Journeys of School Improvement

After the Union Cabinet of India approved the National Education Policy (2020), a key announcement was made. A new National Assessment Centre ‘PARAKH’ would be established as a standard setting body for all recognized school boards in India. ‘PARAKH’ which stands for Performance, Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development will set the standards for the 60+ examination boards in the country. The Union Cabinet also approved a World Bank aided scheme called STARS (Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States) to help set up this assessment centre and to pilot this scheme in the learning and assessment space in six states in India. The aim of this project is to move school boards away from high-stakes examinations towards more holistic assessment of students as well as of schools themselves.

The setting up of a National Assessment Centre for assessing the performance of schools and students signals the intent of education policy makers in India to seek more accountability from schools and their governing institutions for student learning outcomes and student development. A key statement from the NEP (2020) reads “educational outcomes and the transparent disclosure of all financial, academic, and operational matters will be given due importance and will be incorporated suitably in the assessment of schools.”

The focus on assessing and evaluating schools to help them move towards ‘standards of performance’ has been an integral part of the school effectiveness and school improvement movements around the world. Many countries have adopted the ‘standards-based assessment’ approach.

At the same time, other countries have moved away from such an approach and focused instead on completely decentralized and localized education with tremendous autonomy provided to schools and teachers.

These very different country level responses provide a glimpse of the contentious history of school improvement and the various attempts made to enable schools to provide meaningful education for all children. In this article, I will attempt to provide a short ‘moving picture’ view of this journey and look at the current scenario of school improvement in India.

How Can Schools Become Better? Perspectives of Different Stakeholders

The journey of school improvement really starts with the question – how can schools become better? But that leads to the question – better at what? To answer the ‘what’ question, one must step back and look at how different stakeholders perceive the value of education for children and their beliefs around how and where children are to receive such an education.

The belief that schools are the spaces where children are educated has now been institutionalized. Implicitly we understand that learning happens all the time, and through different experiences in homes, families, society, etc. There are worldwide trends such as unschooling and home schooling on the rise as well. Nevertheless, the focus of attention on educational systems still remains on schools as the place where children are educated.

So, this then leads to the other question – what is a good education that can be imparted in schools? For educationists, the question is deeply and inextricably connected to the question of “What is the purpose of education itself?” To become rational, empathetichuman beings with critical reasoning skills is one such perspective. Parents often see ‘good’ education as instrumental in the development of children as economic citizens who will build good careers and lives. For governments, it has often been individuals contributing to society productively and so on. So, the purpose of education itself is contested, making it difficult to standardize the definition of what it means to be running a ‘good’ school that delivers ‘good education’ and how schools can get better at providing such a quality education. These contestations are revealed when one looks at the history of school improvement.

Historically, two main approaches began to define the understanding around how schools can become better. The first approach has focused on understanding what do schools really look like in their daily operations, a snapshot of what schools actually do. The second approach has focused on how schools develop and improve over time towards some institutionally and normatively established goals and criteria.

The first approach, and the research and literature around it, have come to be known as ‘school effectiveness research’. It is like taking a picture of a school and comparing that with pictures of other schools, with the aim of identifying what effective or good schools do differently as compared to poor or failing schools. The second approach has come to be known as ‘school improvement practice’. This is like telling stories about development and change that can happen within a school (Reynolds, Bolan and others, 1996 and 2005).

Both approaches have significantly influenced interventions and change processes in schools around the world, and both have different underlying beliefs.

Researchers exploring school effectiveness, work with the belief that schools are complex entities that deal with a lot of complexity. Therefore, there is uncertainty about what are factors that indicate ‘good’ schools, what factors can be compared between schools and how cause and effects can be examined. Because of these uncertainties, the knowledge base around school effectiveness is built around facts and figures derived from a substantial number of school studies and relies significantly on quantitative research and approaches.

What the history of school improvement tells us is that this is a complex journey, and it requires trust in the people tasked with bringing about changes in school.

School improvement approaches and studies have explored schools from the perspective of identifying what and how systematic and sustained efforts can be made inside a school that can change the learning conditions and other internal conditions in that school to accomplish established educational goals more effectively. There is, therefore, a common sense understanding of the words ‘school improvement’ which relates to general efforts that are made to make schools better places for students to learn. The more technical sense of ‘school improvement’ is the strategy that schools adopt for educational change that “enhances student outcomes as well as strengthens the school’s capacity for managing change” (Hopkins, 2001, page 13).

It is interesting to look back and trace the patterns of how research and work in both these spaces began. As with any large socio-cultural-political institution, the school system has been deeply influenced by broader socio-economic and political contexts of different countries at different points of time. In addition, beliefs about the aims of education and schooling, ideas of schooling as public vs private goods, assumptions about schools as organizations, their goals and processes, prevailing approaches and preferences in terms of change strategies, and empirical evidence built from both studies on school effectiveness and improvement, have all influenced the broader movements of school improvement and effectiveness.

Consistently, studies on school improvement indicate that change and improvement in schools and school systems are more successful when the change is owned by the school rather than imposed from outside. Some key assumptions that have driven countries to adapt this as their key change strategy are that schools have the capacity to improve themselves, school improvement involves cultural changes that need all members of the school to own the process of change, there are system level, community level, school level and classroom level conditions for change all of which need to be supported, and that fundamentally school improvement is concerned with building greater capacity for change within the school itself.

School improvement journeys, approaches, models, frameworks across countries reveal deeply rooted belief systems about not only education but also beliefs about people and cultures.

Research studies have also suggested some key factors that prevent school improvement from taking place. These include schools having unclear purposes and goals about the change initiative and rationale (they are unclear what they need to do and why), schools facing competing priorities (key stakeholders demanding different accountabilities, lack of resources, etc.), a lack of support from key stakeholders within and outside the school, insufficient attention paid to implementation, inadequate leadership and the change initiative being piece-meal and not holistic.

School Improvement in India

In India, apart from small pockets of innovation and experiments with alternative education, school improvement has worked within centralized governance mechanisms, mostly mechanistic reforms. From the perspective of alternative education, how schools should be organized, run and improved have been intimately connected with the philosophy of education advocated by particular educationists. For instance, Nai Talim schools organize curriculum, teacher development and school governance around Gandhi’s principles of ‘head, heart and hand’ (Sinha, 2015).

A Nai Talim school operates quite differently from a school anchored around J Krishnamurthy’s idea of education. The Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER) offers teacher training programs and resources and curricular support which is uniquely linked to the Rishi Valley school’s philosophy of how students enquire into the nature of truth. Similarly, Montessori schools operate within the overarching philosophy of learning advocated by Maria Montessori. So, while alternative schools broadly advocate that schools operate differently from ‘mainstream’ schools, the nature of how they operate and what they are expected to do, differ within the alternative school system itself.

In the absence, therefore, of a common mandate and direction of change, school improvement initiatives in India have predominantly been seen as an exercise in standardization of school operations. Most school improvement initiatives have taken on a program-like approach with central and state governments providing funding for schemes such as teacher professional development, standardized teacher training programs, standardized curriculum, standardized pedagogic methods, etc.

The last two decades have also seen an increase in public-private partnerships in school improvement projects. These include private and non-governmental organizations participating in teacher professional development, institutional capacity building of state institutes, remedial teaching, provision of teaching and learning resources, infrastructural resources and school level improvement projects such as setting up libraries, infrastructural improvements, activity-based teaching in the classroom etc.

The NEP (2020) signals a subtle shift in the school improvement strategy for the public school system. It talks about a ‘tight but light’ regulatory and assessment mechanisms for educational institutions with key assessment bodies (like PARAKH) establishing quality assessment frameworks for schools to use as their improvement journey map.

The focus on assessing and evaluating schools to help them move towards ‘standards of performance’ has been an integral part of the school effectiveness and school improvement movements around the world.

In India, assessment led reforms have become increasingly important as part of the State agenda for school improvement. For example, the School Quality Assessment and Assurance (SQAA) framework for CBSE schools provides a model for CBSE schools to assess themselves against eight domains of focus areas and four levels of school performance. The four levels are: inceptive (starting), transient (early corrective), stable (most processes in place), dynamic-evolving (strong performance on bench-marked standards).

The eight domain of focus include the following. Scholastic processes that include curriculum planning, teacher learning processes, student performance, assessment of learning outcomes and feedback and other sub domains. Co-scholastic processes including mainstreaming co-curricular activities, art education, skill education etc. Infrastructural aspects that involve adequacy, functionality, aesthetics and safety of infrastructure in schools. Human resources invoving staff, teachers, non-teaching staff, recruitment, selection, training etc. Inclusive practices in schools, management and governance (including record keeping), leadership, and beneficiary satisfaction (i.e., satisfaction of all stakeholders in schools) are the other domains of focus.

Similar to the SQAA framework, is Shala Siddhi (which is part of the National Program on School Standards and Evaluation – NPSSE) which consists of seven domains: Enabling resources of schools, Teachinglearning and assessment, Learners’ progress attainment, Managing teacher performance, School leadership and management, Inclusion, health and safety, and Productive community participation. These domains suggest both inputs that schools must work towards as well as outcomes that indicate their progression through stages of improvement.

Frameworks like these suggest focal areas for schools to target and move in a stagewise manner towards better functioning and improvement. Within the NEP (202), this is an indication that while there will be standards that will be used to evaluate schools, there will also be some choice provided to schools to localize their change initiative to suit the context in which they work, and to move towards bettering their performance in stages.

The Global Context of School Improvement

Before examining school improvement interventions and strategies in India, it is useful to look at some of the more significant pieces of research that influenced this process in other parts of the world. One of the first and perhaps most significant reports about schools and their performance was the ‘Equality of Educational Opportunity’ report, more commonly known as the Coleman Report (1966), that came out in the United States of America (USA).

This was one of the first large scale studies that asked questions about learning outcomes and what influenced a child’s capacity to learn, including the role of teachers, peers, and families. This report indicated that a student’s family background and the socio-economic mix of classrooms were the biggest determinants of how a child would perform in school. The report coined the term ‘achievement-gap’ to show that African American children where several grades below their white counterparts in the same school. The idea that the social capital of a child had more influence than schools was met with increasing resistance by governments who began investing more money into research on schools and how schools could be made more effective (predominantly focused on reducing the achievement-gap).

Another influential study at that time in the USA was one by Ronald Edmonds, who was seen as a pioneer of the school effectiveness movement. Edmonds identified and studied schools in very poor districts who were performing better than schools functioning in similar contexts. These were called outlier schools. Edmonds came up with five characteristics of effective schools (1979) and these characteristics of ‘good or effective’ schools significantly influenced the criteria on which schools would begin to be assessed in the coming years. It is worth looking at these characteristics because we find evidence of these characteristics in almost all school standards and evaluation frameworks around the world, including in India.

The first was the leadership of the principal, in particular the principal’s focus on what was going on in classrooms (instructional leadership). The second characteristic of these outlier schools was that they had a lot of focus on learning and establishing clear curricular outcomes. As a third quality, these schools provided an orderly and safe climate conducive to teaching and learning. Fourthly, these schools had high expectations of every student; every child was expected to succeed. And finally, measures of pupil achievement were the basis for evaluation (planned achievement levels).

This was a fairly simple five-point check list for an effective school. This model was increasingly adapted into policies, practices, and research not just in the USA but in policies around many western countries. And ideas of effective school characteristics began to influence how governments assessed schools for funding and resources, how teachers were trained, and how teacher training curriculums were designed. Governments in many parts of the western world were also influenced politically by the philosophy of New Public Management (NPM).

Funding was linked to outcomes and evidence that the services being provided to the public were of value. This approach began to influence funding of schools. The better that schools could provide evidence that they were adding value to children’s learning, the more the schools would get rewarded. This resulted in a school improvement effort broadly called the ‘restructuring schools’ movement.

The ‘restructuring schools’ movement happened in two waves. The first wave was top-down and centralized, and standards and outcomes led. Here, governments prescribed standardized curriculum, accountability of schools were measured through standards, teacher standards were established, and teacher training institutes were established with standardized curriculum.

As ideas of decentralization and localized governance began to be more widely accepted in the space of public policy and governance, western countries began to exercise centralized control while decentralizing responsibility for implementing changes and improvements in their school systems. Government institutions were established to regulate curriculum, inspect schools and establish tighter controls on teaching. Sanctions were imposed and targets set for schools to improve across specific areas. Chief amongst these, were schools being assessed on student performance on standardized curriculum.

School improvement interventions began to take the shape of assessment led reforms, where schools were increasingly asked to look for data on student learning (using standardized tests); standardization of teacher professional development was seen as a key area of focus within school systems, governments encouraged public-private partnerships for setting up schools and in supporting school improvement efforts. As schools began to be asked to demonstrate achievements against standards, schools demanded greater decentralization in decision making and being allowed to make decisions on teacher recruitment, classroom management and resources at the level of individual schools.

This decentralization of improvement efforts led to several grounded school improvement research taking place. Interesting models of school improvement began to emerge. Two broad approaches of school improvement emerged in the 1990s.

One approach may be classified as ‘organic,’ which suggests that schools are given broad principles or general strategies of school improvement within which they are allowed to experiment and flourish. The second approach may be categorized as more ‘mechanistic’ wherein schools are provided direct guidelines and very specific strategies prescribed for their improvement – on which they are evaluated.

Some of the examples of the ‘organic’ approach to change include the International School Improvement Project (14 countries, 4 years, OECD, School as the centre for change), projects with particular philosophies (e.g., the Small-Schools movement), improving quality of education for all (e.g., building collaborative cultures in schools), partnership models (e.g. Schools that make a difference). Examples of the ‘mechanistic’ approach to school improvement include Slavin’s (2005) ‘Success for all’, ‘Sand, Brick and Seed’, Joyce and Weil (2003) ‘Models of Teaching’ and ‘High Reliability Schools’ project (conformity between schools).

As research on school improvement began to provide more data on schools and various approaches to change, a few common features began to be noticed in these studies. By the 2000s, common characteristics of effective school improvement began to be advocated.

Key amongst these were change processes or school improvement methods that: Focused closely on classroom improvement; Had pedagogic strategies that were explicit in describing the models of teaching that they prescribed; Applied pressure at the implementation stage to ensure adherence to the program; Collected systematic evaluative evidence about the impact upon schools and classrooms; Mobilized change at a number of levels – classroom, teacher, parent, community and governance; Generated cultural as well as structural change within schools; Engaged teachers in professional development and dialogue.

More clarity also emerged on the need for ‘whole school improvement’ where all aspects of the school were seen as influencing student learning. This included clarity on the vision of the school, its culture, the role that parents played in the school, teacher autonomy and expertise, student agency, specific pedagogic tools and methods of learning, and continuous formative assessment of students. The role of school leaders in maintaining a culture of learning in the school and building professional learning communities for teachers in and across schools were seen as important aspects of school improvement.

School Improvement in India From an International Perspective

India’s current school improvement approach is reasonably aligned with the route taken by countries like the USA and the UK. However, a very different approach has been used for decades by Nordic countries such as Finland. There is a foundational difference between the two approaches. In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students, teachers and schools are therefore at the center of the school improvement approaches. In contrast to that, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose.

Consequently, education reforms and improvement efforts in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. When school improvement efforts have been driven by the idea of ‘excellence’, countries focus extensively on standardized testing and assessment guidelines. In contrast, when school improvement efforts are driven by the need to capacitate schools to cope with individual differences and social inequality, then the focus of school improvement is not on standardization but in enabling agency and choice oregarding what and how to teach with the schools themselves. In Finland, the school is the main authority of curricula. And the teacher is the sole authority monitoring the progress of students. There is no external inspection of schools or standardized testing of all pupils in Finland. For national analysis of educational performance, Finland relies on testing only a small sample of students (Sahlberg, 2011).

School improvement, therefore, becomes an exercise in equitable educational experience in Finland and not standardized educational experience. Improvement efforts consistently focus on teacher professional development, and in teacher education programs where teachers are capacitated to design their own curricula, assess their pupils’ progress, and continuously improve their own teaching and that of the overall teaching-learning processes in their school. Further, all children in Finland have, by law, access to childcare, comprehensive health care, and pre-school facilities in their own communities. Every school must have a welfare team to advance child happiness in school.

The journey of school improvement really starts with the question – how can schools become better? But that leads to the question – better at what?

The current, broader school improvement approach in India sits quite comfortably with the ‘excellence’ approach advocated and implemented in countries like the USA. However, the diversity of the socio-culturaleconomic and political milieu of India suggest that, at the policy level at least, there are spaces for contextualizing the school improvement approach to the specific needs of communities and stakeholders. However, the administrative system in India is deeply bureaucratic and runs on a command-andcontrol model. Therefore, a standards-based assessment approach to improvement, where schools are given frameworks like Shaala Siddhi or SQAA will most likely lead to schools only responding to the requirements of the frameworks and their reporting requirements.

This more mechanistic approach to school improvement may drown out contextual and innovative improvement approaches that the NEP (2020) suggests should be encouraged. In the past, school improvement efforts have been largely programmatic with funds coming in from Central and State schemes. This has acclimatized schools to report on improvement ‘projects’ rather than see school improvement as “a strategy that schools adopt for educational change that enhances student outcomes as well as strengthens the school’s capacity for managing change” (Hopkins, 1996).

It is unclear how the new National Assessment Center ‘PARAKH’ will implement the ‘tight but light’ model of schools evaluating themselves for improvement. Further the STARS scheme being set up in a few select states, is also in a programmatic mode. This may strengthen the movement of schools towards some standards-based school improvement projects.

School improvement journeys, approaches, models and frameworks across countries reveal deeply rooted belief systems about not only education but also beliefs about people and cultures. In highly bureaucratic societies like India, where there is little trust in teachers or schools to carry out their responsibilities, centralized projects of school improvements tend to become the dominant change management approach and become institutionalized. We have not had a lot of success in centralized school improvement approaches in India in the past.

In Conclusion

However, the hope of school improvement in India today is that there is a wealth of knowledge, research, and data on what works and what does not. For instance, the role of distributed leadership in schools, where teachers have the agency to respond to the needs of students and stakeholders in schools and where school principals understand positive school cultures, have consistently been proven to aid in successful school transformations. Accessing these bodies of knowledge can greatly aid in successful school improvement journeys in India.

Another space for hope and innovation lies in a structural change that the NEP suggests – that of establishing a unit called the ‘school complex’ consisting of one secondary school with primary schools and Anganwadis in a neighbourhood who will share resources and provide improved support for teachers and students across the complex. The NEP suggests that such school complexes/ clusters be given significant autonomy by the Directorate of School Education to innovate and experiment with pedagogies and curriculum etc. (while adhering to the National Curricular Framework and State Curricular Frameworks). These could provide opportunities for clusters to experiment with innovative school improvement models and frameworks.

What the history of school improvement tells us is that this is a complex journey, and it requires trust in the people tasked with bringing about changes in schools. There is no silver bullet to this change process. It requires an understanding of the purpose of education, and spaces to innovate and collaborate with multiple stakeholders. School improvement must keep the welfare of children and teachers at the heart of the change process. This takes time. Whether large systems like the Indian school education have the patience to build the capability of the system to bring about equitable school improvement across the plethora of school systems in the country remains to be seen.

No approved comments yet. Be the first to comment!