With a new round of funding for the Sarva-Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) program in India underway, it’s worth highlighting (again) just how little children are learning in school. Pratham’s great work with the Annual State of Education Report (ASER) shows that in 2005, 53.6 percent of all children aged 7-10 could not solve a subtraction or a division problem and 79.4 percent could not solve a simple division problem. Since most children (more than 93 percent) are enrolled, the numbers reflect what they learn in school.

Data from 112 villages with a private school in Punjab province of Pakistan in 2003 reflect similar problems. These data, collected as part of the Learning and Educational Attainment in Punjab or LEAPS project (more on this later), include mathematics test-scores for children in Grades 3, 4 and 5. The figure on the left shows the current enrollment status of all 10-year olds in these villages. The figure on the right shows the percentage of 10-year olds who can add or subtract single digit numbers.

Three things stand out. First, almost 27% of 10-year olds never enrolled. This number is much smaller in India. Second, among those enrolled, the grade-distribution is crazy—5.9% are in Grade 1, 11.1% in Grade 2 and only 18.5% are in the correct age-grade combination. Third, even those who are in the correct grade are performing far below curricular standards—only 36% of those in Grade 4 can actually add or subtract a single digit number. The average child in Grade 4 in the United States can meanwhile “subtract a two-digit from a three-digit number”; “subtract two-digit numbers to solve a story problem” and; “determine the next number in a given pattern”.

Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have put together an impressive set of associations between learning and economic growth. Here is a gem from their extensive inter-country database on internationally comparable test-results. Every column represents countries on a given test and the scores are scaled to have a mean of 500 and standard-deviation of 100.

India has participated only once in an international testing exercise (the yellow circle)—that too in 1970. Did India’s relative rank in that test have anything to do with the lack of participation in any internationally comparable tests since then? Second, is there any way to get international comparability without sacrificing national sovereignty (for those who take these things seriously) in these tests? Don’t know much about the first, but will have more to say about the second later on.

There is also that troublesome question of how to go about improving quality—let’s get back to that later.