New Student Photo Series 2011 Post #19 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - SIPA Admissions Blog

New Student Photo Series 2011 â€" Post #19 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - SIPA Admissions Blog New student photos continue to roll in.   See this entry for details on how to submit your own photos if you are an incoming student. Kenneth Hau, MPA 13 Suzhou, China: A father navigates a busy street filled with cars on a bike while his child sits in a makeshift baby seat. Beijing, China: Fried scorpions are a common snack found on the streets of Beijing. I did not have the guts to try them. Xian, China: The world famous terracotta soldiers of Xian. Fun fact: The soldiers originally had color, but upon exposure to the air, the color immediately faded due to oxidation. The result is the dull earthen color you see now. There are many more soldiers that are left buried until future technology allows us to excavate them without losing their colors. Name: Sarayu Natarajan Degree Program: MPA-DP These photos are based on what Ive been doing at work. Please note that this will be published at http://www.enterprisingschools.com/blogs as well. I work with Gray Matters Capital Foundation, a philanthropic foundation working to improve the quality of education in low cost private schools. We work with over 300 schools, currently in two Indian cities Hyderabad and New Delhi. We hope our work in rating schools and sharing these ratings with parents will help strengthen the feedback loop between poor parents and these entrepreneurial schools, thereby driving quality. These are pictures that were taken in Alpha School, Silver Dale High School and Little Century High School, both in Hyderabad, India. They were taken as part my work in leading the design of a School Report Card. Sandeep Kumar (Silver Dale High School) runs a school in the peri-urban areas of Hyderabad where fees average Rs.350/mo (About $8). Parents are mainly daily wage labourers and their children in the school are first generation learners. Sandeep Kumar (Silver Dale High School) runs a school in the peri-urban areas of Hyderabad where fees average Rs.350/mo (About $8). Parents are mainly daily wage labourers and their children in the school are first generation learners. However, for any initiative to be successful in this market, buy-in from stakeholders is critical. We learnt that that buy-in is driven by comprehension. We drove the process of comprehension by developing the product through feedback from the main consumers â€" parents. We are looking at ways to enhance comprehension among parents through teachers and most importantly, students. Students at Little Century High School giving feedback on our design of a School Report Card Sandhya Chari, SIPA alum (MPA, ’11) and Principal Consultant, Policy Innovations, explaining the report card to a group of teachers at Alpha School Ganesh and V. Sriram (students at Alpha School) discuss the report card