Strengthening Teaching-Learning And Results for States

The objective of the Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) Operation for India is to improve the quality and governance of school education in selected states. The STARS Program has two results areas: 1. National component that supports efforts to improve overall monitoring and measurement activities in the Indian school education system and 2. State component with five sub-components. Results Area 1: National Component - at the national level, four goals will frame STARS support to Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). The first goal is to strengthen MHRD’s national data systems to capture robust and authentic data on retention, transition, and completion rates. Second, STARS will support MHRD in improving states’ Performance Grading Index (PGI) scores, again by incentivizing states’ governance reform agendas through State Incentive Grants (SIGs), with financial support from STARS. Third, the operation will support the strengthening of learning assessment systems. Specifically, STARS will supply multi-year financing for India’s participation in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2021, including establishing an independent National Assessment Center to manage that participation. Results Area 2: State Component has five sub-components. RA 2.1: Strengthening Early Years Education: Samagra Shiksha expands on the government’s existing early years learning program, which covers grades one and two, by providing guidelines for the introduction into government schools of two years of Early Childhood Education (ECE). States are devising different approaches to meeting this new challenge. Monitoring of states’ progress in strengthening early years education will focus on the development of teacher training modules for ECE teachers and facilitators and the percentage of ECE teachers and facilitators who receive training on those modules. RA 2.2: Improving Learning Assessment Systems - all of the selected states intend to use...