This study shows how middle-tier bureaucrats in India implement learning reforms by translating complex instructional goals into simplified, compliance-oriented routines. It demonstrates how bureaucrats’ limited pedagogical knowledge and performance pressures shape what reforms become in practice, even when motivation and political commitment are high.

This study shows that implementing actors can support the goals of a learning reform yet remain doubtful of its effectiveness. It finds that their skepticism stems from disagreements with policymakers over how to diagnose the problem of low learning.

This study shows how vague policy goals around foundational literacy and numeracy in India are interpreted narrowly by actors during implementation. It demonstrates how ambiguous policy language can turn ambitious reforms into routine, add-on tasks rather than substantive change.

This study shows how state and private actors construct foundational literacy as a policy priority in India, revealing the politics behind consensus-building in education reform. Through a corpus analysis of policy and program documents, it highlights the use of science and evidence-based discourse, common-sense claims, and crisis narratives as key problem framing strategies to justify policies.

This study shows how a post-colonial education reform in India sought to decolonize schooling through a locally grounded model of learning. It demonstrates how the push for a single contextually relevant approach broke down in practice, revealing the political and social limits of ambitious policy design.

This essay shows how the Indian state’s uneven regulation of private schooling amid the rapid expansion of education markets produces persistent conflict and weak enforcement. It highlights how contextual complexity, resistance from private actors, and state forbearance shape the governance of education markets.

This essay shows how the ‘learning loss’ discourse in Indian education was produced and circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic. It critically examines how crisis narratives shape educational governance and narrow how learning is imagined in moments of disruption.