Education For All: Hearing Minority Parent Voice about Public Education in India

This research article explores minority parents' unique hopes, challenges and fears concerning public education in India. Global efforts to provide Education for All have fallen short of achieving educational equity. Lack of educational equity persists due to a variety of conditions, including the failure to take into account local peculiarities. To inform programming of one local school project, the perspectives of minority parents were collected during a focus group held in Aurangabad, India in 2013. Focus group comments were coded and analyzed to identify significant themes. The findings identified factors explaining why minority students are not successful attending public schools or participating in national exams in India. Results and recommendations from this focus group are shared to promote dialogue among school leaders, government organizations and parents to better understand the local public school context and implement practices and policies to reach international education targets and make progress towards Education for All. Keywords: Educational Equity, Parent Involvement, Minority Parent Perspective, Preschool and Early School Programming, Global Education, Focus Group MethodologyChildren have a fundamental human right to an education. This principle has been accepted by nearly every nation. However, despite efforts to increase access to education around the world, there remain large gaps in the opportunity for learning, particularly for children in emerging Third World countries. Global efforts fall short of achieving educational equality because they do not address significant details pertinent to local communities. Each and every community and local organization needs specific research and feedback to make actual improvements to education and increase opportunities for its citizens. Part of the research needed to realize this local orientation includes reaching out to parents and asking for their perspective.In the country of India, Hands of Freedom is one example of a local organization that works to address community concerns. It focuses on reducing poverty and improving the quality of life for families living in some of the poorest areas of both rural and urban India. Since these community initiatives meet local needs, the programming becomes embedded and self-sustaining (J. Borde, personal communication, June, 2014).Hands of Freedom was started in early 2008 to address issues of extreme poverty in India. Hands of Freedom began in one district in India and now, in 2015, serves five urban districts across India. The people served by this agency live in extreme poverty, their families having been classified in the lowest levels of the old caste system, referred to as Untouchables in the Indian vernacular. To ensure sustainable community change, Hands of Freedom provides training, micro saving, and loan programs to support individuals and families as they open small businesses that provide goods and services to meet local community needs. Hands of Freedom also constructs clean water wells, and works to expand programming for basic health care services in local communities. Recently, they opened early school programs in two Indian urban districts to offer educational programming and meet local daycare needs. These schools are registered with the national government and use standardized formats and curricula guides to structure programming (J. Borde, personal communication, February, 2012).A group of educators from Minnesota traveled to India to help Hands of Freedom establish one of the organization's educational projects by providing both teacher and leadership training. The author, a member of the visiting team, helped provide leadership and teacher training, and oversaw the focus group research. As an assistant professor in Educational Leadership, Dr. Wilson was interested in working with minority parents through Hands of Freedom and doing qualitative field research in India.In a focus group, the team interviewed parents who expressed their hopes and dreams for their children, along with the challenges and fears they deal with when sending their children to early school programs in India. …