Addressing The Learning Poverty.

Learning at school is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. A teacher's job seems plain and simple: help students understand and apply a given linguistic, motor, or numeric concept. It is, however, in the details that the devil resides. Here are some: A typical government school teacher who enters a classroom for a session has about 25 minutes to get their 30-50 students seated, review their concepts, introduce the day's lesson, explain the concept, ask questions and answer questions, give relevant examples, give students the time to take notes, give them some classwork and check the progress, go around and see everyone is on track, figure out which students are struggling and attend to their individual questions, get students to do some peer or group activity, revise the lesson, check their homework from previous day and give them new homework for the next.

The typical teacher often has an overcrowded and under-resourced classroom, usually must teach students with diverse learning abilities, always faces pressure to finish the syllabus on time, and never has enough time to make sure all or most students understand the lesson. Most teachers are also responsible for maintaining attendance records, conducting assemblies, supervising children during breaks, and doing administrative work on a daily basis. If you picture the ordeal of teaching at a government school, it is nerve-wrecking even for the smartest and most resilient of the bunch. If you add to the picture the duties and engagement of teachers beyond the classrooms and the policy and cultural ecosystem in which they are expected to teach children, it is crystal clear that the learning crisis at our schools cannot be attributed to teachers alone. The eco-system in which teachers operate is broken due to decades of neglect and decay, making tougher the already tough job of teachers.

The median child at a public school is not learning enough to be able to develop literacy, numeracy, and the soft skillset that enables a person to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the society that they are part of. For a nation that is already tangled up in socioeconomic woes, political despair, and scientific stagnation, the current state of low learning at schools portends only further decay. Effective teachers, no doubt, are indispensable to improving learning outcomes for children. Poor teaching and incompetent teachers negatively affect learning, but a broken, unsupportive eco-system...