Improving India’s School System: A Bottom-up Approach

In a recent article (Opportunity to Rethink Educational Policymaking), we discussed the problems of ‘top-down policymaking’ as it happens in our context: failure to build a body of policy-relevant knowledge based on empirical, context-sensitive studies, and the tendency to rely on short-sighted political compulsions. To counter these, we need to (a) develop an educational ecosystem that does not rely only on teachers and teacher-trainers, but draws on other kinds of human resource such as curriculum developers, administrators, educational data analysts, school psychologists, and test developers and psychometricians and (b) make this ecosystem a base for ‘bottom-up’ decentralized policymaking and evaluation.