Steve Jobs' view on education valid for India - The Times of India

The late Steve Jobs, one of the greatest inventor-entrepreneurs in history, took knowledge and content to the masses. He said quality education was the key to equality of opportunity , and felt this would best be achieved by governments giving educational vouchers to parents, to be used in any accredited school of their choice. India should learn from him.

(see Jobs' views at http:// americanhistory.si. edu/collections/comphist/ sj1.html).

"I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. Equal opportunity to me, more than anything, means a great education . Maybe even more important than a great family life. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that.

I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail." Clearly, good teachers are vital . But why are they so rare? "The problem there, of course , is the teachers' unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened.

Nobody can be fired. It's terrible." Can the problem be sidestepped by using computers and electronic teaching aids? No, says Jobs. "I've helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world, and I am absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing.

The most important thing is a person. Computers are very reactive but they're not proactive; they are not agents." How do we create a system with good, motivated teachers ? Jobs has a clear answer: we need competition between schools in attracting students and teachers, not unaccountable government schools with a lockhold on government funding. Jobs says, "What we need in education is to go to the full voucher system. The customers (in education) are the parents, and the customers went away.

Mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalised and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one.

I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said, "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. And that's certainly what the government school system is. They don't have to care." The economics of state education is crazy, says Jobs. The US government spends lots on education: around $4,400 per child per year.

This is double the cost of buying a small car in instalments. But such educational spending is done by the government, and is not within the power of the household. "When you go to buy a car, you have a lot of information available to make a choice. Everybody knows about all these cars, and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.

And there's a warranty. "But in government schools, people don't feel that they're spending their own money. If you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the $4,400 a year (spent per child by the government school system) and use it. If you gave each parent a voucher for $4,400 that they could only spend at any accredited school, several things would happen. "Number one, schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students.

Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. You could have 25-year-old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy. Instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our government schools would. Third, the quality of government schools, just as in any competitive marketplace, would start to rise." These conclusions apply to India too. Our educational policies remain with leftist ideologues and cynical politicians who think the state must, to the extent possible, deliver alleducational services.

The leftists hate private schools and colleges. Politicians dare not take on teachers' unions. Teacher absenteeism is horrific , and many students cannot do simple maths or read complete paragraphs after years of schooling. Desperate poor parents are switching their kids from free government schools to private schools with fees.

But chief ministers seeking to discipline teachers' unions have invariably been foiled. If challenged, teachers unions will threaten to strike before the annual exams, imperilling the future of millions of students. So, chief ministers invariably surrender. Instead, they try to recruit teachers as their own political agents.

Besides, teachers man election booths on polling days. Politicians fear antagonising teachers, who might collude with the Opposition in fiddling election results. So, our situation is worse than anything Jobs complains about in the US. Yet, the solutions are similar.

We must use vouchers to give parents the power of choice, and encourage private competition in the educational marketplace. Enthusiastic young entrepreneurs will rush into education, just as they once rushed into information technology. All it needs is the political will to combat the unions.

'Putting a Price Tag on the ‘Right to Education'

By Tripti Lahiri

According to a new estimate put out by a government spending accountability group, getting existing Indian government schools to meet education rules that came into effect last year could cost 152 billion rupees, or about $3.4 billion dollars.

And getting India to fully meet what that law mandates—free and compulsory education for all children between the ages six to 14—could cost well over triple that amount, or about $11 billion.

According to a report only 11% of government schools have the infrastructure they’re supposed to have under the new Right to Education Act.

Presently only 11% of government schools have the infrastructure they’re supposed to have under the new Right to Education Act, according to Accountability Initiative, which put out a report last week tracking a portion of educational spending that contained the estimate of complying with the law.

“We thought it was important to get to grips with what the implications of the Right to Education would be. If you just look at the norms, the [law] is quite focused on different infrastructure, facilities and other requirements in schools,” said Yamini Aiyar, director of the Accountability Initiative, in a recent interview.

The law, which was passed in 2009, sets standards for schools on teacher salaries, classroom size and facilities, which should include a head teacher’s room, a playground and a boundary wall, among other things.

The public spending audit group arrived at the 152-billion-rupee figure by working from answers to a questionnaire on whether schools were Right-to-Education compliant. This was part of a larger survey carried out in about 13,000 schools last year with Pratham, a child-focused nonprofit group that assesses children’s learning levels on an annual basis.

The group estimated the cost in each state for adding more teachers, or a playground, among other things, and multiplied that by the number of schools in each state that would need that work done.

The expense of adding a headmaster’s office (which doubles as a storage room) made for the largest share of the $3.4 billion cost. That was just over a third of the total, or about $1.2 billion dollars.

Teacher salaries (which would be a recurring expense, however) for additional staff to meet pupil-teacher ratios came to a quarter of the total, while walls and fencing would cost a little over fifth of the total.

However that costing exercise only took into account existing schools and existing enrollment. Absorbing about 2.2 million out-of-school students between the ages of 6 and 14 into new schools, could cost another 335 billion rupees ($7.4 billion).

The government hasn’t yet said how much it expects to have to shell out to properly implement the law, said Ms. Aiyar, but the group will be watching for that.

“It’s a good thing to have citizen-led costing,” said Ms. Aiyar, saying they could then compare actual government budgeting to these estimates, and see “whether they’re going to make the allocations to live up to the promise they themselves have made.”