Idealism is not dead: TFI takes wing

Over the past three years, the Mumbai-based Teach For India programme, whose objective is to eliminate educational iniquity in India by cherry-picking outstanding graduates and professionals to teach in low-income schools, has placed 506 fellows in 164 municipal and private budget schools in five cities. Matthew Schneeberger reports Prasid Sreeprakash (25) is from a middle class family in Kerala, scored 99.86 percent in the super-tough Common Admission Test of the IIMs and graduated from the premier Indian Institute of Management-Indore. Typically with this prized qualification, Sreeprakash should have landed a job in a company of his choice with a six figure monthly salary as most of his batchmates at IIM-Indore did. Instead Sreeprakash signed up with Teach For India (TFI), a Mumbai-based NGO which pays Rs.16,000 per month. Twelve-year-old Asira Sheikh’s father earns less than Rs.1 lakh in an entire year. Asira is a class IV student of the pathetically under-resourced Varsha Nagar BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) School in Vikhroli, Mumbai, which draws its student body from neighbouring slums. Normatively, attending a BMC primary would have condemned her to a rudderless, rote memorisation-driven education delivered in the vernacular Marathi or Urdu languages by unmotivated, inadequately trained teachers — to a life marred by unrealised academic potential. Instead Asira and her 30 classmates study a joyful, holistic, practical, and skills-based curriculum taught in English by Prasid Sreeprakash. This happy meeting of minds has been enabled by TFI whose objective is to eliminate educational iniquity in India by cherry-picking outstanding graduates and professionals to teach full-time for two years in low-income schools. Since it was registered in December 2008, and three and a half years after it placed its first batch of 80 ‘fellows’ (teachers) in 33 low-income schools in Mumbai and Pune, TFI has recruited and deputed 506 fellow graduates from India’s most admired higher education institutions to teach in 164 municipal and private budget schools in five cities (adding Pune, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad), with plans to place 2,000 fellows in under-served schools by 2016-2017. Although there’s little extant empirical research of the learning outcomes of the 15,000-plus students who’ve learned in TFI-enabled classrooms, ample anecdotal evidence underscores the enabling power of TFI teachers. For instance, last December Asira presented a detailed model of the solar system to a group of adults at the American School of Bombay, an elite international school located in the Bandra-Kurla Complex. Not intimidated by the unfamiliar environment of the well-equipped school, Asira spoke confidently (in English), displaying the aptitude and intellectual curiousity necessary for a career in science, her dream profession. This symbolic victory — for Asira as a student, Sreeprakash as an educator and TFI as an organisation — was replicated in similar TFI student exhibitions on ethics, phonics, visual art and mathematics at the third annual inspirED conference held in Mumbai on December 8-9. Organised by TFI, the two-day education conference attracted 500-plus delegates, including school teachers and principals, and representatives from foreign and domestic NGOs, think tanks, education start-ups and large business…