Research

Reading allies like a book: How smart framing spreads education in India

By focusing on solutions rather than causes, Pratham — a non-profit organization dedicated to primary education in India — has been remarkably successful in motivating donors and volunteers, not to mention the children this program has brought back into classrooms. According to Balaji Koka, associate professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, much of the organization's effectiveness comes from wise framing of the problem and solutions at hand. What's more, Pratham's approach could serve as a primer for any business trouper trying to rally office forces.

2007-10-24

In a country where 40 percent of children drop out of school by the eighth grade, it would be easy to criticize parents for not caring enough, slam the government for not spending enough, or vilify schools for not holding enough of a child's interest to keep her coming back to class.

According to United Nations figures, India's literacy rate is 61 percent, nearly 30 percentage points lower than the literacy rate of 90.9 percent in mainland China. Not surprisingly, there is plenty of finger pointing and blame associated with this Indian problem.

But, you won't find it coming from Pratham, a highly successful non-profit organization that operates under a simple and broad-brushed mission: "every child in school and learning well." Pratham's mission statement reveals few details, but that is likely to be one of the reasons that the group succeeds.

According to Balaji Koka, associate professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, much of this organization's effectiveness comes from wise framing of the problem and solutions at hand. What's more, Pratham's approach could serve as a primer for any business trouper trying to rally office forces.

Picture this

"Framing is a mental construct that you put around a problem or phenomenon," explains Ravi Madhavan, associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School of Business. He, Koka and Michael Hitt of Texas A&M University have been studying Pratham for the last three years under a grant from the National Science Foundation.

According to Madhavan, the way a speaker frames a situation will affect how the listener perceives it. He playfully offers this example: A young monk and an older monk are arguing about whether it is OK to smoke and pray simultaneously. They decide to ask their bishop.

To the young monk, the bishop says, "No! That would demean the action of praying." To the older monk, the bishop says, "Of course. You can pray any time you want." The different answers result from different questions, Madhavan explains. The old monk heard a "yes" when he asked, "Is it OK to pray while I smoke?" The younger one was told "no" after asking, "Is it OK to smoke while I pray?"

But, framing involves more than language, Koka adds. In the context of social movements, frames are supposed to have three things: a statement of the problem, diagnosis of the problem's causes, and identification of solutions and actions to be taken.

Why is framing important? "By definition, framing will include or exclude people," Koka continues. That's critical for any organization, but it's especially vital in non-profit ones, where pay likely lags behind the corporate sector.

For non-profit entities, having workers embrace the organizational mission is essential to keep people inspired and motivated, he explains. Framing is equally important to form partnerships and alliances with donors, volunteers and others who can empower the non-profit — or any organization — to achieve its mission.

According to Koka, Pratham's framing forged vital relationships by skipping what framing literature might see as a crucial step. Rather than defining the problem, stating its causes and then presenting solutions, Pratham managers skipped the middle step altogether.

"If you start looking at issues and saying this or that is the problem, you're going to alienate a lot of people," Koka notes. "But, no one argues with the idea of providing education to little children. That's why Pratham's framing is so important."

The no-blame game

It would be easy to find people, classes, and conditions to blame for India's educational shortcomings. For one thing, prejudices from the Indian caste system of social stratification sometimes come into play. Teachers generally are born into an upper caste.

Many of the illiterates were born into lower ones, and some are among the "untouchables," a hereditary class regarded as unclean by the people of various castes. Such traditions leave children vulnerable to teacher discrimination or indifference, Koka explains.

This is especially true in rural areas and small villages. There may be apathy toward education at home, too, he notes. Many of the children who don't go to school come from families where illiteracy has been the norm for generations. "There is no tradition of education," he says, and this cultural issue is the target of some reformers. Other activists go after the schools themselves.

"They say it's a resource problem," Koka states. "But if you say it's a resource problem, you need to be talking in terms of trying to get more money for schools, materials, teachers, benches in the classroom, things like that." India spends around 300,000 million rupees per year on education, he continues.

Of that, 170,000 million rupees go to primary education. The rest go to secondary and tertiary education, such as the government-funded engineering, business and medical colleges. "This is a class issue. Much of the money has been spent on middle-class people like me, where we get this phenomenally good education virtually free," he says.

According to Koka, "When you say you need to increase primary education's share of the money, people understand it as something that will happen at the expense of college. The middle class and the elite run the country.

They're not going to cut money for engineering, medical and management education. They are the people benefiting from it." Besides, the government has other demands on its coffers to worry about. Money. Class struggles. Caste discrimination.

Pratham doesn't fault any of them, and that, Koka says, makes all the difference for this organization. "You want to focus on the solution rather than attributing blame," he states. "That way, you get a lot of people on your bandwagon rather than eliminating people you desperately need."

Winning buy-in

As of May of this year, the 15-year-old Pratham was touching approximately 350,000 children in 21 of India's 28 states. Programs revolve around pre-school education, as well as homework help and advocacy for those who are or should be in the classroom.

Running the programs in the slums and neighborhoods where they are needed are young women volunteers, most of whom range in age from 18 to 30 and live in those same slums. The average teacher has an 8th-grade education or, perhaps, a 10th-grade one at best.

She teaches a couple dozen children in her home or a nearby courtyard using materials from Pratham and following a curriculum the organization has developed. She earns about 500 rupees — $12.72 in U.S. dollars — each month as an "honorarium."

These volunteers may not have the same teaching credentials as those who teach in public schools, but they have something else to bring children and parents into their classrooms. Their methods work. Among the 140 million children aged 6 to 14 in Indian primary schools, only 30 million or so can read full paragraphs, Pratham's web site notes.

Some 40 million recognize a few letters of the alphabet. Another 40 million can read a few words. Those who can't read at all equal the number of those who can — 30 million. Meanwhile, some 64 percent of children who enter Pratham's programs are in the organization's first category of proficiency, meaning that they cannot recognize letters of the alphabet.

After 45 days in the program, 70 percent have moved up to Pratham's "category three," meaning they can read words, but not sentences and paragraphs. In the mathematics track, the children move from being unable to recognize numbers to being able to add and subtract in the same rapid 45 days.

The cost to provide such proficiency averages less than $15 per child. It is results such as these that help Pratham overcome the legacy of generations-old illiteracy in poor families. Both Koka and Madhavan recall hearing the story of one mother who was surprised to discover her child could read after he started reading the credits rolling on the screen at the end of a movie.

Once she knew her child could read, education found new value in her eyes. In other words, Pratham doesn't push the value of education; it allows demonstrations of proficiency to prove it. "Many parents, after coming into contact with Pratham, take their children out of public schools and put them in private ones," Madhavan says.

"We're talking about parents who may be illiterate themselves — they may be maids or rickshaw pullers — but they buy into the benefit of education for their children." Pratham also seeks and gets plenty of support from corporations worldwide.

How? By speaking the language of the corporate heart: "It's cost-effective," Pratham leaders tell corporate donors. Plus, the organization provided measurement of its success, an almost unheard of and businesslike move among Indian charities.

Another smart faming move was staying away from details in messaging. "This organization has been very successful in keeping the donors focused on the large picture," Madhavan observes. "What this does is give them a lot of flexibility with respect to specific programs."

The domain of Pratham — education for children who are out of school — is a "rather large sandbox," he continues. But, on the flip side, "The more specific the value proposition an organization brings to a donor, the more likely the donor and the organization might diverge" in philosophy or goals.

Hence, "framing the organization in terms that are as broad as possible builds a coalition that is as broad as possible," according to Madhavan. Plus, Pratham leaders are not "ideologically pure," a polite way Koka uses to describe institutions that take a narrow and chauvinistic view of what's right and wrong in operations.

For instance, unlike some Indian organizations, Pratham doesn't shy away from foreign money. It takes donations from anyone and any country. Pratham will work with any organization, too, including local governments, schools and corporations that supply both rupees and volunteers.

And, Pratham leaders are very pragmatic. They take small bites out of the problem rather than trying to swallow it whole. A case in point is school registration, which can be a difficult chore for migrant workers who follow construction jobs around the country.

Registration usually requires a birth certificate, transfer papers from the previous school and a day away from the job that feeds a worker's family. All of these may be tough for an illiterate worker to give. In Bombay, if the local woman representing Pratham brings a child to school, her testimony is enough to get the child enrolled, even without the requisite certificates, Koka says.

"There are little ways Pratham breaks down barriers for the children." Along with "chipping away at institutional inertia," Koka says Pratham does "an end run around the system by teaching children themselves." That, he says, brings in criticism that the organization lets Indian education officials off the hook. "But what does it matter?" he asks. "Let the children learn anyway."

Bottom Line:

• The way communicators frame problems and solutions affects how others will perceive them.
• In social movements, framing often involves three steps: statement of the problem, identification of its causes and a declaration of what can be done to rectify the situation.
• Pratham, a non-profit organization dedicated to primary education, skips the step of identifying causes and assigning blame for India's 39 percent illiteracy rate.
• By focusing on solutions to the problem rather than its causes, Pratham has been remarkably successful in motivating donors and volunteers, not to mention the children this program has brought back into classrooms.

Leadership Management