So we all have our own biases. For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years.
我们对很多事情都有自己的偏见。 例如, 我们可能会认为 要改革腐朽的政府机构是很难的。 当我们聊到政府机构时, 我们会觉得肯定是腐朽的、顽固的, 而且领导层都非常的官僚主义, 拒绝可能的革新。 那么,今天,我会尝试挑战下这个观点。 我的故事是关于一个非常大的政府机构, 这个机构不仅积极的进行改革, 而且改革仅仅三年时间就已经取得了 非常不错的效果。
This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. There are 1 million such schools in India. And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. In India, public schools not only offer free education -- they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is.
这是印度的公立小学的常见景象。 印度有一百万公立学校。 即使像我这样在印度土生土长的人, 走进这样的学校依然会让我觉得心碎。 这些孩子在11岁的时候, 有差不多一半的人在学习上掉队严重, 严重到很难赶上。 到了十一岁还无法做简单的加法, 无法拼写出语法正确的句子。 而这些都是你我会预期一个八岁的孩子 就应该会的。 在他们13或14岁的时候, 他们很可能会退学。 在印度,公立学校不仅提供免费教育—— 还提供免费教材,免费作业本,免费午餐, 有时候甚至提供奖学金。 即便如此,如今多达四成的家长 依然选择将他们的孩子从公立学校 转去需要自掏腰包的私立学校。 而比印度富裕得多的美国, 这个比例只有一成而已。 这个数字印证了印度的 公共教育系统现在有多糟糕。
So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. So she said to us, "Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. Can you possibly help?"
正是在这样的大环境下,2013年的夏天, 我接到了一位非常睿智的女士的电话, 她叫 Surina Rajan。 她当时是印度 Haryana 省(邦) 基础教育厅的厅长。 (译注:全文按大陆行政体系翻译) 她告诉我,"你看,我已经领导这个部门 有两年时间了。 我尝试了很多方法,都没有效果。 你看看能否帮上忙?”
Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. One, that I had never done anything like this before. And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. We knew that we had to craft our own journey.
让我先简单介绍下 Haryana 省的情况。 Haryana 省有约三千万人口, 有一万五千所公立学校, 为超过两百万孩子提供教育。 简单地说,在那通电话里, 我答应要帮助这个省的教育系统进行改革, 改革的规模跟 整个秘鲁或加拿大的差不多。 当我开始着手干的时候, 我很快发现两间让人沮丧的事实。 首先,我从来没有处理这类问题的经验。 其次, 其他人的尝试也大多以失败告终。 我和同事把印度全国调研了个遍, 然后放眼全球, 也没有找到任何样板 能够直接拿过来套用在 Haryana 省上。 我们意识到需要自己走出一条路。
But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. People said, "Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms." By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things.
不管怎样,我们决定开始动手干, 一下子我们就想到了很多点子。 有人说,"我们对聘请教师进行改革, 应该聘请新校长并且训练他们, 把他们都送到国外进行培训, 还要引入现代化的教学设备。" 一个星期下来我们就收集了超过五十个想法, 看起来都非常不错, 都应该立刻着手实施。 但是我们显然不可能同时做50件事情。
So I said, "Hang on, stop. Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve." So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us.
所以我说,"等下,先等下。 至少让我们先定一个目标再说。" 经过来来回回的讨论和争辩, Haryana 省的教育改革目标定了下来: 到2020年超过80%的学生 能按时升入下一年级。 这个目标的具体内容并不是重点, 重点是这个目标为我们指明了方向。 现在这个目标为我们确定了一个标准, 让我们在面对各种新点子的时候 有了一个明确的筛选标准。 这个点子对于我们的目标有帮助吗? 如果有,我们就继续往下做。 如果不能或者我们不确定, 就先把这个想法放到一边。 这个听起来非常简单的做法, 让我们能够目标明确, 在教育改革的道路上 保持专注和敏捷。 两年半之后回头看当时的决定, 对我们帮助是巨大的。
So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. But they were not teaching. I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students.
有了目标之后, 现在就需要找到问题所在,追本溯源。 在我们去学校实地考察之前, 很多人告诉我们 基础教育之所以糟糕, 要么是因为教师们的懒惰, 他们时常缺勤不来学校, 要么是教师无能, 不具备授课的技能。 但是当我们在学校实地调研的时候, 发现完全不是这样。 绝大多数老师在上班时间都是出勤的。 我们通过与老师们的交谈, 发现他们完全有能力教小学课程。 问题是他们的时间没花在上课上。 我去的一所学校, 里面的老师在忙着监督盖教室 和厕所设施。 我去的另一所学校, 两个老师需要跑到附近的银行柜台 一个一个的把奖学金存到学生的账户里去。 午饭的时候, 基本上所有的老师都动员起来 参与或监督午饭的准备和分发,为学生服务。
So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" And they said, "This is what's expected of us. When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed."
于是我们问这些老师, "这是怎么了, 为什么你们都不去教课?" 他们回答, "因为这就是我们被要求做的呀。 当教委领导来我们这里视察的时候, 这些就是他们检查的内容。 厕所有没有建好,午饭供应是否正常。 当我们的校长去首都开会的时候, 他们讨论的也都是这些事情。"
You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. Not explicitly, but implicitly. And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things.
你看,实际上在过去二十年间, 印度为了让学生入学做了很多, 建立了足够的学校, 并且努力地让适龄儿童进入学校读书。 政府发起了一系列项目 来保证中小学入学率, 而老师们变成了这些项目 实际上的执行人员。 虽然没有明确要求,但是 他们就是实际的执行者。 现在我们真正需要的, 不是培训这些老师, 也不是监督他们出勤, 而是告诉他们,相比刚才说的那些事情, 回到教室上课才是他们最重要的任务。 我们应该以课堂教学的质量 来跟踪、评价和奖励老师, 而不是用别的事情来考核他们。
So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program.
当我们对教育体系有了 更深入的了解之后, 我们找到了一些问题的根源所在, 这些根源决定着教育系统中 老师和其他人的行为。 我们意识到除非我们解决了 这些根源上的问题, 否则我们可以做的其它的改革措施, 例如教师培训、引入新技术, 都不会起到真正的改善作用。 于是处理这些隐藏在背后的核心问题 称为改革项目的重中之重。
So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "Let's look around and see what we can find." And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools.
现在我们已经设定好了目标, 也找到了问题根源, 现在就差解决方案了。 我们不希望闭门造车, 相反地,我们决定 "尽量从他人现有的经验中学习。" 我们也确实在印度和世界范围内 找到了一些成功案例, 规模不大,但效果非常好。 这些成功案例一般由NGO(非政府组织) 或者基金会参与完成。 但是这些成功案例都有一个问题, 就是他们的规模有严重的局限性。 所有的案例规模都只有50所, 100所或者最多500所学校。 我们要找的是能适用于 15000所学校的方案。
So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools." Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. And hence, innovations don't scale. So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools." And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. Much easier said than done. (Laughter)
我们仔细分析了原因, 如果这些项目效果显著, 为什么不能扩大规模? 我们发现, 当NGO参与进来时, 他们不仅投入了他们的专业经验, 还能够投入额外的资源。 NGO可能投入额外的资金, 可能投入额外的人力, 也有可能投入新的技术。 当NGO主持的项目的规模限制在 50所或者100所学校的时候, 这些额外投入的资源产生了很好的效果。 但是想象一下, 这些NGO的负责人跑到省教育厅,说: “让我们在15000所学校推广吧!” 问题是到哪儿去募集到足够多的资金 能同时支持15000所学校呢? 他们没有这么多额外的资金, 也没有这么多额外的资源。 所以这样的创新项目没办法大范围推广。 所以在项目开始的时候我们就明确了, "不管我们做什么都要能够大规模推广, 一定要能够同时支持15000所学校。" 因此,我们必须在现有的政府预算内 利用省内现有的资源达成目标。 说起来比做起来容易多了。 (笑声)
I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?"
我想正是从这个时间点开始 我的同事开始"恨"我了。 我们花了很多的时间,无论是在办公室, 咖啡馆, 甚至在酒吧, 想破了脑袋, "到底应该怎么办, 怎样才能解决这些问题?"
In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. I'll give you an example. In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. We needed another solution. We couldn't think of anything. One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. That was a huge eureka moment for us. So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids." And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one.
最终, 我觉得大部分的问题 都找到了比较好的解决方法。 我来举个例子。 在"如何更有效率地学习"这个问题上, 人们常说要通过动手操作来加深印象。 学生不应该死记硬背, 而是应该做些课堂活动, 这样学习的效果更好。 这个想法实现起来就是要给学生一些教具, 例如(算术用的)小珠子、小棒子、 算盘之类。 但是我们没有那么多预算 提供给15000所学校的两百万学生。 我们要想别的方法。 但是始终没有想到解决方法。 有一天,我们一个同事在一所学校里 看到一个老师,从学校周围的花丛里 捡了点小树枝和小石子 拿到了教室里 分给了学生(用于教学)。 这一幕让我们灵光一闪。 于是现在在 Haryana 省的课本里, 每一个新知识点的旁边都有一段注解, 为老师提供了一个操作清单, "教授这个知识点的时候你可以 通过以下活动来促进学生理解。 活动需要一些辅助的教具, 而你可以在你周边环境中找到, 无论是在室外还是教室内都可以就地取材, 用于课堂教学。" 我们后来看到 Haryana 省的老师们 想出了各种创新的方法来教育学生。 从这个角度看,我们的方法虽然简陋, 但是起到了实实在在的效果, 并且从第一天起就能推广到全省15000所学校。
Now, this brings me to my last point. How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? The department used to have a process which is very interesting. I like to call it "The Chain of Hope." They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. It was a little bit ridiculous. Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp.
现在,让我阐述下最后一个观点。 你怎么样让一件事情贯彻到15000所学校, 贯彻到十万名老师身上呢? 教育部门之前有一套流程, 我觉得非常有意思。 我喜欢叫这个过程“希望的链条”。 从教育厅开始,写一封信件, 然后投递给下一集教育部门, 一般是市县级教委办公室。 教育厅希望每个下级部门的 部门领导都能够阅读这封信件, 然后再将信件转发给他们的下一级, 一般是区级教委。 接下来你需要指望这些区级教委, 有人能够收到邮件, 阅读完信件,并最终将信件送到 15000所学校的校长手里。 最后,我们还要指望所有的校长 能够顺利收到邮件,阅读并理解其中的意思, 并开始实施。 这个过程有点夸张。 现在,我们知道正确的方式是借助科技。 但是我们也知道大部分的学校 连个电脑或者电邮地址都没有。 但是每个老师现在都有智能手机了。 老师们都可以收发短信, 挂在Facebook和WhatsApp上。
So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. It spreads like wildfire. You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. Often with innovative techniques. When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly.
现在在 Haryana 省我们是这么做的, 我们建立了几百个 WhatsApp 群, 把所有的校长和老师都加到里面, 这样当我们需要传达一些信息的时候, 我们就直接通过WhatsApp群发就行了。 "嗖"的一下就全省都通知到了。 你还能随时知道哪些人收到了消息, 哪些人已经阅读了。 老师们如果有不明白的地方可以立刻提出。 有趣的是, 不仅是教育厅会有人回答老师的问题, 有时候别的市县的老师 也会主动提供答案。 大家在群组中更像是互助的关系, 很多事情就这么推动起来了。 所以现在你去Haryana省的任何一所学校, 情况都跟过去大不相同了。 老师们回到了课堂, 重新走上了讲台。 新的技术不断被引入到课堂中。 当教委领导视察学校时, 不仅会检查是否修了厕所, 也会检查教学质量。 每个季度,全省的学生 都要做一次全省的摸底考试, 考得好的学校会被奖励。 表现的不好的学校, 教委会找校长谈话。 当然,这些学校会得到更多扶持, 并努力在未来表现得更好。 在教育领域, 很难看到立竿见影的成果。
When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. But not in Haryana. In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. And I said, "Why are you smiling, what's going on?" And she said, "I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to."
当人们谈论大规模的、系统性的改革时, 一般说的是7到10年为一个周期。 但是Haryana要快得多。 去年,三个相互独立的研究在Haryana进行, 都是研究学生的学习效果的, 它们都表明在Haryana省, 一些根本性的东西正在变化。 学生的平均学习成绩不再下滑, 甚至开始有所上升。 Haryana是全印度为数不多的 总体学生成绩在改善的省份, 而且当之无愧是改善速度最快的省份。 这些还只是起步阶段, 还有很长路要走, 但是我们从中看到了很大的希望。 我最近去一所学校, 准备离开的时候, 遇到了一位女士, 她叫Parvati, 她的孩子在这里上学, 她正微笑着。 我问她,"你在笑什么?有什么好玩的事情吗?" 她说,"我也不知道发生了什么, 但是我知道我的孩子们开始学习了, 学得还挺开心。 现在我已经决定不再找私立学校 让他们转校了。"
So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? I certainly believe so. I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains.
最后让我们回到开始的问题: 政府机构能够改革吗? 我很确信可以。 我相信如果你提供了合适的着力点, 他们就能够带来翻天覆地的变化。 (意译:阿基米德"给我一个支点, 我能翘起地球")
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)