Recent surveys have pointed to a fall in general performance of school students, post India’s lengthy Covid-19 school closures. We asked Anurag Behar, Vice-Chancellor of Azim Premji University, whether surveys or other such research are asking the right questions to improve school education, in context of both traditional challenges and those brought about by the pandemic. Research should be focused on how to improve education, and India is falling short in terms of both the amount of, and kinds of, research that we are doing, he told us in an interview. To improve research on education, practitioners such as teachers and education officers, not academics and policy-makers, should be setting the questions, said Behar.