “There are two ways to interpret such benchmarks and plan for it. One approach is the one adopted by Finland, which has done away with standardised assessments and instead focuses on a child-centred integrated approach to pedagogy and curriculum.
“Or, you can follow the US model of ‘No child left behind’, which constantly puts pressure on teachers to keep teaching to tests, assuming that test results are the most explicit measures of quality in the school-education system.”
Which of these different school systems fare better? PISA’s reading scale offers a hint.
The top-performing countries reading literacy include Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. Finland is also part of the list. The US, on the other hand, has been falling in the test scores.PISA also shows that across countries, students who enjoy reading the most perform significantly better than students who enjoy reading the least. But, PISA says, on average, across countries that are part of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 37% of students do not read for enjoyment at all.
Of course, in countries that score well, children know more than reading. They know how to comprehend and summarise information — life-skills in today’s information-overload world.
PISA shows students repeating grades or going through frequent school transfers perform poorer than others. And scoring students just by subject-level ability again leads to lower scores. Schools selecting different learning programmes for different learning needs at a young age show differences, even for students from a less privileged background.
What does this mean for India?
PISA 2021 is a reality, whether we like it or not. Instead of wringing our hands, we need to figure out how to move the discourse towards quality education for all.
Parth Shah, president, Centre for Civil Society, a think tank that advocates for social change through public policy, says, “Given our low level of public spending on education and the rise of private schools, [PISA] is a great way to create a benchmark for all and move towards actual change in fundamentals in education, not mere statistics.”
Education startups and their financial backers should realise that downloads and time spent are still a poor proxy for determining whether they are actually making their user “educated”. That road is a long and winding one.
(Disclaimer: Times Internet, which owns ET Prime, is an investor in Byju’s.)
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