Whacked-A-Mole! Whacked-A-Mole!

Here are the boys acting like...boys. They were dancing and tickling all at the same time.

We whacked-a-mole. The landlady is now an avid supporter of the school...until April. Then we get kicked out. But we whacked-a-mole again! The land transfer paper is now signed by all the necessary government people (see the post on "Indian Bureaucracy"). It turns out we had the plot behind our very nice neighbor's plot so there was no conflict over the land. Now the only step left is filing with the proper revenue government guy. Since we took five weeks running these government yahoos down just to secure the land, we have launched project "Kick Down the Door." Seems there is some supreme being to all the bureaucracy called the District Collector. This all-powerful person is highly recommended to me by my nonprofit friends. They consider him to be a reasonable, unassuming man. So I asked a friend to ask a friend who has connections to get us an appointment. Then we will "Kick Down the Door" and get our building funds papers signed (we hope) in one week, not five. Time is short...April is only four months away.

Last, we are spending a lot of time whacking the biggest mole of all. There is one core competency required to fulfill our goal of successful student learning: quality instruction. We are hoping to learn tips, tips of any kind, from the model schools built by others around India. I am stealing ideas left and right. The teachers are both delighted and frightened. No one really expected so much of them before. In particular, the professional government teachers like Vijaya were left orphaned by the higher ups in the administration. So they made their own way. Now all our teachers at RPS get as many the school supplies they can handle, but they have to file TEACHING PLANS. Yuk, they don't like that. We want to emphasis experiential learning methods because these children have not had formal schooling in a long time, or not at all. That is labor intensive for the teachers, they are on their feet a LOT more.

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MobilesForGood: EDU

Together with the students, parents, and teaching team, we did it. Ten years of the Rainbow Primary School. Our school is a government-funded, local-language (Telugu) school that serves 230 children every day absolutely free. We celebrated by opening an after-school center last month with the best education NGO in the world, Pratham. For the past five years, I've worked on research projects and helped NGOs that have an interest in developing mobile tools for learning. Globally, there are three populations of students that need to close the education gap. 1. 52 million children globally not in school at all. Most are out of school for one or more of these reasons: conflict/no public services (fragile state), lack of legal papers, migrants, or they are female. Migration is a big issue in our area around the Rainbow School. 2. 200 million children globally are in school, but suffer from poor in-class teaching. These students cannot read at grade level. The most common reason

Gray Matters Capital and the Rockdale Foundation

While all is very well at the Rainbow School, I'll pause to highlight a "sister organization" supporting budget private schools in India. Gray Matters Capital and the Rockdale Foundation have an annual symposium in Hyderabad, called "Enterprising Schools." Buddies of mine from here in Palo Alto, the Hewlett Foundation and IDEO, are heading out there next week. More info is on www.enterprisingschools.com My IDEO fellas organized a whole list of very low-cost teaching aide ideas to present at the symposium. Ideas like using old newpapers to teach literacy. They put the list up on the website under "STEAL THIS IDEA" - click here for the list! (in pdf form) BEST WISHES for a successful symposium, I miss you all in Hyderabad!

On Monday, August 18, I was so happy to return to see the Rainbow School. The teachers have made a plan to shift from Telugu to English medium. My friend at Pratham, one of the largest education NGOs -- serving 5 million children in South Asia and Africa -- agreed to help my teachers. My co-partner, Kalpana, is taking the lead on a facilities upgrade. She will oversee an upgrade to the preschool and main building. Kalpana and I have found donors in India and the United States. The children were sharp, completely up on their marks. The teachers were creative, driven, relentless. More to come!

Rainbow Primary School

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