It was the summer of 2022 in Nallagandla, Hyderabad, India, and I was sitting in a public boarding school classroom. The ceiling fan was running at medium speed. Sitting opposite me, across a desk, a 10th-grade student answered my questions in Telugu (my mother tongue). He told me that he was from a rural background and had to go back to his village with his brother during the pandemic. He shared how his family was unable to support him and his brother so he had to work for daily wages as an unskilled manual laborer. He could not study or attend online classes that were offered by his school. Instead, he studied at night with friends on WhatsApp. This conversation made me, a rising 10th-grader in my own right at the time, reflect, contrasting my own, relatively more privileged yet diminished years of learning during Covid.
The Motivation
On March 15, 2020, my school in Amherst, Massachusetts, temporarily closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The school was meant to be closed for only 1-2 weeks; however, that was not the case. From that day forward, the world was ravaged by the deadly virus. Although I was in a large house and relatively safe compared to others, I was still affected, in two ways – my physical health deteriorated and I had an irrational fear that if I stepped outside, I would catch the virus. So, I did not participate in the numerous walks my parents went on in our small town or go outside to practice soccer (the sport I was most interested in then). I gained weight. My studies were also affected. Although my school tried its best to respond to the lockdown immediately, the last quarter of my 7th-grade education was reduced to nothingness and fear. Eighth grade was better, but it still did not come close to in-person learning. At the end of 2021, I reflected on my experiences. I wondered if the educational setback about what our generation lost in the process was quantifiable. My school in Amherst was surrounded by colleges such as the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College, and many children of professors attended my school, which meant it got sufficient attention and funding. If this was the status of privileged schools, how did students from less-privileged backgrounds fare? I thought about other students in the United States.
Students from marginalized classes and races in the U.S. had a worse time than me during the pandemic. Studies show that more students from oppressed communities were worried that they were falling behind in school than others: 28% of Hispanic teens versus 11% of White teens. At the other end of education, teachers faced major barriers and the teaching experience also became incredibly difficult. Teachers were expected to work harder and longer hours. Teachers who taught in schools with lower-income students reported many students falling behind. In terms of pay, surprisingly, public school teachers earned 30% more than private school teachers. If the U.S. education system and its interlocutors were in such a dire state, I wondered how students in less-resourced countries were faring.
I grew up in India until I was seven years old. I was aware of how the education system worked, about the realities of inequality arising from differences in infrastructure, funding, and systemic discrimination based on caste, gender, class, and religious lines. What I did not know, however, was how and whether COVID-19 exacerbated these situations, or whether it altered the experiences of Indian students and teachers. Similar to the U.S., many Indian students from lower-class backgrounds faced issues with access to technology during the pandemic. In India, however, the disparities between urban and rural were much more pronounced with rural students having 15-20% less access to technology. Such disparities exacerbated lockdown learning: a study examining the impact of online education on Indian students found that only 22.1% of students thought online learning had ‘fulfilled its purpose.’ The teaching experience in lockdown was also notably challenging. Teachers were hindered by spatial considerations. Many female teachers did not have a private, isolated, room for online classes, and therefore were unable to mute the household distractions – something which was detrimental to online teaching. They also had to deal with another form of distractions: parent interference during class. The class was further interrupted due to occasional technological problems (internet connection and electricity issues) from both teachers and students. Teachers also found it hard to establish a ‘connection’ with the student because 72% of them would turn their cameras off.
In these studies and surveys, there are a few common themes: access to technology, training on that technology, and the overall efficacy of online learning. The disparities in access to these resources directly corresponded to differential student learning, other things being equal. However these studies have a gap in their analysis of the Covid experience. They do not adequately look at how the type of funding a school is given (privately funded or government funded) affects the learning experience of students and teaching experience for teachers. Additionally, they do not cover in enough detail how the location of a school, whether it be in an urban or rural area, could have impacted student and teacher experience in Covid. These are the gaps that my study addresses.
Research Questions and Data
Considering all this, by doing a focused analysis on the effects of locale and identity, I wanted to answer questions on how students and teachers were affected in India. I focused on student/teacher perceptions of their educational experience in the pandemic. I also asked how factors like the type of funding given to a school, locale (urban vs. rural), and identity (religion, class, gender, and caste) affected these experiences. I aimed to try and start a discussion on what can be done to prevent educational crises in future pandemics.
I had two questions for the student experience in Covid-19. First, how did the locale (urban/rural) and the type of funding (private/public) affect the students’ learning experience in Covid? Second, how were the number of distractions to student learning affected by locale and type of funding? Similarly, I had two questions for the teacher experience in Covid 19. First, how did locale and type of funding affect the student-teacher ‘connection’ felt in in-person classrooms? Second, how was teacher pay impacted by where they taught (urban/rural) and which kind of school they taught at (private/public)?
In order to answer these questions, I set up different axes to analyze the responses from students and teachers. First, the type of school funding (private or public) and within that the different gradations present. Specifically, there are three kinds of “private” schools in India– “corporate,” elite, for-profit schools; “regular,” for-profit schools; and Catholic, non-profit schools. Here are the distinctions. “Corporate” private schools are themselves private corporations, located in big cities, and geared to preparing students for higher-education entrance exams with curricula (i.e. International Baccalaureate (IB), Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in India, and Cambridge) accepted within the larger global education system (e.g. in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia). They are generally run by a managerial company. Parents of these students are commonly top government officials, business owners, and/or have top managerial positions within big firms. In other words, the student body consists of those from the upper-middle classes and the ultra-rich. My friend, who is enrolled in one such school, is preparing to come to the US for undergraduate education right after his high school. By comparison, “regular” private schools and Catholic schools are confined mainly towards domestic higher education. They also have a heavy focus on preparing students for professional courses—medicine or engineering.
The second axis of analysis was the school’s location (i.e. rural or urban). I picked Hyderabad in the state of Telangana as the city, and Kavali off the Bay of Bengal in the state of Andhra Pradesh as the town. Third, the student and teachers’ identity. The identity was based on class, gender, caste, religion. With these axes set up, I prepared two questionnaires with questions about the pandemic experience and personal experience. Then, I conducted two separate surveys, one for students and one for teachers.
Research Findings
There were four major findings from this study. The first finding is regarding the overall learning experience of the students in lockdown. In urban private schools, 9 out of 10 students had access to WiFi, and 8 out of 10 students had access to a laptop. Although urban private schools across the board fared well, corporate private school students were the least affected in online learning. The parents of these elite students earn the highest salaries among professionals in india. This permits them to live in gated apartment complexes with stable high-speed internet. The only disturbance they faced was because the teachers did not earn the same as their own parents, the teachers were more susceptible to internet disturbances, disrupting classes. In urban public schools, the access to WiFi and laptops were more spread out: 5 out of 9 and 8 out of 11, respectively. One reason for this disparity is that one of the public schools was a boarding school consisting of students from poorer rural backgrounds. So, while they had high-end infrastructure in school, back home they had inadequate resources for online education.
Although urban public students faced difficulties, students from rural schools faced much more hardship. In rural private schools, 6 out of 10 students used a laptop while 4 out of 10 used a mobile device, and 5 out of 10 students used WiFi while 5 out of 10 used data or a mobile hotspot. The situation was worst in rural public schools as only 10th graders were offered online school (to study for exams which determine their school for 11th and 12th grades). The rest of the students only could tune in to educational TV programs – 6 out of 10 students learned from the TV programs. These findings truly display the inequalities present in the Indian school system during the pandemic (and beyond). Due to the class status of these students, some people (corporate students) had ample access to devices and high-end teachers, while poor public school students in rural areas only had access to a low-end education (TV programs) and had to act on their own volition to learn and further their education.
The second finding compares distractions experienced by students across the above axes (private/rural, public/private, and now gender). The most common distraction to students during online-learning was household chores. The pandemic caused families (who could afford it) to be unable to hire help for cleaning and cooking. So, the burden fell on the family, especially the women – even if they had demanding jobs. At urban private schools female students reported that they had to do more household work than their male counterparts, and that their share of work was more demanding compared to male students. The story regarding chores in urban public schools was largely similar, but there is one significant difference. As stated above, one of those public schools is a boarding school consisting of students from poor rural backgrounds. So, students whose families could not support everybody had to work and learn through other measures (see story recounted at the beginning of the essay).
Students in rural schools had to perform household work as well. In rural private schools, more male students helped their fathers do manual labor outside the house, while more female students helped with household chores (3:2). It was a similar story in rural public schools. Students were getting distracted by the internet on phones and teachers would get annoyed at many parents, who did nothing. Many parents of the rural public school students were in the informal or domestic sector and were largely educated only until highschool. So the teachers felt that the parents did not have the time to, or even the awareness to push their kids to be focused. It seemed strange to me that this sort of a blame was being put on parents, who had no training or ability to do so. This larger finding regarding distractions fits in with the argument that the lesser funded and more marginal communities and areas were more adversely affected.
The third finding is regarding the loss of student-teacher ‘connection’ during online learning. Many teachers across the board reported a lack of ‘connection’ (how much the teacher is able to understand how the student is absorbing the information) with the students. The urban corporate school teachers fared best in maintaining some form of the ‘connection,’ which was partly due to the better internet connection. However, the lesser funded urban private school experienced more internet issues that caused disturbances in class, disrupting the student-teacher ‘connection.’ Attendance issues were also ubiquitous. In public schools only 25-30% of students attended class. Putting aside the incredibly disheartening black boxes of switched off video cameras, the inequality of access to technology and internet made it virtually impossible for any sort of ‘connection.’ Also, these teachers said that the pandemic caused most of the students to lose two years of education as well as basic social skills.
Higher income parents were able to afford private schools and tended to send their children there – some parents became indebted while buying private education for their children. So, students who attended private schools – especially in the city – were able to have a better internet connection. Teachers were, therefore, able to have a better connection with these students. School infrastructures (better in private schools) and the affluence of parents greatly improved the teaching situation. Regardless of the teachers, these factors played a key role in facilitating better teaching environments.
Finally, the fourth finding relates to the pay of the teachers. Interestingly, while private schools were better in most other aspects in the pandemic, teacher pay is one aspect in which government-funded schools fared better. According to a rural private school headmaster I interviewed, they had to cut teachers’ pay to 25% of the original amount. Urban private school teachers also experienced a similar pay cut: salaries were significantly reduced from their pre-pandemic numbers. However, only the corporate private school teachers did not experience such a drastic decrease in pay. According to that same rural private school headmaster, many teachers started to switch over to government schools. This is because public school teacher salaries were more stable. In fact, in one urban public boarding school the headmaster reported that the school had surplus funds! Due to the stable funding provided by the government, the public schools were able to avoid the financial crises that a good proportion of the private schools (except the corporate ones) faced. However, this fourth finding still does not deviate from the overall argument. Many of the families who send their children to private schools (lesser ones) could be running a tight ship. So, with the absence of substantial savings, the families had to stop paying tuition or move to a different school. Because many of the families who stopped paying tuition were from a relatively lower socioeconomic status, their under-privileged economic identity led their children to experience greater adversities in education.
Main Takeaways
From the four findings above, an interesting inference can be drawn. Most public school students in rural areas had no formal education during the pandemic. The only form of education was TV programs, so these students largely missed out on 2 years of education and lost out on many basic social skills. Their families were already struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic, and therefore could not pressure the government to provide the required schooling support. While urban public schools did have online-classes, they were also hit hard: only a quarter of the students would attend class. Coming to private schools (other than the corporate ones), since a majority of them rely solely on tuition money, they suffered when people were unable to pay or moved away. Consequently, the private schools underpaid the teachers: both a Catholic private school and a rural private school cut teachers’ pay to 25% of the original salary. This is the story of the majority of Indian school students.
However, the only schools that successfully pulled through the pandemic were the corporate schools where a small minority studies. The elites who occupy the formal sector in India were largely unaffected or even made wealth gains through booming stock markets during the pandemic. It is the children of these elites that attend the corporate schools. As a result, the tuition fees which these schools rely on did not show any noticeable reduction. On the other hand, a vast number of private schools were on the brink of a financial collapse, and a vast number of public schools were on the brink of an educational collapse. This affected a majority of students and teachers in my sample, and by extension in the larger education setting. While teachers in public schools fared better in terms of having protected salaries, there was no corresponding infrastructure for these schools to avoid pandemic-induced education setbacks. This sharp contrast speaks volumes about the inequalities in the Indian education sector and highlights the problems that need to be addressed by policymakers.
Students missed out on two years of in-school learning and although teachers tried their best to help students recover from this educational setback with after-school free coaching and counseling in some cases, there are certain permanent losses such efforts can never overcome. Students lost out on social skills, and became more immersed in their electronic devices. As it has been reported widely in the US, this could be akin to substance abuse. Teachers were not able to connect with the students and properly teach. This greatly affected a whole generation of students and their education.
Education is a central pathway to the development and freedoms of human beings; it is not merely a commercial enterprise; all children deserve equal access to top quality education, and on a continual basis. The setback from the pandemic slowed the progress of a vast majority of students significantly – given the already existing inequalities in education between public and private schools, rural and urban ones, among different identity groups (e.g. caste), students at the bottom of the hierarchy (such as rural public school students) have been set back the most and it is not clear if this widened gap can or will ever be addressed.
Future crises have to produce a policy response that channels resources proportional to the unequal setbacks that different groups of students have experienced. To prevent the bleak situation that prevailed in rural public schools in a future crisis, the government ought to provide devices and Internet for all students and teaching faculty. The state should work closely with those industries that have an impact on education and work on subsidizing the provision of essential supplies, so that a fundamental developmental process of a vast majority does not take a nosedive setting back the development of an entire country – a poor and developing one.
In the office of the school head/principal of a small public school in Kavali, I was talking to a teacher after I finished interviewing the students. The teacher was detailing the loss of discipline of students over the years of the pandemic, along with their two-year education loss. She broke down and sobbed for a few moments while describing this great setback to education in her school – she might as well have been speaking for all the severely affected public schools as well as a substantial majority of students and teachers in the schooling system of South India.
Nishant Vakulabharanam is a high school senior at the Calhoun School in New York City. He is the co-chair of the school’s Diversity and Accountability Board, and a facilitator of the South Asian Affinity Group. Nishant is interested in pursuing History and Sociology in higher studies.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the guidance and feedback from Meghan Chidsey, Jason Tebbe, Eric Osorio, Dileep Kumar, V. Ramakrishna, C. Sarada, R. Kotireddy, Sripad Motiram, V. Rajagopal, R. Shailendra, Vidya Vakulabharanam, Surinder Jodhka, Purendra Prasad, Michael Ash, Leonce Ndikumana, and Ashok Gurung in researching and writing this piece.