Declining trends in
quality of learning in elementary schools of rural India
Zakaria Siddiqui
In hustle bustle of ‘big’ political dramas like Budget,
Elections, and the rise of communally motivated attacks we often forget our
future generation. Every year during this time Annual Status of Education
Report (ASER) Centre reminds us about status of education of our children. ASER 2014 released in January 2015
highlights that
infrastructure gaps in schools have been closing successfully and India has
achieved near universal enrollment (96%). This is a good news as it took many
years for us to eventually reach that stage and now attention can now more fully
be given to quality of learning. ASER’s
report once again highlights that children are not learning well in schools. In
fact quality of learning has dwindled over time.
Reading ability in fact has seen a dip over time. Share of
standard II students in rural government schools who cannot recognize even
letters have risen from 13.4% to alarming level of 32.5% against the norm that
children should able to read simple sentence by the end of standard II. Percentage
of standard V children who can read standard II level text has continually
declined though marginally since 2008 for both government and private schools.
Of course this share is higher for private school but trend is very similar.At
the exit point of elementary and compulsory education i.e. in standard VIII a
quarter of all enrolled children still have difficulty in reading text that is
appropriate for standard II level.
Arithmetic ability is also experiencing a declining trend in
Rural India. Share of standard II kids who can recognize numbers 1-9 have
fallen from 86.6% in 2010 to 74.9% in 2014 in rural government schools. Private
schools also show declining trend −from 94% to 91.8% for the same period.
Percentage of standard V students in government schools who can do division
successfully has declined 33.9% to 20.7% during above mentioned period. At exit
point of elementary education also we see similar trend – percentage of
standard VIII children who could do division fell from 68% (approx) to 44.1%.
I have had the opportunity work with testing tools which ASER
uses in order to validate ASER results after properly training the surveyors. I
would say that their results and our research results were not very different.
Given that we accept the results from ASER it is quite depressing situation for
rural India. Now who has to be blamed for this result?
There are various reasons for this. Teachers work in an
incentive system where attending school or any official duty is enough. There
are hundreds of excuses that a teacher can make when asked about declining
learning outcomes. They will argue with concrete evidence that they were left
with little time to teach as they had allocate their duty hours to BPL survey,
Census, election duty etc. in addition to various school related data generation
like Mid-Day Meal scheme and financial supports for students. It would not be
misleading to claim that elementary school teachers are considered as extended
department of government for various kinds of data collection and reporting. The
training(s) that these teachers receive may be good but one has no way of sticking
the responsibility on them as they can always argue that there was no time left
to do required amount of the teaching. When you give too much of responsibility
to an individual you are basically telling him/her that you can get away with
doing nothing. Just like Government ministers cannot be held responsible, it is
always the secretaries who are caught for doing something wrong.
Given my argument earlier quality of training would not matter
much in these circumstances. What is interesting here is that governments'
effort is dedicated to tick all possible boxes to get out of monitoring radar.
All protocols are executed to make sure that there is no legal issue with
regards right to Education Act. Content is hardly an issue for the government. In
fact it is the demander (parents) not the supplier (government) who has to
evaluate the content of education that their children are receiving, as
suppliers have every incentive to spend as little effort as possible.
Government has no incentive in controlling the content of teaching given the
length of electoral terms. It is the clients or their representatives who have
to continuously evaluate the content of education. Now the issue is that not
every parent can be competent in doing this. Eventually, this responsibility falls
on the shoulders of educated parents to take the lead in this direction. The
reality is that they indeed monitor the content very carefully and owing to
this they take their children out of the government schooling system and
educate them in the private system instead.
The policy problem at this level is that educated parents are
also economically better-off which makes private schooling or at least private
tuition affordable for them. If such educated parents did not have the choice
of sending their children to private school/tutors they would have definitely
raised the voice against the poor content of teaching and there would have been
some response to solve this issue initially from teachers and eventually from governments.
So what we should do? Few years ago my immediate response to
this problem was, banning the private schooling is a good idea. Now I think
differently, private schooling can actually be an instrument of competition in
the system. Any additional competition is good for the system. Achievements of
students in private schools can be used as benchmarks for government schools
and will keep aspiration levels high. In order for private schools to work as
competitive force in the system we need some visible hands in
the system. These visible hands would
essentially work for parents who are unable to monitor the content in the
government schools. They should work as information agents in the system who
would highlight the treatments that government school students are getting. To
certain extent such visible hands are
already at work. NGOs like ASER Centre and Pratham are great examples but they
are not sufficient in quantum. Additionally, these organizations are working
objectively on specific issues of evaluation and training but there is a need
for organizations that will work towards translating quality of education into
a political issue which will obviously feed on the information produced by objective
organizations like ASER and Pratham. Another essential component of this visible hand is funding opportunities
which are rather tight and highly opposed to idea of politicizing the quality
of education issue.
Photo curtsey: http://www.stockpicturesforeveryone.com/
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