Private Enterprise in Public Education: Cautionary Tales from the U.S.

Invited presentation at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India, July 13, 2015. 

Video posted at  http://cprindia.org/events/4511

Handout at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7uT6saUYAa_MzJIY2R1clRzd0k/view?usp=sharing

Abstract 

Private entities are a major player in the educational field in the US and have an increasingly high profile in India. They are closely involved in managing and running schools, and providing infrastructure, classroom materials and teacher training. Publishing companies in the U.S. have an inordinate influence over the enacted curriculum and teacher education while a non-profit is changing the face of the teaching force.

This paper will describe the impact of private entities on teacher education and the profession of teaching, illustrating with Pearson and Teach for America. The applications of these impacts to the Indian context will be discussed.

What a Movie Teaches Teachers: Kuttram Kadithal and Corporal Punishment

Ordinary and Realistic – Two attributes of Kuttram Kadithal that set it apart from recent films that addresses important educational issues, and I am not discounting Dhoni and Taare Zameen Par. In Kuttram Kadithal, a teacher casually slaps a Grade 5 student for misbehaving and acting cocky. The student falls down unconscious and is rushed to a hospital. The movie details what happens in the next 24 hours. Mind you, corporal punishment has been explicitly made illegal by the Right to Education Act.

The sheer ordinariness of Kuttram Kadithal

In the genre of realistic cinema that shows routine ordinariness of life, Kuttram Kadithal establishes early on that this is just another day in the life of the teacher, except for a few minor things. She has trouble getting her husband out of bed and ready for work. She was married only three days ago, and it is her first day back at school. A teacher skips the last period to go to a movie with her husband and asks the protagonist to substitute for her, commenting wryly on the high spirits of the class without denigrading them. Even the moralizing speech, an essential ingredient in Indian movies, is confined to a couple of minutes in the end when the teacher ‘fesses up and declares that while her action may not have precipitated the crisis, she did not treat the student with love and dignity, as she would her own child.

The student at the centre of the storm in Kuttram Kadidhal is perfectly ordinary with no features that would make him an instantly sympathetic character or a teacher’s pet. He is not brilliant at cricket or painting but is endearingly mischievous and the apple of his poor mother’s eye. He has an eye for girls but is not cute or handsome. He kisses a birthday girl on her cheek and then cheeks the teacher when she calls on him to apologize, both developmentally recognizable behaviours in a Std. 5 student. In this flow of naturalness, it seems to be the natural reaction of the teacher to give the boy a quick, hard slap. The resulting series of actions seem to flow along with the natural order of things, contrasting sharply with the intensity of emotions.

However, education has not enjoyed naturalism in movies till very recently. Schools and teachers have usually been demonized for the most part as caricatures with glasses and a tight bun or stereotypes who ineffectively yell at students. Even in a movie as well made as Taare Zameen Par, watching the scene in the staffroom without subtitles, my students in the US were able to pick out the stereotype each teacher represented.

Kuttram Kadithal is not without its moments of melodrama: The teacher’s inter-religious marriage establishes her open-mindedness but she fiercely washes away the bindi in an emotional outburst. The principal’s personal loss of a daughter in an accident gives him moral authority in his claim that he would do the best for the student. At the meeting with the shocked mother, the teacher wails uncontrollably, and then keels over dramatically. (No, she doesn’t die to give the student life; she merely faints from emotional exhaustion).

Realistic response to corporal punishment

However, the central educational question of corporal punishment in schools is not made dramatic but is dealt with matter-of-factly and in a low key. The movie raises practically all relevant questions: What are the courses of action available to a school when a teacher uses corporal punishment on a student? What should be done when a student is hurt? What effect does administering corporal punishment, especially if it precipitates a crisis, have on the teacher and on the student audience? What kind and level of support can the teacher, students and parents expect from the school in such a crisis? What responsibility do teachers have to their students in the name of discipline?

Many of the procedural suggestions offered as the action unfolds are probably in place in most schools.

• ·       Have a connection with a hospital and doctor close by for emergencies.
• ·       Take the child to the hospital immediately with a teacher in attendance.
• ·       Inform the parents.
• ·       Have one spokesperson who represents the school, and has the authority to make decisions. In the case of minor accidents, it may be a teacher. In a full-blown crisis, it should be the principal.
• ·       Do not talk to the media.

It is in the matter of how the procedures should be conducted taking into consideration the emotional aspects of the event that schools usually fail to measure up.

Most schools tend to avoid admitting to an error to avoid legal culpability and also perhaps because they wish to be seen as infallible. So the standard response is to meet the parents as minimally as necessary and refuse to take responsibility of any kind. On the other hand, most parents trust schools and are often looking for help while dealing with their grief. Working as partners to resolve the crisis and get the best medical help possible for the student will avoid further exacerbation of relations. The first step is for the school authority, be it the principal or the assistant to be available to answer questions and be seen to take responsibility. As happens in the movie, it may be more politic for the teacher to keep away from the family at the initial moments of the crisis when tempers are running high and parents need to play the blame game. However, it is imperative for her to share in the grief of the family and acknowledge her role in the events. A simple act such as an apology, or the teacher’s heartfelt tears, often de-escalate tensions, and is necessary for the healing of both parents and teachers.

It is also essential for the school to be supportive of teachers. Teachers who may have caused a crisis do not do so with intent to harm. Nor does such an incident leave them emotionally unscarred. Very few teachers are sadists or masochists, who like to inflict pain on their students or on themselves (Students may, of course, disagree with this statement!). As in the movie, the principal should take charge efficiently, even pushing back quietly at the management’s order to suspend the teacher with immediate effect.

The only affective area the film does not portray is what to do about the effects on students who may have witnessed the incident. The question is thrown up when a student asks her mother, “Will he (the injured student) return to school tomorrow?” It is essential to reassure students who may be encountering peer mortality that normalcy will prevail. The trauma caused by witnessing such violence must be processed. Counselors should be made available to talk students through this. Teachers are the most familiar adult figures to students and often the persons they will reach out to in a crisis. A short and pertinent professional development session should train teachers to recognize signs of trauma in students, especially those teachers who teach the grade and section of the injured student and that of the siblings.

For making a movie on a ‘touchy’ issue that teachers can watch without apologizing for their profession, director Bramma deserves the national award for Best Tamil Film 2014. As Tamil cinema comes of age, perhaps corporal punishment in schools will die a natural death. 

I (and millions of others) don’t count as Indian Americans

Building Worlds: A Place in the Sun

Direction & Script: Priyanka Kuriakose

Creative Supervisor: Siddharth Kak

Producers: Ministry of External Affairs & Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs

Presentation of: Surabhi

Bottomline: MEA needs to re-define what success means

  

Going by the documentary Building Worlds: A Place in the Sun, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs does not consider an Indian American worthy of representation unless he is

-male.

-associated with Harvard, Columbia, Stanford or Berkeley as a student or teacher.

-working in New York or the Silicon Valley.

-living in New York or California.

-preferably a millionaire.

The documentary mainly features 'neo professionals': entrepreneur, IT professional. A Hilton franchisee represents the ‘hotel-motel-Patel’ face of the business Indian, suitably upscale.

The difficulty of getting a US visa is represented by a Silicon Valley dude who was turned down three times but eventually got it because his father worked at the US consulate and berated the Consul General. An opportunity available to every applicant, of course.

The three professional females featured are a professor at Columbia University, a Bollywood dance teacher, and a doctor who is shown playing cards with her daughter, not in her professional setting; she can only be recognized in her role as a mother. The fourth female is a wannabe documentary maker who hung out with this crew to learn the craft, or so we were told at the Q&A at Indian International Centre, Delhi.

The creative director Siddharth Kak blithely confessed that they had not considered gender representation (forget parity) when planning the script. They apparently tried hard for an appointment with Indra Nooyi, the Pepsi CEO. Don't know if they even attempted to do so with Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina.

The only person featured who is in public life is Ami Bera, a male. Women who strive to make the U.S. a fair and just society such as Deepa Iyer former director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT); Kamala Harris, the current Attorney General of California or Bharavi Desai the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance – Were they all difficult to pin down for an interview?

I guess since Bollywood dance has been represented, it is okay to ignore all other forms of art and culture such as literature (with a whole host of writers to choose from, many of them female) or journalism (Lakshmi Singh of NPR, Fareed Zakariah, and Rajiv Chandrasekharan spring to mind). Not to speak of a variety of ‘non-traditional jobs’ ranging from standup comic (Kal Penn and Asif Mandvi) to cab driver (take your pick in New York).

A photo of Bobby Jindal could be flashed - while he is desperately trying to deny his Indian heritage – but not one of astronaut Sunita Williams?

And there is certainly no awareness of the American geopolitics of 'fly over country' or the ‘forgotten’ South.

There are no themes, no arguments, and certainly no sociological, anthropological or historical perspectives. There is no attempt to situate the community in the larger context of living in the U.S. No mention of the micro and macro aggression that we as Indian Americans overcome, and still live peacefully in our communities (Wisconsin Gurudwra shooting or the case of Purvi Patel testing the abortion and feticide laws).

How difficult is it to access a Wikipedia page on Indian Americans for a more complete picture of who we are and what we are up to?

And Kak bemoaned the difficulty of covering 50 years of achievement in 45 minutes. Really? Perhaps he needs to take a leaf out of another MEA documentary Natyanubhava which gracefully spans 2000 years of Indian dance in 52 minutes. (Disclaimer: The director is my sister Sharada Ramanathan).

This public diplomacy initiative (not a documentary) looks more like an opportunity created to hang out with the "rich and famous" than represent different ways in which Indian Americans have found their ‘place in the sun’ in all parts of the US.

The objective of the MEA may be to make promotional films that showcase the best of India and its culture. If this is a sample of the other 10 documentaries in this series, most of the diaspora can deem their lives wasted, unremarkable and immaterial.

Why this English-medium-veri di?

I was (am) an English teacher and the language opens doors for me. But I am very concerned about the increasing mania for instruction in English.
This editorial was published in July 2012 in The Open Page. Read it below or at  (http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=366045620135137&set=a.366045226801843.83548.136382846434750&type=1&theater)

Why this English-medium-veri di?

Admission to English-medium schools has rocketed by 280%! We all want to send our children to schools in which all subjects are taught in English. Why? Why this craze for English-medium instruction? Do our children learn better and more when taught in English as against in Gujarati or Hindi? Do they become smarter or cleverer? Parents with children in English-medium schools in various states in India have their own ideas. Let us see if you agree with them.

Why English-medium schools?

For economic capital. First of all, English is absolutely necessary for my child to get a job. The kind and level of jobs available without a command of English are not good enough for us. I would also like my child to be able to work all over India or the world; without English, my child will be confined to living in one or two states.

For academic capital. All higher education is in English only, especially professional courses like medicine and engineering or in IT. For my child to go to college, he will need to have studied all subjects in English. This is even more important if he is to abroad for higher studies.

For social capital. All of our friends’ kids go to English-medium schools. How can I be left out? What kind of friends will my child have if he does not go to the same kind of school? Who will he play with? Who will invite him to birthday parties?

We feel proud when our children speak English in company. At a party at home or a family wedding, when my child sings an English song or recites a poem, all the guests are impressed. It won’t be the same if they recited a poem in Hindi or sang a song in Gujarati.

Cultural Capital. Let us face it. English-medium schools are more sophisticated than regional language schools. They are stricter, with more discipline and better facilities. The teachers are more refined and classy.

Learning English vs Learning in English

I entirely agree that English is essential for a better job prospect, for higher education and for a wider educational experience. I can also sympathise with the need to keep up appearances.

But there seems to be a small problem here. My friends are confusing ‘learning English’ with ‘learning in English’. Learning English is to be able speak, read and write English fluently. Learning in English is to study all subjects such as maths and science and conduct all school activities such as games and drama in English. So, knowing English is not the same as studying all subjects in English.

And there are two problems with studying in English-medium schools. The first is that research says very clearly that learning both the content and the language at the same time doubles the difficulty for students. Once students know the content, they can easily learn to express the ideas in English. So your child may be better off learning the fundamentals of math and science in Gujarati first in primary school. In the higher classes, students could then learn the English words for the ideas and concepts they already know, which would be much easier for them.

And how many times have you complained about the teachers’ standards of English? The fact is that we do not have required number of teachers to teach all subjects in English. While the teachers may know the subject, not all of them have a good command of English. Thus, teachers teach math in the English they know, which may not be very much. So the students end up learning neither math nor English very well. On the other hand, if the teacher taught in a language she is comfortable with, the content would be well taught.

So perhaps we need to seriously consider providing a regional language medium for the primary classes and the moving the students to English-medium for the high school. And good schools with high-standards will open up if we create a demand for it.

As for the social aspiration of having children be proficient in learning to speak English fluently, that is where tuition classes can be useful. If these were to focus on conversational English, students could learn songs and poems to their parents’ hearts content without their academics being affected.

Where sophistication is concerned, my friends have a right to their opinion. But how important is that for the primary schools? Isn’t it more important for our children to get a good grounding in the subjects?

So let us see if we can build good schools that help children learn to be bright and intelligent and know math and science and social studies very well – in the regional language. Then we can send them to English classes to learn to be socially proficient. By ending this kolaveri for English-medium education, parents and students can win!

Fearful Students Fearing Teachers

We expect our students to be proficient in all genres of writing. This year I stretched myself to see if I could write differently. I write 'academese' for scholarly journals. My writing in The Hindu was a journalism feature article.
This is a third level of casualness I am attempting, and perhaps the most difficult for me.
The Open Page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/TheOpenPage) is newspaper meant for parents, students and teachers publsihed in Ahmedabad, India. This article on corporal punishment is only about 500 words but keeping the research down and 'talking' more than 'writing' is breaking down barriers for me. Check my article out in the May issue (http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=332034043536295&set=a.308809069192126.72803.136382846434750&type=1&theater).

Sri Lanka: Overlaying Impressions of Radio Ceylon

I grew up listening to Binaca Geetmala every week. And hearing Devika pronounced differently. Radio Ceylon was a staple of my adolescence. And then came LTTE in my adult days. Going to Sri Lanka for two weeks was the beginning of a third phase of connections to and impressions of the island.

Arrival in Sri Lanka

Did I feel important! When I landed, an official appointed by Dr. Hemamala Rattwatte was waiting by, who ushered me through immigration, customs and into a cab, which flew through the city. There was a slight hiccup in neither the cab driver nor I knew where I was supposed to go and I didn’t have Hemamala’s phone number. But that was soon resolved and I reached Open University of Sri Lanka safely. My host Dilini Walisundra came by to discuss my schedule and take me out to a real Sri Lankan dinner of kottu and curry. And my first shopping trip to buy – a towel!

My presentations

I had two presentations to university faculty, at OUSL and the University of Jaffna, and three to English teachers in Kurunegala, Jaffna and Zahira College, Colombo. A total of 5 which involved travelling across the country and meeting very different groups of people. Each workshop was attended by 30-60 teachers.

Kurunegala - The workshop was in closed room, 50 people and no air-con. But the participation was enthusiastic. Though the day began with one participant who fainted as we were talking. No, I didn’t scare her; she forgot to take her blood pressure medication.

I am even more convinced, if I needed to be, that teachers over the world are asked to be doers and not thinkers. And then we complain that students and our young people are getting less and less capable of critical thinking. What I do not practice I will not teach. And while all teachers may not be from the top of their class, they are capable of thinking, they have definite ideas of who they are as teachers and if we don’t value their beliefs and expect them to articulate them and act on their beliefs, which are mostly conducive to commitment to teaching and students, we will be left with an uncritical, unthinking, unmotivated group of people who treat teaching as a career and will be content to remain the warm bodies in the classroom that we allow them to be. Our loss, in effect.

Galle

I went there the day after the England-Sri Lanka match, pity. But I was able to see the grounds which are in the shadow of the fort. It was amusing to see boys and girls in a mixed team playing cricket just outside the fort walls against a magnificent background of the Indian Ocean. The spectators sat on the walls of the fort in the blazing sun.

My enduring memory is of drinking wood apple juice, which I haven’t seen since I was a child. I remember my grandmother scolding us for picking unripe wood-apples, which tasted sour, if not bitter. But we couldn’t wait for the ripe ones which we would have mixed with jiggery. Delicious.

Sigiriya and Dumbulla

Kandyan Reach in Kurunegala has to be the best value for money. The hotel was clean, the room spacious and clean, and the food good. Most welcome after a hot day out. In case you don’t know, I am not at my physical fittest right now. And climbing umpteen steps at both places was taxing but worth it, if only because I could pride myself on having done both places in a single day, which I advised not to. The frescos at Sigiriya reminded me that buxom is good and I don’t have to worry about not being reed-thin, a hangover of living in the US. Dambulla with it myriad statues of the Buddha was impressive. After the climb, done in the full glare of the afternoon sun, I needed to rest my feet. As I sat on my haunches and cross-legged in turn in each of the caves, other visitors presumed that I was praying and walked around me softly. And I can hear my family and friends cackling at my projection of piety.

The bus rides were fine and cheap. I paid more for each auto ride than for the bus rides put together. And if I was getting fleeced, it was no more than I could afford.

Kandy

I had many claims to interest in Kandy: the elephant orphanage in Pinnewala; the Temple of the Tooth; the train ride. All of them lived up to my expectations. Hemamala had provided contacts to finalize a car for the day (and it took 3 attempts and four people to pull this off) and it was most useful. If I had had to take a bus to Pinnewala, I may have taken a rain check on it, it was so hot.

Meeting Deepika was meant to be a pro forma, my sister’s friend. But we were in the car for 7 hours and didn’t stop talking (No, I don’t want to hear So why is that a surprise?)

Jaffna

I am the first Fulbright scholar to go to Jaffna in recent times sponsored by SLELTA (no pressure, folks!). Just getting here was an adventure and quite fraught. Dilini tried to prevent me retracing my steps from Kurunegala to Colombo but I had no choice. So that day was a 4 hour Kurunegala-Colombo bus ride followed a couple of hours later by another 10 hour Colombo-Jaffna ride. Fortunately, the second was a very comfortable air-conditioned bus. I went into my presentation without much rest but was enthused by the faculty of U of Jaffna ELTC department.

I was sleep-deprived since I cannot sleep on a bus, and our accommodation that night was in a fairly clean but closed-in room in which the electricity went off at least three times. The second night the accommodation at the Christian Theological Seminary in bucolic surroundings with birds chirping was very pleasant, once Dilini got the rooms cleaned and dusted, and arranged for fresh bed sheets.

Hearing Tamil widely spoken, and being able to connect to the Tamils here through the language is exhilarating.

The effects of war are to be seen everywhere. There are portions of the outlying areas that are still abandoned, and have been since 1990. Locals point to all the derelict buildings that had been occupied by the army for more than a decade. The railway line was torn up by the LTTE for girders to build bunkers and the train station looks neglected and forsaken. Roads are being re-laid but the progress appears to be slow. 

We met one family that had lost all its male members. The women had spent 22 years in and around Jaffna, staying in no place longer than a year, and finally came back to their house a year ago. They have set up a small roadside shop selling sweets and crisps with the government compensation and are hoping to be able to settle back into their own lives.

There is a lot of residual fear. We had taken an auto to see the areas that had been cleared out by the army. I temporarily lost sight of two of my friends. The auto driver drove back and forth along the road frantically peering into every disused building and overgrown bush. His sigh of relief when we spotted them was audible and heartfelt.

There are still a lot of regrets. Every person we met had lost a family member, from the auto driver to university personnel. The scars have not healed and it is unrealistic to expect them to forget their losses, even if they have moved on in certain ways. We also happened on an orphanage attached to a temple. The girls there are orphaned or certainly do not have a mother. They looked well-groomed. One of them sang in the temple and looked the picture of devotion. The head of the orphanage is a retired principal of a local school and his wife works at the U of Jaffna. Another woman has opened her house to blind children. One of her protégés is now a lecturer at a local university.

Signs of regeneration and growth are slight but promising. Schools were permitted to be re-opened in cordoned off areas about 10 years ago, and now everyone has access, not just students and teachers. The school we visited was the first missionary co-ed school in South Asia. New buildings have been built and they are well maintained. There is a kitchen garden in the centre of the ground, and growing something so eminently practical and home-oriented was indicative of how much normalcy the people ache for.

War-affected children were provided counselling in schools for a year or so early in the millennium but nothing since. And they have no help in processing their memories and their losses as they grow up. Teachers feel the need to address issues related to the effects of the war but are not encouraged to do so. No one talks about it professionally. They have to input into how to deal with suicidal children. The English curriculum and materials are bland and devoid of all mention of the war or its effects. How can we talk about authenticity in such an approach to teaching and learning which ignores such powerful personal experiences of teachers and learners?

If the Sri Lankan government means to integrate Tamils into the society, they should move faster. Destroying all reminders of the 30-year war such as cemeteries and statues of LTTE leaders may be convenient in the short run but the Tamils are resentful that they are being wiped of all historical landmarks. The events are too close to them yet to renounce their past, though they do not want to go back to being war-torn. And the psychological scars of war must be addressed faster and more specifically, with both short-term and long-term plans.

Sri Lanka is tidy and clean, and that to me was the main difference from India. I could walk around without having to watch my step, wary of stepping on rubbish and filth. Even the restaurants and rest rooms in the areas more remote from Colombo are clean.

The food in SL is heavenly, and I have been very lucky, especially in Jaffna. My insistence on no-onion-no-garlic prompted about four queries of whether I am a Brahma Kumari. I had to regretfully claim personal preference and whimsy rather than a mandate by religion. In Jaffna, I had two delicious home-cooked meals. Jaya and Prof. Bhavan provided idlis with the works, chatnis, molagai podi and madras sambar. Vani cooked up a storm with two sauces, vegetables, chatnis, rice, pittu, curd and a delicious home-made lemon pickle.

However, in one respect it reminded me Indonesia – Like Jakarta, Colombo appears to be the only major city in the country. Sophistication is confined to the capital with its choice of cuisines, shopping arenas and transport. All the other places are more like smaller towns in India; in fact a Tamil compared Jaffna to Trichy. The further you are removed from Colombo the less modernity is evident. And it doesn’t look like the Sri Lankan government plans to share elements of modernity with Jaffna, which may be one way of healing the wounds of war.

The people who made my visit possible (Dilini, Hemamala and Shyamani) and those I met by chance (Vimansha, Paranthaman, Prof. Bhavan, Killi, Daniel, Deepika among others) were responsible for my thorough enjoyment of SL. (No, this is not a vote of thanks, though ti is starting to sound like one.) The place was beautiful and the people ever so helpful. How else would I have been able to attend a doctoral defense back at UWG? I worked hard, played hard, and came back with a tan my grandmother would not have approved. 

And now to find my way back...

No Place for Fear in Classroom

The wide spread use of corporal punishment as noted in the recent study by NCPCR and the long-lasting effects such punishment on children are the basis for the this article.
It is getting easier to write for the popular press, and not worry about not having references. This appeared when I was at the Central and South Asia Fulbright Conference. It gave us all a kick to see the Fulbright affiliation in print.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article2932688.ece