The Former President of  the USA, Barack Obama, was not lying or playing out highly strategic deceit when he praises Bangalore and Beijing children for outsmarting American children. However, his reference population is the highly successful, India-born or educated (or some first-generation US-born Indian Americans) diaspora. In the process, he is talking about the Indian […]

The following listing presents a broad appraisal of the current state of school education system: The cost of education has spiraled way beyond tuition fees. In fact, school fees are often only around 20-25% of the total cost of education to parents. Are schools reduced to being fringe players in the ‘business of schooling’? If […]

Systems and processes are critical building blocks of institutions. Their criticalness lies in setting the minimum default delivery standards; strong systems and processes in a school will translate into a higher minimum benchmark quality of education. Here is a brief appraisal of the state of systems and processes in schools: Schools as a system seem […]

Strangely, consistency in quality of delivery is the hallmark of excellence (as long as the quality is above par). The highest level of quality is desirable but subordinate to consistency of the stated quality in order of importance. Conceivably, measurement of quality is a seriously tricky business; it gets bad if there are multiple ‘stars’ […]

Institutional goals have the single-most important impact on institutional outcomes. The importance of goals becomes all the more critical for institutional efficiency and effectiveness when an institution is under stress, much the way school education system finds itself stuck in. Goals get knotty for schools because the implicit goals override the explicit ones. Here is […]