“In March 2000, I lived through a writer’s bad dream [the World Water Forum at the Hague]. I witnessed the ritualistic slaughter of language as I know and understand it….As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. ‘Language is the skin on my thought,’ I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me. At The Hague I stumbled on a denomination, a sub-world, whose life’s endeavor was to mask intent. They earn their abundant livings by converting bar graphs that plot their companies’ profits into consummately written, politically exemplary, socially just policy documents that are impossible to implement and designed to remain forever on paper, secret even (especially) from the people they’re written for. They breed and prosper in the space that lies between what they say and what they sell.”

(You can accuse Arundhati Roy of a lot of things, but you can’t argue that that her language masks her thought. Her anger is raw on the page, and she does not pretend to be neutral.)

I, too, have noticed myself breaking writing rules when I write for Akshara. Use passive voice instead of active because it’s not worth explaining who is responsible for an action. Avoid describing aspects of data that are too controversial or too unreliable to depend on. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the ritualistic slaughter of language, but I would say that people with different goals can speak radically different languages in response to the same set of bar graphs.

The politics of energy and dams is a bit outside my realm, but it leads me to think about the way language is used in Akshara’s work. There are many types of language barriers I’ve seen play out in my seven months here. To be very specific: during my research on the Karnataka Learning Partnership, I found that nearly 30% of children in Bangalore’s government schools had mother tongues that differed from the language of instruction in their schools, usually Kannada. I’ve met such children – their teachers often know they are struggling to learn Kannada, but continue in Kannada because they feel they must. The children pretend to understand and rarely ask for clarification; the only indication of their struggle is their relatively low achievement on tests. Public discussion about language of instruction focuses on issues of identity (“People in Karnataka should speak Kannada”) rather than issues of learning (“Children learn best in their mother tongues”). Within Akshara there are also language barriers. An Akshara volunteer once asked me (in Kannada) if I worked in the “office where they speak English.” The language barriers between people at different levels and from different communities – which in some ways relate to class background – are always somehow overcome, but are never really talked about.

But there are other language barriers I’ve observed that are even more complex. One is the contrast between the language of research and the language of politics. By now, I’ve seen several government meetings in which language is a means of filling the air rather than a way of creating understanding or clarifying ideas. Documents are political safeguards rather than a way of transferring knowledge. Often teachers we interview tell us programmes are “good” with such uniform insistence that I begin to wonder if “good” really means “I am too busy to talk to you.” When collecting data at Akshara, I’ve often encountered the problem of staff following a policy of “no news is good news,” choosing to speak when something good has happened and to disappear rather than explaining when something goes wrong.

When a researcher uses language, she tries to be neutral and comprehensive about it. When I was home in Massachusetts for a couple of weeks in December, I met with K, a professor at Harvard. “How do you present data in such a way that it makes an impact?” I asked him. “Stick to your methodology, he replied. Focus on what you’ve done and make it so good that no one can argue with it. Keep it simple. And keep it neutral. An academic isn’t a policymaker. People may not know who I am, but they know the numbers I’ve revealed in my research. I just share everything I’ve done; it’s their job to interpret it.”

Yes, I thought, but it takes a newspaper or an activist to interpret data in such a way that people know your numbers. Most people don’t want to poke around the methodology sections of research papers. They tend to believe the statistics they like and question the ones they don’t. Most people are the opposite of academics: they build the argument, and then look for the numbers to back it up.

After all, who can afford to play with neutrality like an academic? It involves risking your beliefs. It also involves, at times, being self-indulgent and impractical. A few days ago, I was looking through literacy journals and discovered an article titled something like “Innovative Models for Assessing Literacy.” Convinced that it would be helpful, I downloaded it to discover that it offered the sage conclusion that (to paraphrase) “Literacy assessment tools that are smaller, quicker, and cheaper need to be developed.” What practitioner wouldn’t know that? Often the mandates of research – that it be neutral and general – make it so broad as to become useless. Maybe this is the reason another professor I spoke to, a literacy expert, responded to my question of “Can you recommend any other research for me to read to learn about literacy?” by saying “No. Just focus on what your context tells you.”

On the other end of the spectrum, I admire the work of ASER (Annual Survey of Education Report) in presenting research in a neutral way that brings forward useful, accessible knowledge. Even here, however, language barriers become an issue. Karnataka government officials were the only ones in the country to invite ASER designers to discuss their findings. As I watched the presentation, I noticed the disconnect in approach. The presenters were neutral, sharing their learning in a non-judgmental way. Specifically, their presentation indicated that learning levels in Karnataka were relatively low and increasing only slowly (not a particularly surprising finding). The listeners seemed to go on the defensive, assuming that the presentation meant that a) they, as government officials, were responsible for poor learning levels or b) ASER was a better assessment than any other assessment that government had done. They interpreted ASER as a political or personal indictment and responded by filling the discussion with marginal arguments, claiming their own assessments were better than ASER, or referring to the efforts they had made to improve education in their state. The presenters, meanwhile, had not made any accusations: they were simply sharing information.

If one side is presenting information as neutrally as possible – particularly if, as in many research papers, the language is technical and inaccessible – and the other is looking for practical – or politically expedient -- interpretations, there are bound to be miscommunications. Unfortunately, eventually the two worlds end up existing in isolation from one another.

When I attended a conference last month on development in Karnataka, I saw another language barrier play out within the field of NGO education practitioners. This time it was between what I’ve begun to think of as the Big and the Small. These do not necessarily correspond to size. The Big thinks of education strategically, like an epidemiologist. If we want to eradicate this disease in two years, what should we do and whom should we target? If we want to improve learning across the state in two years, how should we operate? The Small thinks either about how to perfect models or how to serve local needs. Children in our town have nowhere to go after school, so we will build an excellent after-school center. There’s a lack of good creative learning, so we will start a school that promotes it. Mid-day meals are bad in schools, so we will provide better ones.

I attended something called an Education Roundtable, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a discussion in which the participants were more wrapped up in their own contexts. People were essentially talking to themselves, or to the people who spoke their language. I categorize Akshara as a Big organization. At one point in the discussion, the issue of testing came up. “Tests are stressful and hamper creativity, and we should try to eliminate them,” was the consensus among some people, who were probably thinking of private educational institutions they run themselves. “Tests are necessary to ensure children are getting their basic rights from the system,” I said, obviously thinking about the government system. This contrast was not discussed.). One person talked about her organization’s efforts to empower people to demand quality education from the government. Another dropped nonchalantly that it was impossible to work with the government system because it was so corrupt, so the only solution was to build powerful models and hope the government would notice. Opposite views, but again, the difference was not discussed. Like a classroom of linguistically diverse children, the Roundtable assumed an imaginary common approach and never acknowledged its basic philosophical differences.

Without acknowledging how complex communication can be, no one can ever move past it.

Soon after we arrived in Mysore, sleepy and a little sore from our precarious seats on a luggage rack on the Mysore Express train, we began to look for tickets to see the Dasara procession on the palace grounds. The process, however, was one that becomes increasingly familiar the more I interact with anything meant to be official in India. When I first got to Bangalore, I spent two weeks being sent from office to office in order to register my visa and get a residence permit; I even ate lunch in the police station one day and was then told to go next door and buy a gluestick to glue my passport photos onto my application.

Getting tickets for the procession was more or less the same. “Where can we get tickets?” we asked at the hotel. “Walk straight down here and you’ll get to the Corporation office,” said the man at the desk. “Here” is a loose term in Karnataka, it seems, and after a lot of walking we asked another uniformed man, this time a policeman futilely – with a sort of resigned carelessness about him –appearing to direct traffic. “Just right here,” he said, “unless you want to spend 12 rupees on an auto.” Of course not, we thought; “go that way,” said the next man we asked, pointing in the opposite direction.

Finally we stumbled on the Corporation office, where a couple of men in uniform sat behind a randomly-placed desk. “Can we buy tickets for the procession here?” we asked them. “No,” they said, though they seemed to have a few tickets to something with them – the torchlit parade, I finally deduced, which was planned for that same evening after the elephant procession. “The Jambu Savari,” I said again. “Maybe over there,” they said, waving their arms vaguely. Sure enough, there were two more dudes behind another seemingly makeshift desk in the next room. When I asked for tickets they looked surprised, but finally dug out a haphazard package of a few tickets to the procession. We bought them with relief, though they were quite astonishingly expensive. “Can we get a timetable for the events?” we asked them, maybe so complacent with our successful ticket purchase as to become overly ambitious. “No, madam,” we were told. “Maybe if you go to Town Hall.” Of course, Town Hall was also “right here.”

All in all, it wasn’t impossible to get tickets to the Jambu Savari, and clearly a significant number of tourists with much less familiarity with the area had landed up in the same kind of seats we’d gotten. But the process this time threw into relief something I’d been noticing in all aspects of my life here: informality of information. In the U.S., if you need directions to a place, you’ll go first to Google Maps or maybe, if you’re especially smart, look at an actual map and plan your route. You’ll look at an online or newspaper schedule for an event you plan to attend, maybe buy your tickets online, and listen to the radio for traffic reports just to make sure nothing is out of whack. Of course, none of this will be completely reliable, but the fact is that through the whole process you’ll have very little interaction with people. Life in the U.S. could potentially be run through conversation with machines alone.

Here in India, it’s the exact opposite. You have to ask around before going to a dry cleaner to make sure it’s a reliable place. Ask someone for directions and they will mention not a single street name – only landmarks, and you’re best off just arriving at a landmark and asking someone what to do next at every turn until you get there, since anyway the only address you’ll have is something like “5th Main Road, Opposite Police Station”. When I bought my copy of the seventh Harry Potter book, my fourteen-year-old cousin berated me. You could have gotten a bigger discount at Sapna Book House, she said. You should have consulted me first. Try to look anything up online and you’ll be told something different when you go and ask. In Indian education departments there are entire schools that don’t exist except on the books – the only way to know is to ask someone who’s been there, or visit yourself.

The general trend, then, is that knowledge is housed in individuals. When someone is sick or getting married or retiring, the institution around that person has to start from scratch. So people are constantly reinventing the wheel. And people are always dependent on each other. This dependence constantly strikes me here in Bangalore. The functioning of my life depends on the milkman and my auto driver arriving on time, the tailor being in good health, the bus conductor having change, cluster volunteers not getting married or having new babies or deaths in their families. When I wrote my background paper on the reading programme at Akshara, there was very little of a paper trail to follow – it was more about asking the experts and pulling information together. Learning for the future depends on keeping capacity within the organization. Processes are preserved as long as people are, and not the other way around.

I’m not arguing for a robotic world in which people are incidental and unnecessary, but all this does make clear the importance of documentation. Since I got here I feel I’ve produced document after document, not all particularly useful. Yet there’s something satisfying about knowing that my intellectual work is all on paper for anyone to look at, even if I’m no longer around to explain it. Documentation doesn’t have to be about removing real people from the equation, but it is about communicating knowledge so it doesn’t remain confined to individuals – instead, experiences and learnings can disseminate throughout an organization.

This past weekend I went with A, N, and two cluster volunteers to conduct ASER surveys in households. ASER, or the Annual Survey of Education Report produced by the Pratham network across India, tests children's learning levels in reading and math through random household testing. The purpose of ASER is to do something like what I’ve been discussing: document something relatively simple, the learning levels of children, so that knowledge can become generalized beyond individuals. We visited three households. In the first, a girl was able to recognize letters but stared blankly at sentences and paragraphs. The mother insisted that she had seen her daughter writing the English alphabet, but seemed to know little about what her child was learning. In the second house, two sisters read to us beautifully and confidently. Their mother sat next to them and encouraged them; she told me that she taught them at home and regularly talked to their teacher. All these children attend the local government school. In the third household we visited, a boy whose parents invested Rs. 300 a month for private English-medium schooling also read with fluency and confidence. His older sister was studying for a bachelors in commerce; their mother, by contrast, had studied up to 8th standard. All the children struggled with math; the cluster volunteers told us that children tended to respond better when asked questions in practical terms (“How much money do you have left if you start with Rs. 30 and spend Rs. 13 on fireworks for Deepavali?”).

In short, all kinds of concepts relevant to education policy were here: the crucial role of mothers and other family members in children’s learning, the importance of teaching through concrete examples, the abrupt cross-generational leap in educational attainment in some families, the dismal fact that some children get quite far in the school system without ever learning to read. The parents and perhaps the teachers of these children already knew all of this. The purpose of ASER is to generalize that information, to document and consolidate and disseminate. Once that happens, the localized experience becomes a powerful narrative, one that extends across the district, the state, and the country and becomes a tool for advocating change.

In a sense, all of Akshara’s goals are in line with this idea. Because not only is Akshara improving communication between public and private actors, introducing a new external push for documented information about children’s learning levels, and raising the profile of literacy; it is also attempting to promote future generations of readers who can use the written word to communicate information, imagination, and ideas. Through literacy and communication come sustainability of knowledge and personal independence. So that someday, maybe, children won’t have to ask five different people for help, bribe officials, or use connections just to get from here to there.

My work at Akshara has settled into something of a rhythm, which means I think and speak about Akshara’s programs with some level of familiarity nowadays --and I even fancy myself as having some sort of history with the organization, saying things like “When the math program first started…” When I first got to Akshara, it seemed like everyone was saying things like that to me. At Harvard I imagined that the people with the really serious field experience had this sort of air of mystery about them, like they understood things that couldn’t be explained in words, and had magical skills that would emerge from them in the right contexts. Maybe “the field” isn’t so mysterious after all.

That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “the field.” First of all, what an odd term – as though office-bound development people are plantation owners looking out over their rice crops, or rich people who get the good seats at a baseball game – but also, what an odd concept. After all, “the field” – which sounds like some sort of side issue – is really the basis of an NGO’s existence. If anything, “I work at an NGO” should apply to fieldwork, and office-rats like me should be the ones who get slapped with dehumanizing blanket terminology, like “she works in the bubble,” or “she’s an A.C.-worker.”

The work I’ve been doing of late has indeed been bubble-work: a lot of playing with data and reading documents. Two big things I’ve worked on are a paper on pupil-teacher ratio and its effects on KLP’s reading program and background note on the reading program’s methodology. The reading program was an attempt to pull together my learning from the past few months, and put down on paper all the slightly differently-shaded narratives of the reading program I’ve been hearing since coming to Akshara. The PTR paper was my first dive into the limited data I have – after a week and a half of pestering people I now have much more to play with – and I was amazed at quickly it drew me in. I found myself learning statistics backwards – experimenting with things, then realizing I needed a step I should have done earlier, then moving back a step further. Those people who taught me statistics were pretty much dead-on – I had proved them right by the end.

What was even more amazing was how thick with information a few numbers could be. I had the number of students and the number of teachers in Bangalore’s schools, the results from the reading program in the same schools, and the pupil-teacher numbers in 10 Karnataka districts; I ended up with an idea of the relationship between pupil-teacher-ratio kids’ performance in the reading program and some staggering numbers on the state of Karnataka. For example, Karnataka, according to government numbers, has 677 schools with no teachers but some students attending.

All very impressive-sounding, but my real next question is what to do with data like this. Put it on the Internet to be discovered by students who happen to be Googling education in Karnataka? When I presented my results to Akshara staff, they were all somewhat shocked and said the government should know about it. But when our new staff member, a former DPI in the Department of Education, saw the same numbers, he took them with more than a pinch of salt. “It can’t be,” he said. “We’d have to check. You can’t have a school with no teachers. Most of government data doesn’t match up anyway.”

Last week, A, M, and I made what seemed like a holy pilgrimage to one of the hard-to-reach schools in the dataset: in Kalenahalli, the school with the smallest official PTR in Bangalore during the reading program, 7 children to 2 teachers. After multiple buses and walking in the hot sun, I was told that last year there were 9 children at the school, and yes, it came through as 7 because 2 of them never actually attended. If data were always this accurate, I thought, it could be immensely powerful. Yet it was also somewhat strange. I had built up an image in my mind of a “problem school,” an inefficient teacher placement, and arrived at a tiny, peaceful space with clean bathrooms and classrooms and a hardworking HM who asked us repeatedly to open a library in her school so the adults in the village would get into the habit of reading the newspaper. Maybe that’s something of what’s missing in the bubble, the “strength in the voice” that a Brown alum had told me about before I left for Bangalore. Maybe it’s not so bad for me to work partly in the bubble, if I like it and am good at it, but it’s absolutely key to be sensitive enough to open myself to well-rounded human voices and forms as often as I can.

Bangalore is funny in all the bubbles it has, not just the field bubbles and the office bubbles, but the temple bubble, the expat bubble, the pub bubble, the intellectual bubble. When you don’t quite fit into a bubble you’re desperate to let people know. I’ve had two auto drivers in the past couple of months who talked to me in a friendly way, and both talked about their desire for higher education – one for an MBA, the other for a PhD in economics. It struck me that they wanted me to burst the bubble for them, to see them as people through the usual wall that exists between upper-class-looking auto-rider and not-so-upper-class-looking driver.

On our school visit, we also visited a school with a small library program. The librarian looked nervous about playing with the children; the other teachers at the school had assigned her to drill children on English and she was threatening them with a stick like the best of them. But when A picked up a book and started to read to them, the transformation in them was astonishing. Children crowded around him like middle-class kids might crowd around an iPod or a human heart; children from other schools tried to listen in from the windows. Except this was a book – no more and no less.

Later, as we ate lunch in the courtyard, a group of children started reading to each other. One girl held a book in her hand and read aloud, with the confidence and cadence of a Yakshagana performer; the other children crowded around and repeated after her. As a child, I would carry books around with me like friends, hiding them under the dining table at dinner, running off to read when guests came over. I used to think it was hard to inspire a love of reading – or more broadly, a love of learning – like that. But it seems that really, it’s not – it’s there to be taken advantage of, and at the very least, educationists should try not to ruin it.

There are many ways in which I am lucky, and one is that I’ve never been allowed to stop learning. I have the option to surprise people with the way I act, to stay within or move beyond the world I was born into. I can slip in and out of bubbles, study classical dance, take a BTMC bus, go to Pizza Hut, hang out with software engineers, switch languages with basic facility, spend time with family, and eat guavas on the street. It seems to me that the best way to burst a bubble is education, and most people here have a strong belief in it, whether or not they think it’s a possibility they personally can aspire to. It would be nice if it were so easy – and yet there’s something about Bangalore that suggests good odds.

One thing I noticed, as I worked on a random sample for auditing the math programme and calculated predicted numbers of children that would enter the KLP statewide programme in September, was how immediately useful quantitative data can be in planning. Suddenly, Stata was a boon, and simple enrollment information could reveal a lot about the system. For example, as I looked through the Karnataka data, I found a stark decrease in enrollment from Class 1 to Class 8; in some blocks, this drop in enrollment was particularly pronounced for girls.

Yet the usefulness of quantitative data did not change the fact that there were strange disconnects between quantitative and qualitative information. For example, as I interviewed teachers, I realized how difficult it can be to gain complete qualitative information as an outside observer. The teachers in the schools I visited thanked me profusely for the programme’s existence, though I had nothing to do with it; they balked at my question about what could be eliminated from the math kit, perhaps because they would rather not lose any resources, even if they don’t use all of them. The teachers seemed committed, of course, and children seemed happy – in some cases, to such an extent that I wondered if it was hopeless to train teachers, if really only changing their home environments would make a long-run impact on their performance.

However, though my position as an outside observer, connected to Akshara and perceived as a person with power, made it difficult to tell how authentic the information I was receiving was, there were still something jarring about the contrast between the qualitative and the quantitative. For me, this observation reinforced the importance of triangulation – looking at the same issue from multiple viewpoints. One teacher told me, for example, that the final results in her school from the reading programme came out badly because that day, inexplicably, all the children who had been attending the programme and a new set of children happened to come to school. Though this might have been an exaggeration, I couldn’t help but wonder how well our assesssments really reflect the benefits of our programmes.

Out of this teacher’s comment, I also noticed her deep desire to impress me with the performance of her children. While I observed her class, she asked me over and over whether they were doing well. To her, assessment was not something she could use -- it was only something that could either validate or invalidate her work. Early this week, I presented my theory of change model to the KLP coordinators. Many of the resulting comments were about data use: how could data be made into something that people could use at all levels? Where was data feeding back into the system? In this teacher’s case, data was a yes-or-no question: did they do well? Did they not? If one of the aims of KLP is to shift the system into thinking about data as a useful tool, it may prove extremely difficult to ignite that shift among teachers who are used to being constantly evaluated on summative terms.

Two large questions have become a recurring theme, both related to assessment. The first is this: What does assessment actually assess? And the second is: What should assessment be used for? In fact, the questions are actually almost the same.

When I visited the school in Jeevanbhima Nagar with research students from Columbia, the first thing I noticed was how nice it was to see kids again – it seemed that over the years, the more I learned about development and community work, I spent less and less time with kids and more and more time burrowing in my laptop, discussing kids with people who were not kids, and reading what other people had written about kids.

I also started to think more about the question about what assessment should assess. Assessment is a powerful tool in curriculum, and not just in its role at the end of the process: it shapes the focus of the curriculum and makes a final statement about what was important and what was not. An assessment is almost a philosophy of education, in that it identifies the key elements that educators seek, ultimately, to impart to their students in a lasting way. Are you being marked on your writing skills? Your ability to question? The quickness of your memory? The strength of your foundations?

So what was the pearl of wisdom that the Columbia economics team had to offer on what matters in education? Ostensibly, the mantra that permeates through all of Akshara’s activities: basic skills so that children have something to build upon. As I was watching the children take the pilot test, though, I couldn’t help thinking that it actually stifled the things I thought mattered in education. As proctors of the pilot test, we were responsible for telling the children not to copy, not to talk. As the CV explained to the children what they needed to do, the burst out with a chorus of questions, directed at her, at us, and at each other. There was lots of collaborating, lots of copying. It seemed like these children thought of the test as a group exercise rather than a chance to demonstrate their individual progress.

Watching the children interact with the teacher and each other made me question the values testing imparts. After all our talk of interactive learning, of bringing the teacher and the child closer together, the endpoint is the message that what’s really important is for you to sit at your desk, not look to your left or right, not help anyone, not ask for help, not receive support from the teacher, and get the right answer. It seems like a mismatch. Wouldn’t it be interesting to test students and reward them for their ability to work together to solve a problem, instead of their ability to struggle with things in silence alone? What is the boundary between individual success and group success?

I think, in the end, this is an ideological question, but it seems, ironically, like the culture of testing has had enough power to offer support to things like cooperative learning. Slavin’s research, for example, argues for cooperative learning because it improves test scores – a cooperative process to achieve an individualistic outcome. Interestingly, though, Slavin also concludes that cooperative learning works best when students know that their individual assessments depend on those of others in the group: their successes are interdependent. So cooperative learning is both an end in itself – because, obviously, it teaches cooperation -- and a means by which to improve students’ individual performance. Testing students individually also has the advantage of being much more apppealing to institutional culture than allowing students to “cheat” – it’s able to show the results that can be used for good advocacy for good causes.

The H meeting I attended danced around a similar question – what is important to assess? – though this time, it related to the relationship between a child and a book. The main conflict was between the importance of processing a book as a whole and the importance of being able to read words on a page. H, leaning on the premise that books with less text on each page are easier for children to understand, cares about whether a child can access and understand, generally, a book. Akshara cares about whether the words on the page are made up of letters that children can read. Complicating the whole discussion was the reality of Kannada publishing – there simply aren’t many books for low-level readers with simple words. Then there’s the question of development: is an older child who can’t read simple words interested in the same book as a younger child? Probably not.

Here too, there was the concern that what you assess defines what you value. For H, what is important is that kids love books, even if they aren’t literate enough to read all the words in them – thus, assessment hinges on the book layout and accessibility. For KLP, what is important is that kids can read, and assessment focuses on letters much more than on complexity of meaning. I wonder how these two axes of reading skill could be incorporated into an assessment system. For example, what if books were assessed by word complexity, with an additional rating for book complexity? Then we’d assume that a young, poor reader would read a book with low complexity and low word complexity, but an older poor reader would read a book with low word complexity and high book complexity – a more mature story, fewer graphics, and perhaps a more challenging vocabulary.

At the end of all this assessment is the question that I began working through with A this week – what should assessment be used for? In an a large meeting, P nsisted that there was a difference between diagnostic testing and assessment. Diagnostics are used to analyze problems and design solutions for them; assessments are used to make a final judgment on something’s success or failure. In program evaluation, this is the distinction between formative and summative assessment.

It seems to me that KLP’s foundation, at least in theory, is the idea of diagnostics – remedial programmes should be setting off a long-term cycle of improvement, with each test offering the information that can inspire the next round of improvement. This was my work with A on policy models for KLP. Yet my evaluation professor’s distinction between formative and summative evaluation is key here: the final deciding factor in whether an evaluation is formative or summative is the way it is used. In the case of the math programme, the tests are not diagnostic: teachers likely will not use them to shape their teaching. Even the reading programme’s tests were not diagnostic – the data mostly served to affirm success rather than to identify problems and solutions.

This is the question that a BRP from the South 4 district raised when we went to visit the BEO office there. Sitting in the back of the room, she began to contribute her thoughts on KLP. She had a lot to say, but the very first thing she said was that KLP made teachers feel “down” – by assessing students so regularly, the programme only managed to affirm that teachers were doing a bad job and someone else could do a better job than they could. The worst part, to her, was that the teachers were actually doing all the work in both cases.

I think that underlying her problems with KLP was the same distinction between diagnostics and assessment that I’ve been talking about. To her, the reading programme had been assessed, not diagnosed: KLP came in, imposed a programme, declared success, and left. This had left teachers, according to this BRP, feeling attacked rather than supported. The last part of the cycle was missing: the feedback and planning for the next strategy for improvement. The BEO told us that she hadn’t seen much impact of the reading programme in her block – perhaps an indication that one turn of the wheel is not enough to make a lasting change. What defines KLP’s testing as diagnostic will be the way it is used, and so far it has not been. This space is where I am hoping to insert myself over the course of the year.

Spending time with Akshara staff this week gave me a stronger sense of the supportive nature of their relationships, something I was not fully conscious of at the outset. Particularly on our trip to Ramnagar, it was clear that the group has an easy, nonjudgmental camaraderie about it that welcomes difference. Passion and thoughtfulness underly all of their work. In the U.S., there’s a separation between work and life, and I’m often surprised at people’s lackluster levels of efficiency. Here, as far as I’ve seen, people do an incredible amount of work with dedication and sincerity.

Outside of academia, there’s also a diversity of skillsets that’s entirely refreshing. In university environments, I find that I’m often drawing on a limited, one-dimensional set of competencies – problem identification, nuanced speech, reading, synthesizing, analyzing, writing. These, fortunately for me, are the things I’m good at, but there are other things I know I lack. Watching the easy eloquence of N’s training, the command D had over her audience, the effortless combination of sincere but dry information and lighthearted interludes, showed me how broad is the set of experiences and abilities that people at Akshara draw on in their everyday work. I got the sense that the organization gives people the opportunity to offer their whole selves, to be unique contributors, in an unusual and inspiring way.

I visited two libraries last week, one a tiny space with books hidden away in a closed cabinet, a row of computers, a few children playing carrom, and a quiet, somewhat aloof librarian; the other a warm and welcoming space. In the second library, the librarian, AU, showed me around the library and pulled out the projects her students had done. There was an astonishing creativity in the kinds of learning activities the librarians here had offered their students. I thought again about the incredible individual variation inherent in any educational program. Because teaching requires a spark of individuality, there’s a way in which it can’t be assessed according to a uniform standard. And yet it’s often clear, on the ground, when it’s working and when it isn’t.

It’s that wild card, that element of mystery in the filtering process of any supervisory structure, that presented a challenge to the math program this past week. The intuitive ingeniousness of the math curriculum, as A explained it to me, inspired me deeply – I wonder, in fact, if its style of teaching will have benefits for children far beyond the sphere of the results on their math tests. Yet the frightening part was that it was so difficult to know whether the program was really “remedial.” Multiple students who had, block coordinators suggested, simply copied answers from the board, scored perfectly on the baseline assessments, disqualifying them from the remedial program, even though retesting would show that they were only able to answer one or two questions. It suggested that teachers might not want the programme in schools. If teachers are the ones who bring life to this curriculum, and teachers are the ones who don’t feel invested in its purpose, I have trouble imagining that any results from this program will be reliable.

I’ve found myself thinking often about my friend Santiago, a Buddhist mathematician turned educationist, and his frequent reference to fractals over the year I studied with him at Harvard. Santiago spoke of the alienation that Marx talks about, the process by which super-specialization separates decision-making from ground realities, reflection and action become separate. Fractal structures for him represented an alternative way of organizing communication. Each level of the fractal is an exact replica of the whole; each individual understands the society just as each society understands the individual. Hierarchies are collapsed, and there is communication and inquiry across all levels. What this requires is skill-building and dogged communication.

What would teachers in Bangalore need in order to be invested in the math program such that they see the whole as well as their role within it? And how can Akshara mobilize teachers (and ultimately, communities) around educational improvement so that they are contributing their ideas with the same passion that Akshara ignites at the leadership level? It seems to me that this is the crux of the philosophy behind KLP, the leap of faith that distinguishes it from other programs, its biggest challenge but its biggest promise.

What this means is that I’m already seeing in front of me many of the questions we grappled with in my master’s program, questions many smaller organizations are not even close to being ready to worry about. For example, my third day here, I accompanied A, the head of the library program to a meeting of block coordinators and ERC managers – responsible for each of the nine designated blocks of urban Bangalore – and had a conversation with him on the bus about the ethics and the usefulness of randomized controlled trials. That same afternoon, I attended a meeting back at the Banaswadi office, at which the heads of various programmes reported on their progress. There was an atmosphere of critical friendship. People were lighthearted when necessary, but also seemed to demand that their peers be articulate about justifying their decisions and understanding their terrain. Each person seemed to have a deep knowledge of the other programs, both from a mission standpoint and an operational one. What amazed me, too, was the huge scale at which these leaders think and operate on a day-to-day basis.

Finally, at the end of the week, I joined the block coordinators – many of whom I had seen previously at the library meeting – A, the head of the maths program, and C, the Chief Operating Officer, for a meeting at which A asked block coordinators to provide summary data on the results of a maths baseline assessment. A was concerned about the data because it seemed that something had gone wrong with the testing – much fewer students had low enough scores to qualify for the remedial program than expected. Some teachers reported that multiple students had scored 100% on the baseline test. Besides, the data collection was delayed – it was difficult to get to certain parts of the district; there were power outages; students were absent; teachers were absent. Many schools were missing.

In this first week, I’ve noticed Akshara’s complicated relationship with data. On the one hand, there’s the idea that numbers can drive educational reform by drawing attention to service gaps, identifying problem areas, and making maximum impact. A has already asked me two or three times whether I’m “good with statistics and numbers.” On the other hand, there’s the constant struggle to achieve accurate numbers. At this large scale of operations, in the long process of consolidation that places a single child in the context of a citywide school system, there are many places where a number can fall through the cracks, where data can get distorted and lost. And there’s the constant question of whether the numbers really tell you much at all. What does it mean to read at the sentence level, anyway? How might different teachers define it as they gather information? Is it really fair to deny thousands of children access to a library, even when you have enough funds to provide it, in order to prove that the libraries achieved so many standard deviations of literacy skill? Some of these questions are part of the painful process of honing and streamlining and eventually producing a reasonable dataset. Others are inherent limitations of research.

There also seem to be challenges in using the discourse of statistics itself, because that discourse highlights the differences between Akshara’s staff at different levels of operation. Almost everyone I’ve talked to at a management level at Akshara has spoken of the challenge of communicating the importance of data to people without data experience. “They just don’t understand,” is one common refrain, another is “Education levels are very low here.” Of course, the irony is that this problem is the exact one Akshara is trying to combat in the first place. And after this week, something A mentioned to me my first day has become increasingly clear: the significant role of building skills within the organization. The same systemic shortcomings that exist outside the organization exist within it as well – in this case, a lack of quantitative and, even more broadly, independent critical thinking skills – and must be faced directly to be overcome. It is the same philosophy that drives the idea of the Karnataka Learning Partnership. Work with a flawed system in order to improve it, rather than creating an isolated, perfect programmatic specimen that’s impossible to reproduce.

This philosophy tends to operate at the level of “dream big and then make small adjustments” rather than “dream small and expand the vision slowly.” In multiple conversations, I’ve heard assertions of this kind of optimism. We can’t afford to compromise, Akshara seems to believe. If we make the ambitious claim that we can eliminate illiteracy in 5 years, we might eliminate it in 8; if not, we may never eliminate it at all. In fact, when I first came across the Akshara Foundation last summer while I was working with the Deshpande Foundation, this attitude struck me right away. It was unlike anything I had ever seen, and I wasn’t sure whether to be incredulous or impressed (now I’m a little of both). I’ve noticed this attitude manifested in the interactions I’ve seen between block coordinators, A, and A. It seems like A and A are always asking block coordinators to do things quickly, and block coordinators are explaining why they can’t. The power is out, or the internet is down, or the rains are making the roads bad. It’s the same kind of request the very notion of the Karnataka Learning Partnership makes of the government. It asks schools to make children literate, a demand that most people, I imagine, have probably given up on. The underlying idea seems to be that only by asking the impossible question can you begin to make answering it possible.

At the top couple of levels, this seems to work, as far as I can tell. The data might not arrive tomorrow, but it arrives maybe a week later. And Akshara’s large-scale successes show that, eventually, its impressive aims are often met. That said, I’m very curious now about what the process of gathering statistics looks like on the ground in the intervening time. What corners are cut? What principles are followed? At the meeting of block coordinators I attended with A, I was surprised at how little of the time they spent talking. They referred to A as “sir” and reported to him the way a student would to a teacher. There were things about Indian work culture I had yet to understand. In later conversations, however, I was amazed with the amount of work they did. Each responsible for several clusters, they coordinate the library program as well as the maths program. Their work reminds me of student life not only in the way they report to higher-ups, but also in the way they are responsible for various demanding programs – just like students juggling classes with multiple professors, each enough to fill more than a regular work schedule.

Despite what might look like a very trickle-down organizational structure, the block coordinators seem very committed and engaged in their work on an individual level. One block coordinator, S (who tolerated my Kannada and smiled encouragingly after I nearly threw up my second time on a Bangalore bus) told me again about the importance of statistics. She told me that Akshara’s successes with funders were largely due to its ability to demonstrate with data the impact of its work, and bemoaned the fact that some staff did not value data collection. Some teachers, she said, didn’t know how to calculate percentages – considering that this came through while collecting data for the baseline assessment for the maths program, this is a particularly jarring fact.

With characteristic insistence on improving the system, Akshara works with teachers both to assess and improve the performance of students who are falling behind. What I would like to hear more about, though, is what teachers might be doing that is especially positive for children. So far, I’ve only had the chance to learn about teachers as a piece of the complex machinery of Akshara’s work – often as a challenge, but sometimes as neutral implementers. But teachers are the heart of the Karnataka Learning Partnership. After all, Akshara’s “product” is not a piece of hardware: it is, at least in its most utopian vision, simply a demand for better teaching. And as such, it is messy and nebulous. What is good teaching, after all? At the top level, teachers look like tiny specks in a huge constellation. I’m interested to know what the variations between those tiny specks might be. It would mean coming to understand what exactly, at a curricular level, is working best within Akshara to produce those coveted numerical results. Otherwise, the demand for quality education lacks a definition of exactly what quality is.

At the end of this week, my curiosity is wandering away from a friend’s recommendation to “think big” as I explored development work here in Bangalore. I find myself increasingly curious about the small pieces of Akshara’s work. I’m wondering how teachers actually teach this material, what from the training they implement and what they ignore. I’m wondering what the teaching process actually looks like, what the implementation turns out to be between the baseline and the midpoint, and between the midpoint and the posttest. I’m wondering what they do well (and what they do badly) that Akshara’s training hasn’t thought of. I’m wondering how cluster volunteers go about collecting data, how block coordinators divide their time. And at the end of it all, I’m wondering how the collection of data will actually serve as the push for effective service delivery. How will the data be disseminated? Who will use it? What elements of the data will they ignore, and what will they use? What will they use it for? What will bridge the gap between information and its use for change, the same gap that plagues even the most mundane of Akshara’s daily tasks?