Indian Education System for NYC?

In my early blogging days, I’d written a blog post called Indian Education System is the Best … for India!

In a recent FORTUNE magazine interview entitled “The CEO Educator”, Joel Klein, the New York City School Chancellor, acknowledges “colleagues who are using tutoring services where kids get online with people in India tutoring them in math.” His comments later in the interview make you wonder if the stress-filled, exam-packed Indian education system is what Klein is ordering for the New York City public school system!

Joel Klein is widely credited with turning around the deteriorating public school system in NYC in the four years that he has been in charge of it. Graduation rate has zoomed up from 47% in 2005 to 61% in 2008 and dropout has fallen eight points from 22% to 14% during the same period.

In charting the course for bringing about further improvements, Joel Klein cites lack of immediacy as the greatest challenge. He’s wary of the tendency of middle-class and affluent parents to take good education for granted and is very critical of their concerns regarding testing-induced stress upon children. You can make out that he’s a strong supporter of testing when he says, “our kids are going to grow up in a world with high-stakes testing at every level, high-stakes challenges in a very aggressive global economy.”

By acclimatizing children to the stress of tests and exams, an education system prepares them to slug it out in a future economic landscape that fits Klein’s description. While knowledge can arguably be acquired only in a relaxed environment free of continuous evaluation, schools have to do more than just impart knowledge. They have to equip children with the tools to capture knowledge on an ongoing basis, get jobs, build careers and contribute to the overall growth of their nations in an increasingly competitive world. And, to do all that, testing is indispensable – something that Indian educators were evidently convinced about while laying the foundations of the Indian education system long ago.

With Joel Klein’s comments resonating with their own convictions, hope Indian educators allow the Indian education system to continue to deliver its proven results, and dismiss demands from some quarters for eliminating tests and exams from schools and universities. Instead, they could use their collective energies to improve the quality of assessments, prevent leakage of question papers and streamline the overall process of administration of tests and examinations.