Dear Multilingual Education friends,
ASER does each year an independent assessment of the status of primary education in the country. ASER 2011 reached 558 districts, 16,017 villages, 327,372 households and 633,465 children. This year I somehow missed reporting on it in January. Here is a key finding you might find interesting:
Nationally, reading levels are estimated to have declined in many states across North India. The All India figure for the proportion of children in Std V able to read a Std 2 level text has dropped from 53.7% in 2010 to 48.2% in 2011. Such declines are not visible in the southern states.
However for this mailing list the most interesting thing is that this year for the first time the survey included a question on language:. The instructions read: “ Ask the child or any adult in the household which language is spoken at home, by the family members” (Full instructions copied below.) The summary of the result is:
A quarter of all rural children attend primary schools where the medium of instruction is different from their home language
I looked at the data per state. Some interesting figures:
STATE | Home Language is Different From School Language (%) |
Nagaland | 100% |
Chhattisgarh | 99% |
Manipur | 98% |
Arunachal Pradesh | 96% |
Jammu & Kashmir | 95% |
Himachal Pradesh | 89% |
Rajasthan | 77% |
Uttarkhand | 67% |
Jharkhand | 61% |
Bihar | 53% |
(The full table is given below)