Akanksha Jungle Jamboree

Watch a video of the students performing at the Jungle Jamboree

Lions, zebras, and giraffes, oh my!

The Jungle Jamboree at the Akansha School within the Sitaram Mill Compound Mumbai Public School was a filled with excitement as the KG and 1^st standard students performed for parents, teachers, and community members at their end of year showcase. The event highlighted the culmination of a year of learning with students performing skits, songs, dances and poems – all in English – showing off all they had learned over the course of the year. A group of parents performed a special dance to show their appreciation for the teachers and staff.

The day also celebrated the hard work of school leader Mandira Purohit and her teachers to bring this new school to life and provide the children of the community access to a high-quality education. Through a public-private partnership with the government, Akanksha took over full management of the English medium strand of the existing public primary school one year ago. The school started with two grades and will continue to grow adding additional grades each year.

After the performance, guests were invited to visit the classrooms where students waited at learning stations to answer math and reading questions from the guests. The interactive learning demonstrations showed students ability to converse confidently with guests in English and apply their learning to different situations, not just recite memorized material. The event highlighted the rigor, high expectations, joy and community involvement that makes this Akanksha school an outstanding educational opportunity for underserved students in the neighborhood.

EdVillage applauds Mandira and her team for their hard work and will share their best practices and learnings with other like-minded school networks around the world.

Tags: Akanksha, education, India education, public private partnership

Fighting Apartheid Through Education in South Africa

Throughout the year, the EdVillage blog will include guest posts by participants, volunteers, supporters and friends. This is our first from Hollis Wood who worked with the 2011 Global Fellows last summer and traveled to South Africa this year to support the Global Fellows on the first day of the new school year. 

When EdVillage co-founder Allison Rouse first started talking to me about his dream to create an organization that would profoundly affect education around the globe, I could feel his enthusiasm and sense of purpose. But I also knew that those attributes alone weren’t enough to make the difference he hoped. Don’t get me wrong, I was on board from the beginning, but I had some concerns about how everything would come together. Those concerns were put aside after a long conversation this past October with Ross Hill, one of EdVillage’s first Global Fellows from South Africa.

Ross grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of an Anglican pastor and a high school biology teacher. As a young, white adult, he recognized the privileges he had growing up in apartheid South Africa. Ross became intent on fighting injustice and making a difference in the lives of historically disadvantaged children. He attended the University of Cape Town and earned a BS in Applied Mathematics. Seeking to do more, he went on to complete a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education and began his career in teaching in South Africa’s townships soon thereafter. After several different experiences, Ross became a Math teacher at LEAP Science and Maths School in Cape Town where he also taught Physics and Chemistry. However, when the opportunity to start a new LEAP school in Diepsloot, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, arose, Ross seized it and left Cape Town for Johannesburg. Compelled by a desire to narrow the socio-economic and educational divides between white and black, and rich and poor, in his country, Ross looked to EdVillage for training and support to strengthen his leadership skills in order to bring educational equity to his students. Ross is a trailblazer and one of the three inaugural EdVillage Global Fellows.

EdVillage volunteer Holly Wood with Global Fellow Ross Hill

When I first spoke with Ross last summer, he had finished the leadership institute and was deep into his experiential residencies at high-performing schools around the United States. I asked him what the opportunity to participate in the EdVillage Global Fellows program had meant to him. He responded, “the [leadership institute] opportunity was enormous.” He expressed appreciation for the knowledge of process and leadership he had gained. He added that it provided him with a “few months to plan and strategize without being in the middle of opening the school” in Diepsloot. He shared that the fellowship provided an environment in which he had time to absorb relevant information, meet other school leaders, and learn about education and management strategies.

Ross found the residencies furnished him with the opportunity to observe the characteristics of well-run schools. The time he spent seeing systems of education with proven results for low income students informed his plan for the LEAP Science and Maths School he leads in Diepsloot. He put in several weeks at KIPP Schools in Houston, Newark, and New York City, Uncommon School’s North Star Academy in New Jersey, Noble Street Charter Schools in Chicago, High Tech High in San Diego and Phillips Academy Andover. Ross expressed the belief that he had developed “a broad picture of successful schools in the United States” and an understanding of “the culture of high performance” that made the schools successful.

I asked Ross what lesson he would take back to South Africa. He shared that on the personal level he would be returning with enhanced management and school leadership skills. On the educational level he would be bringing an understanding of how to use data to inform instructional practices and how to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching in the classrooms. He feels two critical ways to improve schools are creating a common language that identifies good teaching and developing systems of data that help monitor student attainment. Ross said he “has learned to recognize good teaching and now has the language to describe it.” This gives him the tools to assess and improve the teaching occurring in his school.

Heading into the new school year at LEAP Diepsloot, Ross offered the insight that he is “disciplining himself to spend time with the [central office’s] operations team to keep [his] school healthy as well as balancing micromanagement and the freedom of the faculty and staff.” He is excited to take on the challenges ahead.

There is no question Ross holds a deep commitment to the students of Diepsloot and South Africa. I know he is looking forward to incorporating the new ideas and using the skills he developed during the Global Fellows program. I am headed to Johannesburg to help Ross with the opening of the new school year. I can hardly wait to see his school, meet his students and share the excitement of making his vision reality. I’ll promise to tell you more when I get back!

Stay tuned for Holly’s next blog about her experience visiting the opening days of Ross’ new school in South Africa.

Hollis (Holly) Rust Wood is an EdVillage volunteer. She is a retired writer, educator and fundraiser. When she is not volunteering for EdVillage, Holly spends as much time as possible with her 7 children and 4 grandchildren, watching Stanford Women’s teams compete and helping Stanford University thrive.

Tags: apartheid, education, LEAP, Ross Hill, south africa education

A Celebration of Excellence

The end of each school year always brings a time of reflection, celebration, and recognition. The Akanksha teachers and staff did just that on Sunday at the Akanksha Annual Day in Mumbai. While students enlivened the celebration with skits and dancing, this event focused on the dedication and hard work the adults put in over the past year to bring excellence to all Akanksha schools and learning centers.

The highlight of the day was the recognition of teachers and staff who had given five and ten years of service. Colleagues stepped up to speak about each awardee praising the commitment, friendship and unique talents each brought to the team. Included in this group was CEO Vandana Goyal who has been with Akanksha for five years. Founder Shaheen Mistri praised Vandana for growing the parts of the organization that were successful while also having the courage to change the organization for the better. Vandana challenged everyone to keep setting “big hairy audacious goals” for children and striving for excellence everyday.

A former student turned Akanksha teacher who has now started his own NGO closed the ceremony by reflecting on the role Akanksha played in shaping his life path. “If it was not for Akanksha, I would be a gangster. But now I’m not a gangster. I’m a good human being. I’m living a good life, a happy life, thanks to Akanksha.”

Akanksha currently runs 46 after-school centers and 9 schools serving 4,055 children in Mumbai and Pune. The organization will open 4 new schools for the 2012-2013 school year.

Watch Akanksha Student Dance at the celebration

Tags: Akanksha, education, India education

Happy Anniversary EdVillage!

It’s hard to believe that one year ago this month, we launched EdVillage. It was a busy first year as we embarked on improving the quality of education for impoverished communities around the world. We built partnerships with organizations in India, South Africa and the United States committed to education equality. We trained future school leaders through our Global Fellowship program to start high quality schools for low-income students in their home countries. We provided school improvement support to schools and networks looking to scale their innovative school models. Overall, we learned much about the need, challenges, successes, failures and possibilities that confront us. Most importantly, we’ve already begun to see the difference we can make in giving all children the opportunity to learn and reach their full potential.

In celebration of our first anniversary, we are excited to share with you the EdVillage Anniversary Report. Look inside to learn more about our partners, programs, milestones and plans for the year ahead.

Thank you for helping making the launch of EdVillage a success. Here’s to many impactful years ahead!

Allison Rouse and Mark Medema
Co-Founders, EdVillage

EdVillage in Education Week: India Public-Private Partnerships

India Pushes Public-Private Ed. Partnerships

Government unveils plans to open 2,500 new schools

April 17, 2012  By Jason Tomassini

  Young Indian children study at an open air school in Jammu, India. A law making primary education compulsory in India came into effect, opening the door for millions of impoverished children who have never made it to school because their parents could not afford the fees or because they were forced to work instead. —Channi Anand/AP

In an effort to boost enrollment and improve its public education system, India is turning to the private sector.

The government is planning to open 2,500 new schools under public-private partnerships over the next five years, the first such initiative in the country, according to Livemint.com, a business-news website in India.

India’s human-resource-development ministry is seeking applications from companies and foundations to open schools under such partnerships, part of a larger plan to open 6,000 new schools over the next five years, beginning next school year.

The ultimate goal is to provide enough schools to educate all of India’s children, many of whom, especially in impoverished areas, don’t attend school.

And in a large country of more than 1 billion people, with dozens of languages and local cultures, national standards for new schools could bring some level of consistency to education, not unlike the intention of the Common Core State Standards in the United States.

Scaling Up Quality

The public-private models are similar to American charter schools, though in the case of India, it’s the federal government seeking private operators for planned schools, rather than private operators applying to open new schools through a state or local entity.

 

Young Indian children study at an open air school in Jammu, India. —Channi Anand/AP

India offers traditional government-run schools as well, some of which are operated by the federal government and others by local governments. The government has set aside the equivalent of about $190 million for the 2012-13 school year for the initiative, according to Livemint.com.

Public-private school partnerships are important because the government must support organizations currently operating high-quality schools so they are able to scale up, much as the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Achievement First charter schools have done in the United States, said Allison Rouse, the chief executive officer of EdVillage, a Washington-based group that develops school leaders around the world, including in India.

For instance, Mr. Rouse said, EdVillage works with the Akanksha Foundation, a nonprofit group in Mumbai, India, that operates nine public schools in some of India’s poorest neighborhoods using a model inspired by KIPP, which emphasizes assessment, parent involvement, and extended school time. Those schools are in partnerships with their municipalities, but a national partnership could help the effort expand, he said.

Challenges Ahead

For American educators, it’s that relationship between local support, federal support, and private school managers that could provide lessons for how privately run public schools operate in the United States.

“How does a [central] government go about serving its schools by still giving autonomy to its states?” Mr. Rouse said in an interview.

According to Livemint.com, the private entities will be responsible for all managerial aspects of the schools, including development, design, and management. A grant for 25 percent of infrastructure costs and the cost of education will be provided by the government, the report said.

India already has an extensive array of private schools, which make up a majority of the secondary schools in the country, Mr. Rouse said. Some charge only nominal fees. But in 2010, India passed the Right to Education Act, aimed at making high-quality education available to students who can’t afford more traditional private school tuition.

Whether the partnership initiative succeeds depends on exactly how the money is allocated and how much emphasis is put on improving education, rather than simply providing it, Mr. Rouse said.

“We think the challenge for India is to create millions of seats for kids, and at the same time keep an eye on the quality bar,” he said. “We want quality schools, not just spaces that house kids.”

Any operator, including for-profit companies or those without education experience, can apply to open a school, though there are checks in place to help make sure applicants are qualified, including requiring deposits and giving permission to companies with education track records and graduation results to open multiple schools, according to the Livemint.com report. Those measures could help ensure quality in typically underserved communities.

“The overall quality of teaching and the learning process remains very low in most places” in India, said Stephen Anzalone, a vice president and director of the Asia Regional Center for the Education Development Center, a nonprofit with headquarters in Waltham, Mass., that develops global education initiatives.

 

India at a Glance Population: 1.2 billion GDP: $1.7 trillion Number of children ages 6-18: 293 million Number of children ages 6-18 enrolled in school: 247 million School landscape: Provided by public and private sectors with control at federal, state, and local levels Primary school student-to-teacher ratio: 44:1 Upper-primary student-to-teacher ratio: 34:1 Number of secondary schools: 113,824 Number of higher-secondary schools: 59,166 Higher education institutions: 564 universities and 31,324 colleges Literacy rate: 74 percent SOURCES: Government of India Ministry of Human Resource Development; World Bank; UNESCO

Business Opportunities?

What remains unclear is if and how Western education companies will become more involved in India because of the new public-private initiative.

K-12 education in India will be worth $29 billion by the end of the school year, Livemint.com notes.

Companies with large operations in the United States such as K12 Inc. and Pearson have looked globally to provide content, technology, and virtual education to students, and the Indian initiative could open doors for companies seeking new markets. For instance, K12 recently purchased a stake in an English-language education provider in China, and Pearson acquired a majority stake of TutorVista, an education services company in India that manages 24 schools there, according to Pearson’s 2011 annual report.

But so far, experts say, the demand coming from India for services provided by Western education companies has been limited.

Coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation is supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Vol. 31, Issue 28, Page 11

Tags: charter schools, education, government, public education system, public private partnership

“International Education Entrepreneurs Look to U.S.-Style Models” -Education Week

View article on Education Week website 

Indian teacher hopes to import ideas to Mumbai

October 19, 2011
By Sarah D. Sparks

While much of the current policy discussion around international education focuses on how American students stack up against their peers in Europe and Asia and which international models offer lessons for American schools, one Indian educator is visiting the United States in search of models he can import to a slum of his hometown of Mumbai.

Gaurav Singh, a Mumbai teacher who plans next summer to open a free school in a slum more populated than New York City, is among a new group of international education entrepreneurs who suggest there may be value in U.S. schools exporting their own models to developing schools, too.

Mr. Singh is one of three education entrepreneurs spending six months to a year studying American schools as part of a residency program launched this year by the Washington-based EdVillage, which aims to help international educators set up networks of free public schools to share best practices. During his six-month stint in the United States, Mr. Singh has been visiting district, charter, and private schools for a few days to several weeks.

Mr. Singh said he has been getting numerous ideas from the 18 schools he’s visited so far, for everything from school finances to teacher training, pedagogy, and supplemental enrichment.

“Where do you go in India to see what’s possible for a kid who comes from a slum? Not at a comparative level of, ‘Let’s give them a few skills to work in a coffee shop,’ but on an absolute level, what’s possible?” he said. “There’s not much we can look at.”

‘Excellence Is Excellence’

The first visits to American classes full of desks and interactive white boards were a major culture shock, Mr. Singh recalled. As a member of the founding class of Teach for India, a nonprofit modeled after Teach for America, he had started teaching two years ago after five weeks of training with a 2nd grade group of 50 students ranging in age from 6 to 14. Classes took place sometimes in a classroom and sometimes in buildings or sidewalks.

“When you enter a classroom that’s very different from yours in terms of space, in terms of number of kids, … you just say, ‘This is not going to work in our country,’ ” he said. “You have to calm yourself and say, ‘This is useless; excellence is excellence,’ and then figure out how we can transfer these practices. We needed to hunt for the big nuggets. Now, I’m actually going back thinking, it’s not that different.”

Mr. Singh’s “3-2-1 School” will open with 120 students in kindergarten and 1st grade, adding a grade each year. And unlike most public schools in India, which operate for four hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Singh said his school will operate on something like an American schedule of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., five days a week. The school will start out with a student-teacher ratio of 30-to-1, in line with new national rules expected to go into effect in the next three years.

Students will enroll via a lottery, and Mr. Singh is planning for at least a two- to four-year age range in each grade, as well as considerable language diversity. The children, mostly from Mumbai’s slums, speak more than 16 languages. He said he has been choosing U.S. schools to visit based on specific practices—a character-development program in one, teacher professional development in another.

The educator said his goal is to have 100 percent of students scoring “proficient” on the Assessment of Scholastic Skills through Educational Testing, or ASSET, India’s standardized test, by the time the kindergarten cohort reaches 3rd grade.

There is no formula-based government aid for public schools in India; the government will decide whether to provide funding for the 3-2-1 School based on its academic achievement, said Mr. Singh, who has set a goal of having a network of 100 K-12 schools in 15 years.

He has some reason for confidence: During the teaching fellowship with Teach for India, Mr. Singh’s students progressed 2.6 grade levels on average in a school year. “Once we started overlooking the resource constraints that we had, we started finding that learning was happening, and happening on grade level,” he said. “When we started seeing that the kids could learn whether they had a blackboard or not, whether they had a classroom or not, it started teaching us a lot of things about learning and about joy.”

As Mr. Singh toured a Montessori school in New York City last week, a delegation of U.S. Department of Commerce officials and higher education officials were in Mumbai, New Delhi, and Chennai, looking at Indian schools and recruiting students to study at American schools. That mission focused on colleges and universities, according to Kristian Richardson, a senior international trade specialist for the agency, but he said the department would as readily export K-12 school models if American educators were willing to pitch them overseas. For the past eight years, Indian students have been the largest group of international students studying in the United States, and the department believes “this population will continue to grow as demand for education in India outweighs the supply of available institutions.”

Exporting Schooling

The Commerce Department “actively promotes U.S. education as an export” through education missions like this one, and it considers education to be one of the country’s top 10 service exports. International students accounted for more than $18.8 billion in tuition and living expenses while studying in the United States during the 2009-10 school year.

Yet there are relatively few opportunities for education leaders like Mr. Singh to get a firsthand look at U.S.-style learning, according to Robert Spielvogel, the chief technology officer and vice president for research, evaluation, and policy for the Newton, Mass.-based Education Development Center, a research-and-consulting organization that helps establish basic education in developing countries. And, while numerous American colleges have created satellite campuses in other countries, the idea hasn’t caught on yet in the K-12 sector beyond the international schools that generally serve children of American diplomats. In Mumbai, Mr. Singh said the American international school costs $15,000 per year—far more than the $1,000 U.S. dollars the average Indian earns in a year.

“There’s been surprisingly little of that in the [United States],” Mr. Spielvogel said. “The charter networks in the U.S. … have focused more on states, not spreading themselves internationally.”

Norma A. Evans, an EDC senior research and development associate who builds literacy programs in Africa, said much of the research that undergirds her development work comes from the United States, but “we haven’t tried to transfer a packaged or predefined school model for a number of reasons, the most obvious being the need to recognize and respect the curriculum and instructional setup mandated by the host countries.”

“We try [to] weave our instructional practices and models into existing frameworks. That said, we do hope that over time and as ministries see the impact of the new practices on student learning, they will begin identifying how to mainstream the practices and models,” Ms. Evans said.

Edvillage was founded this year by two former leaders from the Knowledge Is Power Program Foundation: former KIPP business director Mark Medema, the current Edvillage president; and former KIPP outreach and institutional advancement director Allison Rouse, the group’s chief executive officer.

“We’d both opened a number of charter schools in the states in the last decade and then spent some time overseas,” Mr. Medema said. “We noticed the huge demand for education reform initiatives in other countries. The stories weren’t much different from the problems we were facing here in the United States, so we came back to the U.S. and thought hey, maybe there’s an opportunity to share the lessons—the good, the bad, and the ugly—that we’ve learned here in the U.S. about education reform with other countries.”

The nonprofit got a two-year, $700,000 start-up grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Mr. Singh and two South African educators were recruited to be the first program residents, and the group is now recruiting 16 educators from India, South Africa, and Latin America for next year.

The EDC’s Mr. Spielvogel predicts the Internet will accelerate international interest in American educational practices.

“Even in the poorest countries, there is a desire to be up to date and incorporate 21st-century learning,” he said. He also expects that accreditation programs like the International Baccalaureate and open-source education services will continue to grow. “As people get familiar with educational materials they might start to get interested in more of the pedagogy.”

Coverage of leadership, expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org.

Vol. 31, Issue 08, Page 11

What Will I Do About It?

Look around you. Find something that moves you. Find something that you feel passionate about. Find something where you think you can have maximum impact. And find something where you think there is a big need. Then basically ask yourself, “What will I do about it?”
–EdVillage Global Fellow Gaurav Singh

Tags: Gaurav Singh, india