Frontline Gap

• lack of teachers on the ground to do the work
  • too much expectations from too little teachers
• karthik muralidharan
  • expectation from the bureaucrats to do too much
• Rohit lamba graph
  • less local employees
• Is it because of the lack of job openings? Or is there also an aspirational gap?

Birds of a Feather - Homophily in Social Networks

When I was in my early twenties, like every self-respecting twenty year old, I thought I could fix education. The education in our country I's bad only because teachers didn't know what to and how to teach. see I have done 12 years of Schooling and I have gone through that process. So obviously that makes me an expert right. All we needed to do is train them to do better.

Visiting schools in India is a fun adventure of its own. Everyone kinda authoritatively talks about how bad the Indian schools are. Usually Indian government schools geta bad rep for its infrastructure
Recently I was interviewing teachers in various government schools in Karnataka

During my field visit to Karnataka, I witnessed two kinds of schools—schools with happy teachers and schools with grumpy teachers. The adoption of the tool was evidently better in the schools with happy teachers. These happy teachers invited me with a smile, were excited to interact with me, were nicer to their students, motivated to learn and implement new teaching strategies in their classroom, and overall seemed to be enjoying their teaching profession. Whereas the grumpy teachers were tired, annoyed with their students, and were not super-motivated to perform. While initially I thought that being happy or grumpy is more of a personality trait. As I visited more schools and interacted with more teachers, I could see a clear trend emerging between the schools where teachers are happy and the schools where teachers are grumpy. The happiness/grumpiness of the teachers was significantly influenced by one externality—the number of staffs in the school in proportion to the number of students. In other words, the teachers in adequately staffed schools were happier than the understaffed schools. They could focus more of their time on a single classroom rather than trying to handle multiple classrooms at once. Even when it comes to a single classroom, the role of the teacher is not just to teach but also to maintain various administrative responsibilities such as maintaining student data in the various online government portals, implement the mid-meal program for the students, and many more. It actually surprised me that teachers were not really annoyed with these responsibilities. They in fact acknowledged that these responsibilities are part and parcel of being a teacher. However, where it gets challenging is when the teachers are expected to do this for multiple classes beyond their capacity. Then it becomes fire-fighting. It's a plain fact that no matter how efficient one could be in their work, the quality of work and the well-being will take a hit when the worker has reached their capacity. The over-worked teachers are already exhausted . But having said this I wouldn't paint a glorified picture of the teachers stating that many teachers are not doing their job only because they are overworked. Definitely there are unmotivated teachers (like many of us mortals) who are lazy to work despite having enough time and there are also teachers who transfer their responsibilities to a junior teacher in the school who gets overburdened in turn. Cases like this are also in a way a result of poor capacity at the schools. Schools, like any other institutions, require good personnel with strong administrative capabilities to ensure accountability and efficient functioning of the institution. Many of the schools with grumpy teachers had vacant headmaster positions that have been vacant for a very long time and in some cases the headmaster had to take the role of the teacher and handle multiple classes due to teacher shortages.3

{talk about capacity building and training}
when we say shortages, it creates a mental image that there is a short in supply. But in this case, the reality is that there is no short in supply but the lack of capacity to hold the supply. Why our institutions are understaffed despite the availability of a huge untapped human resource capital?

[1]

Chiu, Y.Y. et al. 2024. CulturalTeaming: AI-Assisted Interactive Red-Teaming for Challenging LLMs’ (Lack of) Multicultural Knowledge. arXiv.

[2]

McPherson, M. et al. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology. 27, (2001), 415–444.