Building Strong Foundations in Education: Lessons from India

Pratham is an innovative learning organization created to improve the quality of education in India. As one of the largest non-governmental organizations in the country, Pratham focuses on high-quality, low-cost, and replicable interventions to address gaps in the education system, equipping children with strong literacy and numeracy skills for their futures. The US continues to have an achievement gap, starting at an early age. What can we learn from the experiences in India that can help inform new directions to assure equity and access to quality programming?

The lecture will provide an overview of Pratham, their approach to community involvement, early childhood and the use of technology. This event will be moderated by Philip Fisher, Director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, and the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford.

About the Speaker:

Rukmini Banerji, CEO at Pratham Education Foundation

Rukmini Banerji completed her BA at St. Stephen’s College and attended the Delhi School of Economics. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and earned her PhD at the University of Chicago.

Banerji worked as a program officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago for several years before returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham as part of the leadership team. There, she led the organization’s research and assessment efforts, which has included the internationally acknowledged Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since 2005, and served as director of the ASER Centre in New Delhi for ten years.

In 2008, Banerji was the inaugural recipient of the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar Award conferred by the Government of Bihar, India. Over the years, she has represented Pratham and the ASER Centre in various national and international forums. She writes frequently on education in India and enjoys creating books and stories for children.

About the Moderator:

Philip Fisher, Director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood

Philip Fisher is the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. His research, which has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1999, focuses on developing and evaluating scalable early childhood interventions in communities, and on translating scientific knowledge regarding healthy development under conditions of adversity for use in social policy and programs.

He is particularly interested in the effects of early stressful experiences on children's neurobiological and psychological development, and in prevention and treatment programs for improving children's functioning in areas such as relationships with caregivers and peers, social-emotional development, and academic achievement. Dr. Fisher is also interested in the brain's plasticity in the context of therapeutic interventions.

He is the developer of a number of widely implemented evidence-based interventions for supporting healthy child development in the context of social and economic adversity, including Treatment Foster Care Oregon for Preschoolers (TFCO-P), Kids in Transition to School (KITS), and Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND). He is the recipient of the 2012 Society for Prevention Research Translational Science Award, and a 2019 Fellow of the American Psychological Society.