Like 24 karat Gold: Scale as a Cultural Object of Education Reform

• In Event: Scale, status, and expansion: Cultural-historical studies of education and democracy in South Asia

Proposal

*Like 24 karat Gold: Scale as a Cultural Object of Education Reform*

I was sitting with the leadership team of Sharan, an afterschool program serving children in the urban slums of Pune, India. The team desperately wanted to expand their impact. Mazhar, a consultant from a social enterprise incubator, offered some perspective.

“Yes, you need to scale,” Mazhar said, but cautioned: "I think of scale like gold. You might have 24-karat gold, something pure and valuable. You can maybe get it down to 18 karats, it would still be acceptable. But once you're down to 14 carats, you lose the essence."

Mazhar captured Sharan’s dilemma: stay treasured or lose the gold.

In this proposal, I argue that “scale” is more than a goal to be achieved. Through my study of Sharan, I present scale as a cultural object, a discursive symbol guiding aspirations and organizational identities, giving meaning to a new class of educators.

*The Discourse of Scale*
The dream of scale is to solve large challenges by leveraging economies of scale, marginal utility, and incentives (List, 2022). In education, scale has translated into the “What Works” paradigm, with an underlying ethos to find generalizable solutions to concrete problems in a knowable world (see Akyeampong et al., 2023, Kremer et al., 2013).

Scale has been challenged as harmful, the result of a “universal idolatry of giantism,” (Schumacher, 1975, p. 70). Homogenizing one-size-fits-all approaches are promoted (Tikly, 2015). Policy solutions become magic bullets, dismissing local knowledge (Hobart, 2002; Chabbot, 2014). Nevertheless, scale has captured the imagination of education reform efforts and created a “scalability zeitgeist,” (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022), a context meriting deeper exploration.

*Method*
I want to better understand scale as part of a system of symbolic representations. Scale can be considered a cultural symbol representing hopes, aspirations, and fear, but also creating possibilities, identities, and organizational truths. Ethnography is well suited to exploring this field (Wolcott, 2008). I explore scale as a part of a system of symbolic representations that give meaning and purpose to human interactions (Geertz, 2017).

I worked with Sharan over a period of 18 months, conducting four months-long visits alternating with frequent online interviews and chats. I kept detailed field notes (Emerson et al., 2011), and conducted over a hundred recorded interviews – all transcribed and translated (Spradley, 2016). Transcripts and field notes were coded and analyzed for prominent themes (Saldaña, 2021).

*Three Vignettes of Scale*
(1) Five years, 10,000 Students, Ten Centres
“In five years, Sharan will serve 10,000 students across ten centres!” Khoj often said. These centres would address what Khoj found was a key challenge in education: “The overall problem that we are looking at is, kids spend very little time in school…We don’t have any solution which is working at scale that looks at time as an opportunity.”

Sharan would provide that solution. In a few catchy phrases, Khoj had turned afterschool programs into a scalable solution to an identifiable problem, an easy-to-comprehend fix to a persistent educational issue.

(2) The Dark Store
Sharan’s strategy was to scale their satellite centres. Hamza, a co-founder, explained the idea in stilted English.

"If satellite centres can sustain from fees, that will be scalable model. Entire operational things…all of those sustainable from fees. That model might be similar to a 'dark store' model."

Hamza was referencing the wildly successful strategy of delivery services in India like Flipkart and Blinkit (Sanghi et al., 2024.). These companies use “dark stores” as merchandise hubs, avoiding high overhead costs.

To work, Sharan needed to increase fee collection. Sharan frequently let parents slide without paying. But Hamza had created a discount program, reducing fees by ₹1,800 for a guaranteed up-front payment. He now felt he had a scalable model.

(3) Scaling Staff
The largest obstacle to scale was hiring staff. Entering Sharan’s third year, 18 of their 33 mentors were new.

One of Sharan’s best mentors was Jayavsi. One day I walked through the Lohiya Nagar slum with Jayavsi, children constantly approaching for a deep hug. “This one is my favorite student,” she said to me for each child. She was trusted by a community consistently disappointed by education. “I need a thousand Jayasvis!” Khoj told me.

Perhaps the most important hire was an instructional coach. After an intensive interview process, the team settled on hiring Kalindi. “She’s really aspirational,” Khoj said. “She could be leading a city if we scale.”

Kalindi would be vital to strengthening quality. However, after a few weeks, she resigned. Khoj took to Sharan’s Whatsapp group to respond:

"Hi everyone,
I’m writing to let you know that Kalindi has decided to accept another opportunity. This news was quite sudden.
We have respected Kalindi’s decision and have released her. For us, the mission continues. 💎✨💛"

“We were hurt,” Drishti, another co-founder, told me, despite the message’s tone. The news was a blow to Sharan’s growth plans.

*Discussion*
Scale is often framed as a goal for development (Banerjee and Duflo, 2012; Seelos and Nair, 2017; Gibbs et al., 2021). This study reframes scale as a cultural experience, a discourse constructing a social reality through which people interpret their world. The vignettes hint at three dimensions in this view.

First people like Khoj viewed themselves as entrepreneurs rather than educators, firmly embedded in start-up culture that has swarmed post-Liberalization India (Gupta, 2025; Irani, 2019). Second, scale constructed the possibility of replicating the dramatic success of enterprises like Blinkit. Lastly, scale distracted from understanding the grounded, empathetic work of its best teachers, like Jayasvi.

Scale was a linguistic currency; like gold it could be traded for access to the world of educational reform; but if diluted, scale lost its potency. Scaling after-school time or replicating a “dark store” model were strange, almost fanciful reform ideas. Perhaps they would succeed; but the essence of transformative work remained opaque. This study thus offers a novel interpretation of the rapidly changing culture of education, one defined by new norms, new symbols, and new discourses of hope.

Author

• Madhu Narayanan, Florida International University