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Poor facilities, unskilled teachers and high dropout rates the bane of government schools across India.
Government schools across India are plagued by poor infrastructure, high drop out rates and unskilled teachers. Is it a legacy or has the government systematically done this to public education ?
A few days back this website had reported how the new rule of the government that determined classrooms on the basis of teachers rather than the number of classes had reduced almost 27,000 out of 75,489 Karnataka schools to 3 classrooms or lesser. The District Information System for Education (DISE) had issued a report that revealed 10,592 schools in Karnataka had 3 classrooms, 14,064 had 2 classrooms, 2,083 had 1 classroom and 164 schools had no classrooms at all. The DISE data is collated by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NEUPA), Delhi, established by the HRD ministry.
Government schools are also plagued with sub-optimal quality of teaching personnel. Quoting data from DISE again, an estimated 48.87% school teachers in Karnataka were not even graduates. Of the 4.25 lakh teachers in Karnataka’s urban and rural schools, 2.08 lakh teachers did not have a graduate degree, of which some 3,000 teachers were just below secondary school passouts, 63,000 secondary and 1,42 lakh higher secondary. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, mandates that schools should have graduate teachers in upper primary schools and higher secondary teachers in primary schools.
These statistics paint a correct yet gloomy picture and the lack of qualified teachers is a harsh reality in most schools and is not restricted to government schools alone. This is because teaching is not high on youngsters’ career list. When even call center jobs turn out to be more lucrative than teaching, what would entice a young college graduate to take up teaching?
And when teachers get posted to rural schools, it is common knowledge that they either go on leave or apply for a transfer immediately. It is because teachers have to perform in almost impossible conditions. Picture this: teachers not only have to handle combined age groups but also be available for government duties as deemed fit which results in exhaustion and frustration.
Moving on to the next ailment of our government schools – high dropout rates. Traditionally, under-privileged Indian families engage their children to supplement the family incomes. Once these young minds get used to bringing in money doing petty jobs, teachers find it very difficult to retain them especially secondary school. When they discover the freedom to use this money for fulfilling their needs or of their family members, naturally their interest in school withers. No amount of convincing that school will open up the doors to better job opportunities convinces them to continue school. The story is different for girls where the dropout rate is attributed to lack of basic sanitation facilities in rural government schools.
Arresting dropout rate should be the primary aim, rather than worrying about whether the schools have enough classrooms or not. If the school has a low turnout, it compels the schools to run combined classes for the same age-group of early graders, middle graders, tweens/teens and young adults.
Lastly, government schools are truly anaemic in the sense that they lack even the most basic infrastructure. The DISE report found that 30% to 40% of even the available classrooms are in need of serious repair work. Computers donated to government schools by IT companies, often sit unused in mountains of dust as there are either no teachers to teach computer courses or simply there is no electricity in the schools more than 50% of the time.
We may conveniently critique government schools for their lack of infrastructure, low turnout, unqualified teachers, and general poor quality of education and it may seem that private schools have it all. They are plagued with their own set of problems specially a highly skewed and unfavourable teacher to student ratio. Teachers are called upon to handle anywhere between 40 to 50 children in a classroom. Worse still, the children, even in primary school, are pitted against each other in a cut throat competitive environment.
These are not new problems, nor have they been pointed out for the first time ever. What should be different is that this time we should view these problems in the light of the proposed New Education Policy. This will show us the seriousness of the government to tackle these problems and make the government schools effective tools of disseminating education.