Building Teacher Quality In India

India has one of the largest student populations in the world; the quality of teaching is blamed for the poor performance by Indian students on internationally-comparative assessments. By analyzing various measures of teacher quality, this book provides a framework for policymakers to further improve teacher quality in India.

India has one of the largest student populations in the world; the quality of teaching is blamed for the poor performance by Indian students on internationally-comparative assessments. By analyzing various measures of teacher quality, this book provides a framework for policymakers to further improve teacher quality in India.

By drawing on quantitative data and qualitative analyses of five major national education policies implemented in India over the last 15 years, this comprehensive volume explores their impact on teacher quality and perceived effectiveness, explaining how this relates to variations in student performance. Responding to a national agenda to increase the quality of the Indian teacher workforce, Teacher Quality and Education Policy in India critically questions the application of human capital theory to Indian education policy. Chapters provide in-depth and strategically structured analyses of five national policies – including the recently approved National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 – to see how Indian policymakers use teacher quality as a driver and measurement of education and national economic development. Ultimately, the text offers evidence-based policy recommendations to improve teacher quality in India, suggesting that while all five policies have contributed significant frameworks and recommendations for teacher quality reform, they have failed to move beyond a symbolic function. Given its rigorous methodological approach, this book will be a valuable addition to the under-researched question of education policymaking in postcolonial contexts. It will be an indispensable resource not only for scholars working on policymaking in the Indian context, but also for those working at the intersection of education, teacher development, and policymaking in developing countries.

This report presents the best current evidence about what can make teacher-oriented reforms effective and points to examples of reforms that have produced specific results, show promise or illustrate imaginative ways of implementing change.

There are many expert teachers working in the global South and we can learn a great deal from them. Neither of these claims should be surprising, yet to date there has been almost no research conducted on expert teachers working in Southern contexts. Instead, the huge sums of money invested in attempting to improve teacher quality in the South have frequently been directed towards introducing exogenous practices or interventions that may be culturally inappropriate, practically infeasible and ultimately unsustainable – often failing as a result. In this pioneering book, Jason Anderson provides an authoritative overview of the practices, cognition and professionalism of expert teachers working in low-income contexts. By drawing upon both systematic reviews of teacher expertise and effectiveness research, and his own fieldwork in India, he argues that without an understanding of expert teachers working in all contexts worldwide, we cannot truly understand expertise itself.

This book provides a scholarly investigation of the new era we have entered, in which platforms can replace or profoundly modify educational systems, and questions the role of educational policy in this new stage of platform-based digital technology. The contributors explore important questions around who controls these transformations, what form they are taking, what the balance between national education policies and Big Tech education solutions should be, as well as whether there should be a public platform in every education system that digitally expands learning, and what evidence there is that learning will be more efficient using these platforms. The first part provides a selection of empirical studies on the new digital educational policy, and an analysis of the real opportunities and concerns that governments face in this regard, while the second offers reflections on the processes of platformization and the role of the state in this new digital world. Uniquely examining the temporal evolution of these changes and taking a theoretical, political, and epistemological approach, it crucially opens pathways for dialogical and diverse critical thinking about profound problems and possibilities. Gathering purposeful thinking that creates space for design solutions and rethinking educational systems considering these new technological artefacts, it will appeal to researchers and specialists in the fields of educational technology and educational policy.

Highlights importance of teachers on influencing future generations, analyses several significant aspects of teacher education in India.

India's landmark Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) guarantees education to all children aged 6-14 years. The Act mandates specific student-teacher ratios and emphasizes teacher quality. Writing this into legislation took seven years, but the seven years since has proven that ensuring effective teachers are recruited and placed in all schools in a time-bound manner is considerably more challenging. This report takes a detailed look at the complexity of the teacher management landscape in elementary and secondary schools in nine Indian states. On a daily basis, the administrative machinery of these states has to manage between 19,000 to nearly a million teachers in different types of schools and employment contracts, and cope with recruiting thousands more and distributing them equitably across schools. This report examines the following issues: official requirements for becoming a schoolteacher in India; policies and processes for teacher recruitment, deployment and transfers; salaries and benefits of teachers; professional growth of teachers; and grievance redressal mechanisms for teachers. For the first time in India, this report compares and contrasts stated policy with actual practice in teacher management in the country, using a combination of primary and secondary data. In so doing, the report reveals the hidden challenges and the nature of problems faced by administrators in attempting to build an effective teacher workforce which serves the needs of all of India’s 200 million school children. The report examines states with varying characteristics, thus generating knowledge and evidence likely to be of interest to policy makers and practitioners in a wide range of contexts.