The Indian Express | 3 weeks ago | 20-01-2023 | 02:40 pm
After a gap of four years, the national ASER survey was back in the field in 2022, reaching 616 rural districts of the country to understand children’s enrollment status and basic reading and arithmetic ability. The Covid pandemic had caused schools to shut down in March 2020, and India had one of the longest school closures in the world — primary schools were closed for almost two years. The impact of the pandemic on the education sector was feared to be twofold — learning loss associated with long school closures, and higher dropout rates, especially among older children, due to squeezed family budgets.During the Covid period, ASER looked for opportunities to go back to the field and was able to conduct representative surveys in three states in 2021 — Karnataka in February, Chhattisgarh in October and West Bengal in December. Estimates from these three state-level surveys could be used to understand the extent of children’s learning losses. These state level estimates are extremely useful as they are the only ASER estimates of learning we have between 2018 and 2022.For the country as a whole, learning levels had been rising slowly between 2014 and 2018, after being stagnant for several years. For example, at the all-India level, the proportion of children in Class III who could read a Class II level text (a proxy for grade-level reading) had risen from 23.6 per cent in 2014 to 27.2 per cent in 2018. ASER 2022 shows a big drop in this proportion to 20.5 per cent. This 7 percentage point fall is huge, given how slowly the all-India numbers move and confirms fears of large learning losses caused by the pandemic. In math also, learning levels had risen slowly between 2014 and 2018. The 2022 estimates show a drop here as well although much smaller than in the case of reading.However, the four-year period between these measurements encompasses both the period of school closures as well as the initial six to eight months after school reopening, depending on the state. As mentioned earlier, ASER managed to assess learning levels in three states — Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal – in 2021, when schools were still closed or had just reopened. While these are not national estimates, they provide an interim measurement that is more reflective of pandemic-induced learning losses than the estimates for 2022. Across all three states, there were large learning losses in both reading and math in 2021 — in excess of 7 percentage points, except in the case of Std V in West Bengal. The loss in reading is a little higher, though not by much. In both reading and math, the 2021 learning levels in these three states fell below their 2014 levels. A year later, ASER 2022 data shows that across all three states, there has been a recovery in both reading and math (except Karnataka in reading and West Bengal in reading in Std V) after schools reopened in 2021-22. In other words, while the 2022 learning levels were still below or in some cases close to the 2018 levels, comparing 2018 with 2022 hides the dramatic fall in learning levels observed between these two points and the subsequent recovery that has happened in the last year.Another big development during 2020-21 was the introduction of the new National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020. For the first time, there was a big focus on the early years and the importance of foundational competencies. Once schools reopened, states moved quickly and almost all states have made a major push in the area of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) under the NIPUN Bharat mission (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy). This push is reflected in the ASER 2022 data. As part of the survey, ASER field investigators visited one government school in each of the sampled village to record enrollment, attendance and school facilities. This year we also asked whether schools had received any directive from the government to implement FLN activities in the school and whether teachers had been trained on FLN. At the all-India level, 81 per cent schools responded that they had received such a directive and 83 per cent said that at least one teacher in the school had been trained on FLN.Extrapolating from the experience of the three states for which we have 2021 data, we can assume that other states also experienced large learning losses during the pandemic. However, once schools reopened, states made a concerted effort to build or re-build foundational competencies, which has resulted in a partial and in some cases, a full recovery. The extent of the recovery varies across states depending on how long their schools were closed as well as when they initiated learning recovery measures. For instance, Chhattisgarh was one of the earliest states to reopen their primary schools in July 2021, giving them a longer period to work with children, as compared to, for instance, Himachal Pradesh or Maharashtra, where schools reopened much later. Taking into account the 2021 figures, the 2022 estimates for Chhattisgarh point to a remarkable recovery, in both reading and math, that is hidden if we just compare 2022 with 2018. In the absence of a 2021 measurement for other states, it is difficult to say what the original pandemic-induced learning loss was — from which states are aiming to recover.Now that the NEP has set clear FLN goals for the entire country, states can find different pathways to achieve these goals. While there have been learning losses, there has also been recovery once the schools reopened. Accounting for all the interim measurements, ASER 2022 estimates tell a story of recovery rather than one of loss.The writer is Director ASER Centre
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