Knowledge
Equal importance to both the poor kids and the rich is the way to fix India’s schooling system
US based commentator had a lot to say about the Union HRD minister’s policy making. While a volley of tweets echoed on social networks between the two figures. Ultimately, the Indian schooling system needs more than policies. It needs equal commitment towards rich and the poor kids.
Last week, the Union minister for Human Resource Development (HRD), Smriti Irani, tweeted half-a-dozen policy measures her ministry is undertaking. In toto, they appear to be pieces of a grand plan put together to monitor and track schools, school children and all possible educational parameters as minutely as possible.
The flurry of tweets that came before 10 am on April 23 were ostentatiously a knee-jerk reaction to an article, published in the Times of India that same morning, by the US-based commentator Sadanand Dhume, which said that Irani had “not exactly distinguished herself as minister for HRD”. The article claimed that the Narendra Modi-led BJP government was losing support among “the vocal middle class supporters who helped power it to office” for failing to match policy with politics and cited the lack of “education reform” and “failure to fix… the RTE” as a prime example of this problem.
Mindless policymaking?
Though the tweets may have been a reaction, but they hardly constituted a response, rather ironically they vindicated Dhume’s central criticism: that policy-making displayed “a lack of original ideas…”
The tweet that got the most play in the media was the plan for a day-by-day monitoring of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. An administrator of the education programme in a southern Indian state said this was mindless policy-making at its best, designed to ensure that no one did any work other than collate data.
Similarly, a 5-state study on how governments monitor schools found that head teachers and education officials spend vast amounts of time collecting data like school enrolment, attendance, mid-day meals, and so on. They have to send this data in different formats filling multiple forms, from 11 in Karnataka to 23 in Himachal Pradesh. This is only for information collated annually.
The RTE bugbear
While assessing the RTE, which he calls “possibly UPA’s single worst law”; Dhume cited private school administrator and London University professor Geeta Gandhi Kingdon as saying that the RTE is dragging Indian education backward because it places an emphasis on infrastructure, and not on learning outcomes. This weakness of the Act is now in the open and very few people will disagree on that. But the attacks on the RTE do not simply stop at quality, they are often also against the economically weaker students (EWS) quota, which gives poor children a shot at quality education.
RTE Section 12(1) (c) can be effectively described as a voucher-based school choice system. It gives poor parents the fantastic opportunity to go and pick a private school of their choice for their children. This section, noble in intent, was designed to allow poor children a chance to study in schools that deliver quality education.
Most quality private schools don’t want poor children for 2 reasons. Firstly, they feel that these poor children will bring down the standards of performance of their school which in today’s competitive market is a marker of a school’s success. Secondly, these school owners are also concerned about the low reimbursements from the government for these quota students. Presently, states like Uttar Pradesh, are reimbursing anything between 10% to 15% of the fee to the schools.
Another myth busted?
Another argument made repeatedly against the Act is RTE’s “list of onerous and often unrealistic requirements” which has led to the closure of 5,500 private schools. According to Dhume, these schools “educate poor students at affordable rates”. But the National Independent Schools Alliance, whose data he cited, is questionable as the data do not differentiates between schools that have closed and those that have received compliance notices.
The problem, said Anurag Behar, the CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, is that private schools balk at the monetary cost of RTE requirements for basic child safety standards and a child-friendly educational environment.
On Twitter, the HRD Minister responded to Dhume’s repetition of the school closure story to say that Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, who had made the same complaint to the HRD ministry, was asked for the names and addresses of the schools that had ostensibly been closed but had not been heard from since.
As for the claim that low-cost private schools actually “educate children”, there is enough evidence to show that this does not happen any more than it does in a standard government school. A voucher-based school choice study in Andhra Pradesh by Karthik Murlidharan-Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Azim Premji Foundation found that there was no significant difference in learning outcomes between children who won a voucher to a local private school and those who remained in government schools
States must take the lead
Among solutions suggested by critics of the RTE is a “Right to Learning” law where importance is given to learning outcomes rather than infrastructure. State governments, which have the major responsibility for school education, have considerable freedom to devise their own laws. Gujarat, as Dhume himself said in his article, showed the way by creating RTE rules that gave student-learning primacy over all other parameters. However, those who are disappointed that Modi did not implement this Gujarat Model at the Center miss the point that India, like the USA is a federal country where the states have the powers to make rules and the Center has limited powers.
We can reasonably assume that even if Modi’s government successfully tightened the screws of RTE – for example fixing the balance between learning and infrastructure, and including minority-run schools in the EWS rule – it will not be able to fix the EWS provision in a manner that would make high-cost private school owners or the entitled middle class happy.
Fixing the RTE will also not solve the problem of education and skills in India. Though the government has initiated the ‘Skill India’ program for that, it needs deep pockets and a commitment to treat education for the children of the poor at par with those of the well-to-do. To achieve this, at a minimum, they will have to: Turn teaching into a desirable profession, put enough skilled teacher educators into enough institutions that will produce teachers who teach children how to learn rather than to cram, and create a system of academic support for teachers not so very different from the one Gandhi Kingdon’s schools boast of.
What everyone concerned about the crisis of education in India agrees on is that this government does not appear to have the “intellectual infrastructure” to deliver a unified policy to make this happen.