World's top teacher May have already solved post-covid education

Two months ago, the 2020 Global Teacher Prize was awarded to Ranjitsinh “Ranjit” Disale, a teacher in rural, Western India.  The story is so inspiring I can’t even do it justice with a summary.  Just watch:

In an extraordinarily challenging year, I would have been more than happy to simply take some inspiration from this life-changing man to lift my spirits and leave it at that.  I can’t imagine facing the obstacles he overcame like child marriage, child labor, and lack of a functioning school building.  Those all seem, at first glance, like problems of a hundred years ago that are hard to fathom having to break through today.  His perseverance, his willingness, his energy - amazing.

I’ve watched, read, re-watched, and re-read everything I can find on Ranjit Disale (I recommend this, this, and this).  This has been a tough school year, I’ve been in a slump, and I can use all the inspiration I can find.  Once the “wow” factor wore off, however, I noticed something else in my re-reading and re-watching - Ranjit Disale didn’t just solve problems of the past.

He already created the perfect post-Covid educational system.

It might be easy to look at Disale’s situation and feel like it bears no resemblance to our own - like it is a different world.  However, there are four ways I think that the obstacles of Disale’s last ten years are going to match the obstacles we face in the next ten.

1. He convinced his community that education is worth it

Disale recalls a time when he visited families imploring them to send their students to school, and they wouldn’t do it.  

Sound familiar?

Thousands of students have simply disappeared from schools this year.  Thousands.  Disale also recalls being told by those families that they simply didn’t see people going to school being guaranteed good jobs.

​Sound familiar?

Perception of the importance of education in this country has been on the way down for years, and Covid-19 pulled the carpet out from under it.  Even before Covid-19 gave thousands of families an easy way to disappear,

• After ten years, there is still a belief that students don’t learn “real” math or reading thanks to the Common Core
• Two years ago, 16 million people loved and shared a viral video that inspiringly declared that school teaches all the wrong things in all the wrong ways
• The fact that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of school is commonly lauded as proof that nobody really needs school or formal education
• And so on

Climbing out of the Covid-19 hole is going to mean not only convincing our communities that education is worth it, but also making sure that it actually is.  Look no farther for Disale for how to do both.

2. He personalizes learning


Disale makes no bones about the fact that even though his students are the same age, they’re nowhere near ready for the same learning.

Sound familiar?

The latest numbers I read speculate that the average student in America has improved about 50% of normal in reading and 30% of normal in math this year.  Pile those gaps on top of the ones that already existed in many of those same students, add in the students who have skipped school entirely, plus the ones getting top-notch online instruction and private tutors, and you have:

Students who are the same age but nowhere near ready for the same learning.

I’ve already written at length about my fears that, a year or two from now, we’re just going to plop everybody in their age-based grade-level and hope for the best like nothing ever happened.  Personalizing pace and content in certain areas should absolutely part of the solution to the problem we face.  Make no mistake - it is going to be extremely difficult to do.  But if one man can create a process for doing it in a remote area with minimal resources, surely we can figure it out, too.

3. He demonstrates that improvements in education don’t happen without improvements in society

Disale keenly understood that improvements in education follow improvements in society, not the other way around.  Education can absolutely be a force that changes an individual’s future, but when you look at communities or countries who drastically change their societal-level educational outcomes, they always follow or come alongside other progress, like lower poverty, decreased crime, better access to healthcare, and so on.  We may like to think that it works the other way, but at least on the larger scale, it doesn’t.

Disale did things in the right order - he worked to organize his community first.  The leaps in education he helped foster came after greater progress in his community.  We would be wise to learn from him.  Our children need great schools after this pandemic, but they need a lot more than that.

4. He became is own leader

From all I can find, Disale’s drive and decisions appear to have been his own.  I don’t see any evidence of a school board, mayor, or governor type figure who had a vision that just needed the right person to carry out.  I think we probably need to learn from that.  I’m not sure that most of us can expect a vision or plan to come from our elected or appointed leaders, and given the state of our country right now, I don’t think most of us would trust it if one did.  There are times when do-ers need leaders, and there are times when do-ers become their own leaders.  Education during the pandemic has been the latter, and I think the time that follows will be as well.

​Ranjit Disale, rightly named the best teacher on Earth, overcame obstacles that many teachers haven’t had to think about for decades.  He may have also given us the keys to solve the ones that are right around the corner.

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