The second teacher effect
Thirty-two crowded schools in Sylhet added a second shift and an assistant teacher. Reading levels moved first.
Rehana Parvin's school used to run one classroom at sixty children, which is not a class so much as an audience. The second shift split them: thirty in the morning, thirty in the afternoon, each with an assistant teacher hired from the same neighbourhood as the children.
Reading levels moved within two terms. It is hard to learn syllables when you are watching the back of someone's head, and thirty children per room is a different exercise from sixty. The program's assessment rounds, run each term by the district team, showed the jump clearly in the younger grades.
“Sixty children cannot learn to read in one room. Thirty can, and we did not have to turn anyone away.”
Attendance was the harder number. It held above ninety percent until the harvest, when older children are wanted in the fields and every school in the district sees the dip. The program publishes the dip rather than averaging it away; the November note shows attendance at eighty-six percent in grades four and five.
The honest summary, written by Lin Zhao who runs measurement for the whole portfolio: "The second teacher is the cheapest classroom we can buy, but it is not free to keep. Salaries are the whole cost, so the exit plan — district budgets taking the line item by 2028 — is the part that decides whether this was a program or a pause."