Girls are surging ahead of boys in some subjects. Government schools are doing better than private schools. And everyone has better reading, writing and arithmetic skills. This is a good news story, dear reader. How did it come about? The ASER survey has some answers. Read on…

     

The Big Story

ASER survey finds the kids are (more than) alright

Leading the way (Source: ASER, 2024)

There’s a lot to be happy, and hopeful, about the latest ASER or Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) that has since 2005 measured Indian schoolchildren’s ability in reading, writing and arithmetic. 

Fears that the pandemic, when India had one of the world’s longest school closures, would disrupt learning outcomes and lead to children being pulled out of school have proved unfounded, the survey released earlier this week found.

The nationwide household survey of 649,491 children in 15,728 schools in 605 districts across 29 states finds that children are not just back to pre-pandemic levels of learning, but have exceeded earlier outcomes. 

For instance, in pre-pandemic 2018, only 28.2% of children in grade 3 could do simple subtraction sums. In 2024, it was up to 33.7%, the highest in the past 10 years. We have “more than a full recovery from the post-pandemic learning losses,” writes director ASER Centre Wilima Wadhwa in an accompanying essay, More than a Recovery, with the report.

“This year’s improvement is being driven by government schools in the early grades,” points out Rukmini Banerjee, chief executive officer, Pratham Education Foundation which facilitates the survey. 

Government schools, traditionally regarded as a sort of black-hole in terms of learning, especially in rural India where those who can afford it would rather send their children to private schools, the 2024 survey runs contrary to this stereotype. Private schools are still ahead of government schools in learning outcomes but while government schools have improved and are doing better than at pre-pandemic levels, private schools have shown a decline. 

For instance, 23.4% of children in grade 3 in government schools could read a grade 2 text, a significant improvement from 20.9% in 2018. But the same skill in the same grade at private schools has plunged from 40.6% in 2018 to 35.5% in 2024. 

ASER finds that almost every child is in school. In the age group 6-14, only 1.6% of children were out-of-school, which is the lowest since 2009 when the Right to Education Act came into effect. 

More ways to learn (Source: ASER, 2024)

But even as the percentage of out-of-school children has fallen, girls aged between 15 and 16 continue to make up the largest cohort, 8.1% out-of-school, compared to 7.7% of boys of the same age. 

And, yet, it's the girls who’ve made the most progress across grades. For instance, they are ahead of the boys in their ability to read a simple grade 2 text as seen below: 

Children who can read a grade 2 text

Understanding the breakthrough

There are several reasons for the marked improvement in school education. 

Improvements all around (Source: ASER, 2024)

First, far from being a setback as feared, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digital revolution. In 2018, just 36% of rural households had smartphones. With the shift to online learning and virtual classrooms during the pandemic, 74% of rural households had smartphones that their children could access. By 2024, it was 84%.

With easy access to smartphones at home, ASER 2024 finds that 82.2% of children know how to use these devices. But the gender gap remains and girls continue to lag behind boys. Only 62.2% of girls could perform simple digital tasks as setting an alarm or searching for basic information. Among boys it was 70.2%.

Second, the ASER report attributes learning gains to the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 which made policy shifts from focusing on just completing prescribed curriculums to actually building foundational literacy and numeracy right from the age of three onwards. 

Starting young (Source: ASER, 2024)

This early childhood education has promoted better learning outcomes in the later grades with 80% of all rural three-year-olds and 85% of all four-year-olds—an estimated 100 million children—enrolled in early childhood programmes either at anganwadi centres, pre-primary classes in government schools and in private schools. 

Third, says Rukmini Banerjee, a new generation of mothers who went to school now want their children to not just go to school but thrive there. It is these mothers, she says, who demand higher standards from schools and anganwadi centres. They hold the future of their children, and the country, in their hands. 

(You can download ASER 2024 here).

In other stories

Big brother. (Source: HT Photo)

The first uniform civil code in independent India includes a clause that requires co-habitating, or what it calls ‘live-in’, couples to register their relationship. This involves a 16-page form and certification from a religious leader that the couple is eligible to marry should they choose to do so. Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami claims the clause will ‘protect’ women. But in a country where one in three women are subjected to domestic violence how exactly this will work is a mystery.

It’s a shame that what could have been progressive, secular legislation by bringing one common law for marriage, divorce, maintenance, and inheritance for all citizens regardless of their personal laws has veered off course into the private lives of citizens. 

I wrote why this is a lost opportunity in my HT column here.

Gender ideology remained in the crosshairs of the early days of the reign of Donald Trump. The US president signed orders to revise the Pentagon’s policy on transgender troops, another one that restricts gender care for under-19s, and the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes within the federal government in keeping with his campaign promise to end what he calls “gender extremism”. He even blamed the worst air crash in a quarter century over Washington D.C. on “DEI programmes”.

A screenshot from Selena Gomez’s original video.

Selena Gomez has deleted her Instagram post where she is seen weeping after US officials said it had made 956 arrests as part of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. That hasn’t stopped right-wing commentators asking for the actress and singer to be deported. Gomez is born in Texas but is the granddaughter of undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Immigration, she wrote in a 2019 essay for Time, “is a human issue, affecting real people, dismantling real lives.”

More on this story in the New York Times here.

Insurance against violence? (Source: Archives)

Is there a connection between women’s employment in the formal sector and violence at the hands of an intimate partner? Yes, says a new paper by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)—except in cases where she earns more than her husband.

Looking at National Family Health Survey data of 235,000 women, the paper finds that other factors do help reduce the likelihood of violence. For instance, education levels of the husband, a woman’s higher agency in the household, and the normalisation of reporting such instances. Interestingly, having more female leaders at the state level also results in a reduction in intimate partner violence. 

You can download the paper here.

Afghanistan Women's XI players celebrate a wicket during the cricket match between Afghanistan Women's XI and Cricket Without Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne. (Source: Martin Keep/AFP)

After the Taliban took over in August 2021, the 19 women cricket players burned their jerseys, travelled in small groups and, with the help of commentator Mel Jones, escaped to Australia. Three years after that traumatic escape the women played their first match on Thursday against Cricket Without Borders. The match comes amid an ongoing row on whether England and South Africa should boycott the men’s Champions Trophy matches against Afghanistan. And pressure is mounting on the ICC to take collective action.

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