Friday Notes, February 14, 2025
Dear Friends —
American schoolchildren are still suffering from COVID. According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, released earlier this month, students have not recovered from pandemic-era learning loss in math and reading, and are almost a half-grade behind in each. Reading scores are actually continuing to slip to below pre-pandemic levels, absenteeism remains high, and (given our property tax-based way of funding education) the gap between wealthy and poor districts has grown larger.
This is not how it’s supposed to be. Knowing all the benefits to society of an educated citizenry, we should be targeting public dollars toward the communities that need them the most. With each generation, more kids should be going to school, and going consistently. We should be getting better at understanding and applying knowledge about how children learn. Reading and math scores should not just be back to the not-so-great pre-pandemic baseline; they should be higher.
Witness what’s happened in India. According to the recently released Annual Status of Education Report 2024, based on a massive national survey, Indian schoolchildren have more than recovered COVID-related learning losses across virtually all states. The good news includes high levels of pre-primary enrollment, improvements in foundational reading even in poor states, and high levels of digital literacy among teens.
How is it that the United States, which spends far more on education as a share of GDP than any industrialized nation, is failing — while India, facing far more resource constraints and infrastructure challenges, succeeds? That’s a question for the experts, but one potential explanation is obvious even to lay people like me: the combination of political will plus evidence.
India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with policymakers eager to transition towards a services-oriented economy while also strengthening the manufacturing sector. Increasing the share of the workforce in the formal economy, expanding the development and use of technology, and increasing women’s labor force participation are all part of the game plan. And none of that can happen without a more educated population.
Motivated in part by earlier evidence of shockingly poor learning outcomes among young children, which foretold a hindrance to a future healthy economy, the government adopted a National Education Policy in 2020. The policy, primarily implemented by state governments, is focused on foundational literacy and numeracy, and supports the application of an effective teaching method that was developed and rigorously tested over years. What is that method? It’s “Teaching at the Right Level” and this video describes how it works.
The recent ASER findings speak to early success of policy implementation and it’s quite remarkable. While there’s lots of room for improvement and the story is infinitely more complex than I’ve presented here, it’s inspiration to draw. And who doesn’t need some inspiration these days? If India can export the idea and practice of yoga to every neighborhood in America, maybe it can also send over Teaching at the Right Level.
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Speaking of yoga, here’s this week’s favorite video (even though it’s from 10 years ago):
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And . . . another lesson we can learn from our friends across the ocean.
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth