This book focuses on the failure of elementary education since Independence, which is usually seen as the result of simplified phrases like 'lack of political will', 'because of poverty', etc. This book looks at the system as a whole: infrastructure, quality of teaching, privatisation, nutritional incentives, curriculum. It contains samples from two states namely Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh.

This book examines the policy shifts over the past three decades in the Indian education system. It explores how these shifts have unequivocally established the domination of neoliberal capital in the context of elementary education in India. The chapters in the volume: • Discuss a range of elementary education policies and programs in India with a focus on the policy development in recent decades of neoliberalism. • Analyse policy from diverse perspectives and varied vantage points by scholars, activists, and practitioners, illustrated with contemporary statistics. • Introduce the key curriculum, assessment, and learning debates from contemporary educational discourse. • Integrate the tools and methods of education policy analysis with basic concepts in education, like equality, quantity, equity, quality, and inclusion. A definitive inter-disciplinary work on a key sector in India, this volume will be essential for scholars and researchers of education, public policy, sociology, politics, and South Asian studies.

Accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the original Public report on basic education in India (PROBE) by the PROBE Team.

This book assesses how efficient primary and upper primary education is across different states of India considering both output oriented and input oriented measures of technical efficiency. It identifies the most important factors that could produce differential efficiency among the states, including the effects of central grants, school-specific infrastructures, social indicators and policy variables, as well as state-specific factors like per-capita net-state-domestic-product from the service sector, inequality in distribution of income (Gini coefficient), the percentage of people living below the poverty line and the density of population. The study covers the period 2005-06 to 2010-11 and all the states and union territories of India, which are categorized into two separate groups, namely: (i) General Category States (GCS); and (ii) Special Category States (SCS) and Union Territories (UT). It uses non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and obtains the Technology Closeness Ratio (TCR), measuring whether the maximum output producible from an input bundle by a school within a given group is as high as what could be produced if the school could choose to join the other group. The major departure of this book is its approach to estimating technical efficiency (TE), which does not use a single frontier encompassing all the states and UT, as is done in the available literature. Rather, this method assumes that GCS, SCS and UT are not homogeneous and operate under different fiscal and economic conditions.

Elementary education provides the foundation for a learned and literate global citizenry. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to education. Likewise, the document states that elementary education should be free, compulsory, and universally accessible to all children. Parents, leaders, and policymakers recognize the importance of education in developing basic skills. Yet, the purpose of education goes beyond just skill building; the purpose of education, as Paulo Freire asserts, is for emancipation and the development of independent thought and critical awareness. Education is freedom. It is as Nelson Mandela once declared "the most powerful weapon to change the world." Again, elementary education provides the roots for the world and for our future. Yet, each society situates their systems of elementary education based on their society's cultural values, economic goals, political whims, and socio-historical context. To understand the larger goals of elementary education it is important to have a comparative and international lens, which is provided in this new NOVA Science book titled Elementary Education: Global Perspectives, Challenges and Issues of the 21st Century. The book is co-edited Dr. Erik Jon Byker and Dr. Akesha Horton, both editors are long-time global educators committed to social justice. The purpose of this book is to describe and explain the perspectives, challenges, and issues related to elementary education in this current, twenty-first century global age. The book's authors and the content of the book's chapters represent several countries across the globe including India, Indonesia, Greece, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, and the United States of America. The book is organized into three sections: (1) context, (2) competencies, and (3) content. The context section examines the historical and current context for elementary education from international perspectives. The competencies section focuses on the skills and dispositions necessary for pre-service and in-service teachers to navigate the contours of elementary education in a global age. The content section explores elementary education subject matter-largely in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-that will continue to eminent throughout the twenty-first century. Elementary Education: Global Perspectives, Challenges and Issues of the 21st Century is a timely book for internationally-minded educators, government leaders, parents, practitioners, and policymakers for gaining deeper insight into the critical role of elementary education in preparing children for our dynamic, interconnected, and globalized world.

The success of the primary education system has a direct bearing on the upper primary, non-formal and adult and continuing education sectors; an efficient primary education system is expected to contribute significantly to total literacy: an appropriate rise in literacy levels improves the functioning of other systems of education. Effective delivery of primary education contributes to bettering India's HDI (Human Development Index), including our standing in the Human Development Index evolved by UNDP. This volume is a study of the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) in one of the states of South India. It is a piece of policy evaluation research expected to contribute to the ongoing discussion of policy processes in primary schools. It specifically questions to what extent objectives such as access, retention, quality and equality are achieved by the implementation of the DPEP. Figures from before and after the implementation of the DPEP show a significant increase in enrolment levels in primary schools all over the state. Thus, the major impact of DPEP implementation is seen in enhanced access to primary schools. The study shows that the DPEP implementation succeeded in attaining the objective of equality. This can be observed from gender equality in dropout rates at various primary grades. The DPEP seems to have achieved only moderate success in meeting the objective of retention of students. The DPEP does not seem to have approached the quality objective very seriously.

This volume discusses key aspects of the economics of the elementary education system in the poorer and educationally backward states of India, while also examining one high-achiever state--Tamil Nadu. Providing the first state-by-state analysis of major cost and financing issues, the book is based on data gathered from one of the most comprehensive surveys conducted in recent times in these states, which was specifically commissioned for this book. The survey covered 120,000 households and a thousand schools spread over 91 districts in eight states.Written by leading educational economists, the original essays in this volume- analyse the major cost and financing issues in elementary schooling in seven of the eight states surveyed--Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal;- identify recent initiatives made by the governments of these seven states;- systematically scrutinise the pattern of the public spending in elementary education;- examine enrolment in government schools and the quality of education that they impart;- study household expenditure on schooling--the costs to parents of sending children to school; and- compare government schools with private schools, showing how the private sector has began to take over the what should be the responsibility of the government, particularly in the poorer states.

The Public Report of Basic Education in India presents a comprehensive evaluation of the educational system in India. Based on an extensive survey of 200 villages in five states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan, the report gives a voice to thousands of parents, teachers, and children.