Senior Consultant, The Brookings Institution and USA's Center for Universal Education

Vyjayanthi Sankar is a senior consultant with The Brookings Institution, USA’s Center for Universal Education, and works closely with Brookings India. A leading Education, Assessment and Management expert, Vyjayanthi’s clients include the World Bank, UNICEF, Governments, several NGOs and CSR. At Brookings, Vyjayanthi researches on building a regional learning assessment for South Asia and supports the Learning Metric Task Force by strengthening capacity for educational assessments in the region.

In 2013-14, Vyjayanthi was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Humphrey Fellowship by the US Congress and spent the year in Penn State University for her academic work and at The World Bank in Washington DC. Prior to her Fulbright Fellowship, Vyjayanthi was part of the start-up team in Educational Initiatives (EI) as Vice President since 2003, and founded its Large Scale Assessment Division and built it to become the leading assessment provider in South Asia. Vyjayanthi has pioneered Large Scale Learning Achievement studies in South Asia with nearly 90 large research and assessment projects. The most recent and prominent ones are the 18 state ‘Student Learning Study’ done with support of Google, lauded by the Govt of India’s Joint Review Mission as , “the largest education study of its kind in the world with a methodologically rigorous testing cycle and with results more interesting than NCERT or ASER studies”; the ‘Annual Status of Student Learning’ in Bhutan done under the aegis of the King of Bhutan and the ‘Quality Education study’ in partnership with Wipro in India’s ‘top’ schools.

Her experience at Educational Initiatives also include working with the governments and the development sector in South Asia – India, Bhutan, Maldives; specialising in Organisational Strategy, Operational and Financial performance, Business Development and building Global Partnerships with an extensive network of funders, governments, NGOs and CSR. Vyjayanthi’s technical and academic expertise in student learning includes program evaluation, public policy, large scale assessments, curriculum research, pedagogy, advanced psychometrics and multivariate statistics.

Vyjayanthi has presented several research papers on student learning and in prestigious forums such as the National Council of Educational Measurement (NCME)-USA, Language Testing Research Consortium (LTRC)-China and United Kingdom’s Forum for International Education and Training (UKFIET). She was invited as a mission member for the 20th SSA Joint Review Mission by Govt. of India and the World Bank in 2014. She was a member of the advisory board of the Educational Survey Division of NCERT, India in 2012-14. She co-authored the ‘National Strategy Paper for Educational Assessments’ by TSG, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India in 2012. She is currently an expert member for the Southeast Asia Ministers of Education Organisation Secretariat’s SEA-PLM, a regional learning assessment for South East Asia. Vyjayanthi also serves on the board of a few NGOs in education.