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Systemic Reform
At the elementary level, the Indian education system currently reaches out to nearly 200 million children, a challenge across infrastructure, management and implementation fronts, of huge proportions. Giving impetus to state and other efforts to improve the quality of education that is accessible to children across different regions and backgrounds requires attention to both the form and method of schooling. It implies ensuring amenities like drinking water and toilets, sufficient and comfortable classroom, a playground, a library, and laboratories capable of supporting simple science and maths experiments. It also implies changing teaching practice at the classroom level helping teachers to become effective and motivated, but crucially making sure that the sheer number of teachers is sufficient to teach the millions of children growing up in India today. Motivating teachers and allowing them to become 'reflective practitioners' necessitates a variety of enabling preconditions, such as the qualifications and ability to understand the subjects they are supposed to teach and training which helps them to analyse their own role and teaching, deepening their understanding and teaching effectiveness in the classroom. These issues in classroom practice are not independent of the larger context of education, a context which includes the reasons for, and aims of education. Moreover, education impacts society overall, the manner in which society builds and evolves over time, and how social relations get determined. Governance is also affected, and in a democratic governance structure such as India it is important that people's governance-related choices are well-informed and systemically well-intentioned. Enabling citizens to make these choices and defining 'well-informed' are clearly interlinked, and this is why the role of education is crucial in developing society as a whole.
The state, or government is a key partner, implicitly or explicitly, in any initiative that attempts to reach out to children, since curricular content and systems of assessment are almost always determined by state institutions of education, and in the case of government schools, so too are teacher-training processes, classroom pedagogy and management issues. Moreover, allowing for a level playing field in the sense that good education is available to all, irrespective of their social, cultural or economic background is a pre-requisite for furthering the roles and aims of education, as is the role that this education will play in the healthy functioning of democratic governance systems. The state must therefore play a pivotal role in determining educational content and financing and providing it given its role as a supreme 'collective' which acts in the social interest. While different private bodies such as individual schools, organisations or collections of such may well play important roles in influencing how and what the state does, from a social welfare perspective, they should not be responsible for providing, determining or financing education at a system-level. The role of the state or government also assumes importance given the context of information asymmetries that characterise many educational transactions or choices. These asymmetries are those which occur between, for instance, parents choosing what kind of school to send a child to or whether to send her in the first place, and the state or private provider of education, and explain why a individually-optimal decision for a parent may not be socially optimal, or why parents simply do not have the means to understand the different complexities involved in educating their children, and resultantly, the consequences of the decisions they may take.
The ICICI Centre for Elementary Education, or ICEE, aims to play a catalytic role in the processes of systemic reform, providing support to resource centres, research initiatives and projects, each of which is expected to contribute towards sectoral knowledge and attempts to change the way curriculum is designed, textbooks written, teachers trained and academically supported and students taught and assessed. In particular, ICEE has been working towards such change in the government system of education by undertaking the following initiatives:
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