Teach For India - India's Education Crisis

India's Education Crisis

In the middle of the last decade, there was intense debate in India about the state of education. On the face of it, India had made vast strides in education and is likely to achieve universal primary education by 2015, one of the key UN Millennium Development Goals (also refer to Millennium Development Goals report 2012). There is also a multilingual scenario in India. While it has been proven that education imparted in mother tongue is the best kind of education, the focus for medium of English is drifting away the cause. Technology should reach out to people in their language. One of the major cause for a break in education among inter state migrants in India, particularly from tne economically weaker sections of the society, is the medium of education. Providing quality education and e-learning in regional languages in Public Schools should also be given a thought. But India continued to have, according to one researcher, the largest number of children out of school in 2005. Although this is no longer the case, India still has 2.27 million children out of school. This doesn't exactly mean that children don't start school. The real problem is that many children drop out of school. 90 percent of children in India who start school don't finish it and only 57 percent complete primary school. Only 10 percent of children who start school go to college. A number of reasons have been attributed for this situation, but the most popularly accepted reason is the quality of education in schools. Empirical evidence suggests that Teachers make all the difference, and pedagogy remains a critical factor to keeping children in school. Teach for India addresses itself to this education crisis.

TFI was started in 2008 by a group of activists led by Shaheen Mistri wanted to bring about a systemic change in the Indian education sector by infusing committed teachers into the system. The group . The group met Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America (TFA), and following a McKinsey study, started adapting Teach For America’s Theory of Change in India. Under this model, young professionals and bright college graduates are recruited to teach in under-privileged schools for a period of two years. The first Teach for India Fellows started teaching in June 2009.

Teach for India emphasizes on spreading the idea of Quality education for all children across all walks of life through its alumni. TFI currently employs 506 Fellows, of whom 283 were recruited in 2012 for the two-year program. The Fellows work across 164 schools in 5 cities of India - Mumbai, Pune, New Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad reaching approximately 16,000 students. The organization's plan is to expand by 2016 to 2000 fellows working across 10 cities of India teaching at least 60,000 students.