Supply Chain Management-an Analysis of Education Supply Chain

AN ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATION SUPPLY CHAIN AND
SCM CHALLENGES IN K12 SCHOOLS
The goal of supply chain management (SCM) is to integrate and optimize activities within and across organizations for all stakeholders’ satisfaction. SCM in academia, which is called Educational SCM, aims at giving the best education possible for the students making effective use of the available resources. In the academia, the customers themselves provide their bodies and souls, minds, belongings, or information as inputs to the service processes. Supply chain management is needed for various reasons: improving operations, better outsourcing, increasing profits, enhancing customer satisfaction, generating quality outcomes, tackling competitive pressures and increasing globalization. SUPPLIERS
The suppliers in the Education System are of many categories.
Those that supply the Teaching Staff:
These are typically the teacher training colleges and institutions that offer degrees and diplomas to certify "trained" teachers for schools and colleges. In addition to Government funded/aided colleges , plenty of private institutions have come up that offer quality programs to train teachers. According to Mr.Sabharwal, Chairman of Team Lease, "The biggest challenge is linking the supply side -- the training institutes -- to the demand side -- the employers. Currently, supply and demand are in parallel universes, so most kids are not "job ready." On the government side, we do not link financing to outcomes and have not made government money available for private delivery. We also need to simultaneously tackle our school system because we cannot teach someone in six months what they should have learned [over] 15 years."
Those that supply the textbooks, study materials, teaching aids: The syllabi for different education systems(C.B.S.E., Matriculation, etc.) are first set by special boards for each category, a panel of educators then compile the material for the different textbooks , which are then published by the textbook publishers, Textbook Society of India, etc.
Those that supply other teaching aids, lab equipment, materials for co-curricular activities, sports equipment, furniture for the educational institution: The educational institutions usually have contracts with these kind of suppliers to ensure good quality products delivered on time.

THE SERVICE PROVIDER AND THE INVENTORY
The service providers are the educational institutions themselves, in this case the K12 schools. The inventory, then, is made up of:
The teaching staff comprising of the teachers who teach Math, Science, Language, Social Sciences, Physical Education, Arts and Crafts , IT, Music, Swimming and other co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.
The text books, software and other materials necessary to provide well rounded education, such as necessary lab apparatus, equipment for PE, crafts and other tools.
The admin and other staff such as the librarian, lab assistants, watchmen, gardeners, sanitary workers, etc. without whom the school cannot function efficiently.
Basic furniture including desks and chairs for the class rooms, black/white boards, playground equipment and other fixtures of the school campus which need to be changed/replaced only occasionally.
CONSUMERS
The consumers are the students who avail of the services of the school and get educated. The interesting thing is that the end consumers become the inventory for the higher educational institutions.
PROBLEMS
Shortage of appropriately qualified teaching staff , especially ones with the passion for teaching, is the major problem associated with the Education Supply Chain. The UNICEF report (2006) says,"19 % of the total primary schools are single teacher schools in India catering to nearly 12% of the total enrolment in primary classes . Systemic factors - lack of teachers (especially female), teacher absenteeism, irregular classes, overcrowded classrooms, and traditional methods of rote learning – have diminished the quality of teaching/learning and the support teachers and schools can provide children.
Within India, the teacher absence rate ranges from 15% in Maharashtra to 42% in Jharkhand. Again 16.29 per cent schools in the country still do not have two teachers. While Kerala has an average of 6 teachers in primary schools, in states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan the average number of teachers is even lower than 2. Uttar Pradesh still faces difficulty to provide even a single teacher in 921 primary schools. The average Pupil Teacher Ratio for All India is 1:42. Bihar has the worst teacher pupil ratio at 1:83. Though enrolment rates have shot up, there has not been a corresponding increase in the number of teachers."
According to The Times of India (2009), India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers. In the US, it’s 3,200 teachers per million people, in the Caribbean it’s 1,500, in the Arab countries it’s 800 and in India it’s 456 teachers per million people.

There are many reasons for this shortage:
• underfunding leading to low pay and benefits
• poor working conditions
• labor migration
• competition from other educational institutions
• low social status and recognition
• bad organization
• drain into other labor markets such as BPOs and sales
• poor standards in training institutes
• lack of sufficient motivation and incentives are the most common.
However, we will have to move beyond just fixing the matching problem -- connecting labor supply to demand -- to fixing the mismatch problem --repairing supply for demand.
RECRUITING EFFECTIVE TEACHERS
While the measurement of teacher effectiveness is a controversial issue, research in the area does suggest that more effective teachers tend to hold certain attitudes and beliefs. They have confidence in their own teaching ability, and in the power of teaching to make a difference to students’ lives. They are enthusiastic, caring towards students, and they are committed to their own professional improvement.
EMPIRICAL STUDY ON FACTORS AFFECTING TEACHER QUALITY
An empirical research has been done following four distinct lines that relate in varying ways to teacher quality. At the most aggregate level and possibly the most influential, a variety of studies have traced changes over time in the salaries of teachers relative to those in other occupations. Going beyond that, a second level of studies relates pay and other characteristics of teaching jobs to the characteristics of teachers in different schools and districts and teacher turnover. A third line of research, following naturally from these, relates teacher characteristics to student performance. It is the failure to find a strong relationship between the contributions of teachers to student achievement and other outcomes on the one hand and teacher education, experience and salaries on the other that is so inconsistent with the popular view of teachers as a key determinant of the quality of education. Finally, the fourth line of research appears to have solved this conundrum by demonstrating both the large impact of teachers on student learning and the lack of explanatory power of traditional quality measures.

The following solutions have been suggested:
First, because salaries of teachers have fallen relative to other jobs, some argue an obvious move is simply to restore teacher salaries to their previous position in the earnings distribution in order to attract better teachers into the profession.
• Second, states should adopt more stringent qualifications for teachers such as mandatory Master’s Degrees in order to improve quality. Salary increases are often but by no means always recommended along with more stringent qualifications in order to offset any possible negative impacts on teacher supply.
• Finally, an alternative set of policy proposals has taken a very different tact. These typically advocate less strict rather than stricter requirements in combination with incentives for higher teacher performance and improved school personnel practices.

LEARNING TO IDENTIFY EFFECTIVE TEACHERS
In choosing where to teach, personal factors such as caring responsibilities were equally important for the most and least effective teachers. But on professional factors, the two groups differed markedly. The most effective teachers placed much more emphasis on the chance to influence the direction of their schools. They sought out promotions, and said that better promotion opportunities would be more likely to hold them in a school. They were also much more likely to say that increased responsibilities and power would hold them in a school, while the least effective teachers tended to say that fewer responsibilities would keep them there.
The most effective teachers were also learners. They held higher qualifications than the least effective (even controlling for age and experience), were more likely to be currently studying, and were more likely to be involved in a professional association (such as their subject association). Many of them said that better professional development opportunities would attract them to and hold them in a school. Opportunities to learn and build on their pedagogical knowledge were important to them.
The most effective teachers also placed a much greater value on educational innovation as a means to draw them to or keep them in a school. The most effective teachers in the study were significantly more likely than the least effective to say they transferred into their school because they wanted to teach somewhere with a really innovative approach to education: effective primary teachers were twice as likely, and secondary teachers four times as likely, to mention innovativeness as a quality that attracted them to their current school.
PLACING AND RETAINING EFFECTIVE TEACHERS
• First, systems could attach a greater proportion of senior positions to the schools that are hardest to staff, with appropriate additional funding. Not all effective teachers want to be in leadership positions – some highly effective teachers are happy to remain in the classroom. Overall, however, a strong chance to move into a leadership position will tend to attract more very good teachers into hard-to-staff schools.
• Second, offering scholarships for further study could attract some of our better teachers to challenging schools, while providing the benefits of additional expertise and knowledge to the school community.
• Third, systems could work to create centers of innovation in some disadvantaged settings, with appropriate additional funds and training. The most effective teachers place a strong value on working somewhere that is breaking new educational ground. Fostering cutting-edge educational practice in hard-to-staff schools is likely to draw and hold some of our most competent teachers there.
• Fourth, schools in challenging settings need to ensure they allow good applicants for positions the capacity to negotiate about their roles and responsibilities. The most effective teachers tended to have clear ideas about what they would like to do in a school, so more negotiating power is likely to have a strong appeal for them.

PROBLEM OF TEACHER ABSENTEEISM & A SOLUTION WITH PARA TEACHERS
Teacher absence is more correlated with daily incentives to attend work: teachers are less likely to be absent at schools that have been inspected recently, that have better infrastructure, and that are closer to a paved road. Absence rates are generally higher in low-income states.
To overcome the problem of teacher shortage and teacher absenteeism the para teacher scheme has been introduced in India. Para educators are generally members of the same community in which they teach, and therefore, share many of the experiences and cultural practices of their students, including their primary languages and cultural practices. In India, the state of Rajasthan has successfully overcome the problem of both teacher shortage and teacher absenteeism through these para teachers under the ‘Shiksha Karmi Project’ which is also the origin of para teacher scheme in the country. In India, the state of Rajasthan has successfully overcome the problem of both teacher shortage and teacher absenteeism through para teachers.

India at present has more than 500 thousand para teachers in a number of states. The Government has pursued a fivefold strategy since the 1990’s to improve the quality of education in general. These include – improvement in the provision of infrastructure and human resources for primary education; provision of improved curriculum and teaching learning material; improvement in the quality of teaching learning process through the introduction of child centered pedagogy; attention to teacher capacity building, especially female teachers; and increased focus on specification and measurement of learners’ achievement levels.
With increased involvement of community in management and running of schools, as well as enhanced teacher support and development, it is expected that the issue of absenteeism will be addressed in time to come.
USE OF TECHNOLOGY - EBOOK READERS
For the next decade or so some solution will have to be devised and implemented to improve education for the children entering school. Beyond more teachers, there are only few options left. Technology is one of them. To increase the chance that the chosen technology will actually be effective, some precautions should be taken. Basically, the probability of success will vastly increase if the technology can be used and maintained by children for the intended purpose. Anything more complex or demanding risks being relegated to gather dust in a corner.
Current ebook readers are constructed for indoor use in the developed world. They do have too many unprotected openings and fragile components for a developing world environment. However, covering up these holes and putting in more robust components is not very difficult. For most ebook readers this would be a minor, and cheap design change, not a problem.
The use of ebook readers is quite simple. We drop in an ebook (or a shelf of ebooks) and we start turning pages. Apart from language and date and time there is not much to set. Theoretically, we can update the software of an ebook reader, but there is not often a need for doing that. An ebook reader can in most respects be considered to have zero-maintenance.
It is obvious that developing countries will not be able to double or triple their number of teachers in the short term. But after we have the wonderful gadgets and gear, it should improve education. As teachers will have to change their teaching habits, it is very advantageous to instruct them in using the technology to improve their lessons. Given the other obligations that occupy teachers, any face-to-face training courses have to be short. To make the changes permanent, an interactive follow up is needed over the months that follow the face-to-face courses.
An ebook reader will not only be an invaluable aid to the teaching staff in terms of student-teacher ratio, but it will also greatly reduce wastage in terms of repetitive printing of text books and other reading material.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the most effective steps which can be taken immediately to solve the teacher shortage problem are:
1. Increase salary for teachers to a level which is competitive and attractive when compared to other industries. This will prove to be an excellent incentive to draw the best talent.
2. Offer bigger promotions and performance incentives to retain the talent hired.
3. Provide a challenging environment which will nurture healthy competition and bold innovation. This will also improve the perceived importance and the prestige associated with intelligence and capabilities required for teaching.
4. Encourage and foster innovations in training methodologies.
5. Improve and motivate high quality standards with more certifications.
6. Collaboration in terms of peer review and training is an excellent tool to improve capacities
7. Consciously talk about, display and market the opportunities, potential and most of all the prestige and power inherent in the teaching profession.
8. Scale up the para teachers model to alleviate the shortage of teachers throughout the world.
9. Use technology wherever possible, if not to fully replace, at least to make level the teacher to student ratio more effective.
10. Improve quality standards in teacher training Institutes - The chairman of "Team Lease" Mr.Sabharwal suggests we do the following:
• Fix our labor laws, vocational training regime and education system
• We need a massive dose of deregulation, which will end the suffocating controls that hinder the creation of private capacity and sabotage competition.
• We need to separate financing from delivery and make government money available for private delivery.
• We need to link our financing to outcomes such as learning and jobs, because spending money is not the same as investing it.
• We need to decentralize the delivery systems such as employment exchanges, schools and industrial training institutes, which are all currently in the hands of state governments.

REFERENCES
1. Getting good teachers into challenging schools - By Suzanne Rice
2. How to Improve the Supply of High Quality Teachers - By Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin
3. http://www.unicef.org/india/resources_1551.htm - Unicef report- 2006
4. O’Brien, Elaine M. and Kenneth R., 1996, “Educational supply chain: a tool for strategic planning in tertiary education?” Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp.33-40
5. The Tmes of India (2009)
6. TeamLease 's Manish Sabharwal on Fixing India 's People Supply Chain - Published : April 08, 2010 in India Knowledge@Wharton
7. The Challenges for India’s Education System - By Marie Lall, Chatham House
8. An Empirical Study of Educational Supply Chain Management for the Universities - By Md. Mamun Habib, and Chamnong Jungthirapanich
9. We Cannot Train More Teachers, We Must Empower Them with Technology - By Rob van Son - for Educational Technology Debate
10. http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/01/16/india-education-report-2009/

References: 1. Getting good teachers into challenging schools - By Suzanne Rice 2. How to Improve the Supply of High Quality Teachers - By Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin 3. http://www.unicef.org/india/resources_1551.htm - Unicef report- 2006 4. O’Brien, Elaine M. and Kenneth R., 1996, “Educational supply chain: a tool for strategic planning in tertiary education?” Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp.33-40 5. The Tmes of India (2009) 6. TeamLease 's Manish Sabharwal on Fixing India 's People Supply Chain - Published : April 08, 2010 in India Knowledge@Wharton 7. The Challenges for India’s Education System - By Marie Lall, Chatham House 8. An Empirical Study of Educational Supply Chain Management for the Universities - By Md. Mamun Habib, and Chamnong Jungthirapanich 9. We Cannot Train More Teachers, We Must Empower Them with Technology - By Rob van Son - for Educational Technology Debate 10. http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/01/16/india-education-report-2009/