Markets are complicated, and improving them requires more than just creating incentives for new providers to set up shop. This is equally true in the market for public education. The growing charter school movement has spurred the creation of new education organizations like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which recently opened a shiny, new 85,000-square-foot facility four miles north of the Super Giant. KIPP has become a national model of high-quality, urban education, posting impressive achievement gains with low-income student populations.1 Sixty-six new KIPP schools have opened in 19 states and the District of Columbia in the last 15 years. KIPP is what school choice proponents claimed would happen with market-based reforms in education: entrepreneurial educators successfully teaching the students who need help the most. But KIPP is an outlier among its peers—many other charter schools in the district have been unable to achieve such impressive results. Just around the corner from KIPP, a recently restructured charter school shares space with a church in a small, unimposing brick building. Over the door hangs an easy to miss sign with the school’s new name—The Howard Road Academy of Excellence. The previous charter school occupying the space gave up its charter after the D.C. Public Charter School Board threatened to shut it down due to financial mismanagement. That school also posted some of the lowest student-achievement scores in the city, with just 13 percent of students scoring proficient on the city test.2 Its failure serves as a warning to those relying on the free market alone to improve education in low-income, urban neighborhoods.

Government programs that bring in private sector firms like Giant or nonprofits like KIPP can increase the supply of market options in low-income communities. But such subsidies will not, in and of themselves, ensure that all of those options will be high-quality. Nor will they guarantee that consumers will make good choices and utilize the newer, better options that come along. Functioning, well-designed markets improve higher-quality supply and higher-quality demand.

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Erin Dillon, Education Sector

Leading figures in the Swedish free school revolution – on which David Cameron is basing his education reforms – insisted today that companies must have a right to make profits to drive up standards and keep down costs.

Speakers at a Spectator conference in London also challenged findings of the Swedish national agency for education, the equivalent of Ofsted, which claimed the reforms have led to falling standards and greater divergence in achievement.

The report is being seen by Labour as hugely damaging to the Tory cause. The policy differences between the two parties on school reform are probably wider than on any other domestic issue.

Anders Hultin, the chief executive of Kuskkappsskolan, a system of private Swedish schools, told the conference that 75% of Swedish free schools were profit making. “Only the profit motive will drive the level of expansion and innovation that education services require”, he said.

He insisted competition had improved state schools at no extra cost to the treasury. He said: “Most free schools were profit making, been able to raise investments from the private sector and form rental agreements with private developers.”

Dr Mikael Sandstrom, the state secretary, insisted new schools must be non-selective and there must be a limit on top-up fees. He challenged the national agency’s claims. “The overwhelming weight of evidence shows free schools have improved quality. Increased competition improves results in state schools.” But he accepted the initial reforms had been disastrously implemented, including cuts in grants to municipalities.

The shadow schools secretary, Michael Gove, wants to replicate the Swedish and American free school movement by making it easier to open free schools, so expanding parent choice.

He has not yet been clear on how, or whether, he will introduce profit making beyond hinting he will allow a management fee to be charged. Gove insists the controversy in Sweden has not been about free schools, but the degree of external inspection and marking.

Ed Balls, the schools secretary, said tonight: “Michael Gove needs to explain to parents how he would pay for hundreds of new free market schools with hundreds of thousands of surplus places, without big cuts to existing schools.

“And he needs to explain why the Conservatives are pressing ahead with an experiment which, when it was tried in Sweden, led to falling standards, higher costs and rising inequality.”

Since the mid-90s the number of free schools funded by the Swedish state pupil vouchers has risen from 122 to 1,091. The Swedish experts claim up to 5,000 free schools could be established in England within 15 years.

The Swedish education agency said grades had declined and the variation in results between schools was more pronounced. It said: “Pupils from similar backgrounds have shown an increasing tendency to congregate in the same schools.”

Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 4 March 2010

When all the teachers were fired from Central Falls High School last week in a sweeping effort at school reform, their superintendent gave them a taste of the accountability President Barack Obama says is necessary.

It is a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. But while there have been some improvements in test scores, schools where most teachers have been replaced still grapple with problems of poverty and discipline. Even advocates of the approach say firing a teaching staff is just one of several crucial steps that must be taken to turn around a school.

Central Falls teachers have appealed the firings and both they and the administration are now indicating a willingness to go back to the table to avoid mass firings. Teachers say wholesale firings unfairly target instructors who work with impoverished children who have been neglected for years.

“We believe the teachers have been scapegoated here,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said of the Central Falls firings this week.

In Rhode Island, the state education commissioner earlier ordered Central Falls authorities to make radical improvements in a city where more children live in poverty than anywhere else in the state and where academic test results were very low. Eleventh graders tested at the school in the fall had a 7 percent passing rate in math. Fewer than half of the school’s students graduate in four years.

Obama referred to the Central Falls firings as an example of accountability during an education speech Monday in Washington.

“If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” he said, citing the school’s dreadful test scores.

No one keeps firm numbers on how often wholesale firings have been used. But William Gunther, president of the Boston-based Mass Insight Education and Research Institute, estimates that mass teacher firings are tried in about 20 to 30 schools annually. Many more schools adjust other elements, such as curriculum and teacher training, to boost performance without substantially changing the staff.

In Los Angeles, charter school operator Green Dot took over a high school in the Watts neighborhood and in 2008 broke it into seven small college-prep academies. Green Dot founder Steve Barr laid off all the teachers and asked them to reapply for their jobs.

“You want them to come back, but you have to establish what your vision is and give them the choice: do you believe in this vision?” he said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose to fire teachers en masse when he headed Chicago’s public school system.

He was confronted with lagging test scores at Sherman Elementary School in Chicago’s South Side, where students are overwhelmingly poor and black. Before it was revamped, 29 percent of students were meeting academic expectations, according to statewide tests.

The city allowed the Academy for Urban School Leadership to take over the school in September 2006. It hired a new leadership team and installed a large number of AUSL teachers, mostly people who decided to become teachers after working in other fields. The school’s original staff had to reapply for their jobs; many simply left.

Test scores have improved. During the last school year, 51 percent of Sherman students tested proficient on the same academic test, although they still lag students in the rest of the district. More recently, scores for students in some grades have slipped in reading and mathematics.

A spokeswoman for Duncan cites the school as an example of where replacing the staff — which he calls a turnaround — worked. It’s one of four strategies that states can use to improve low-performing schools while competing for millions of dollars in stimulus funds.

The other three options are closing a school and sending its students to a better one, converting troubled schools into charter academies, and firing the principal and making other changes to improve performance.

Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo picked the turnaround model — the mass firing of all 93 teachers and staff after the end of the school year — after talks with teachers broke down.

It’s not clear whether any Central Falls teachers will lose their jobs. The union has filed a complaint with the state Labor Relations Board, and on Wednesday, after the union indicated it would support teachers working a longer school day and providing additional tutoring, the superintendent said she’d like to resume talks to avoid mass firings.

Gunther, who briefed Duncan’s staff on turnaround strategies in the fall, said breaking a “failing culture” in troubled schools almost always requires replacing a large part of the teaching staff, but cautioned that’s not the only thing that schools need to do.

“The problem with most reform elements is they tend to rely on a single bullet,” Gunther said.

Besides new staff and better leadership, he said troubled schools generally need to partner with outside groups that can help them and create a cluster of elementary and middle schools that feed better-prepared students to high school.

In Chicago, parents at Sherman Elementary said the firings and other changes have improved the school, although problems remain.

Shawn Jones, 38, the head of the Sherman’s parent-teacher association, said the school is far better than it once was. His 9-year-old daughter, Ty-yonne Jones, is a fourth grader at the school, since rechristened the Sherman School of Excellence.

Students are required to wear uniforms and can play on a new track and playground. Still, he does worry about some slips in test scores and believes discipline could be improved, much like other city schools.

Outside the classroom, Jones said parents and the school must compensate for the poverty and family difficulties in their neighborhood. For example, he’s trying to start a program to teach girls about puberty and other issues.The school is experimenting with has a men’s group to encourage single fathers to get involved with their children’s education.

“It’s a constant work in progress,” Jones said. “It’s going to take changing a few different aspects — not just the faculty.”

Ray Henry, Associated Press, 4 March 2010

A committee on ‘Development of a Policy Framework for Implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education ACT, 2009 in Schools in the NCT of Delhi’ has said that the government can take steps to provide grant-in-aid to the genuine schools which face difficulty in paying salary as per the government’s structure.

On fee structure, which has remained a vexed issue for the last few years, the committee has said the students should be exempted from paying any type of fee. “No fee in any kind or form should be charged from the students of elementary school,” the committee, set up by NCERT and headed by lawyer Ashok Agrawal, concluded in its report.

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act says that any school needs to obtain recognition from local or state government for operation. It is silent on teachers’ pay. In that case, provisions of the state act, if any, would be applicable. In the state of Delhi, recognition is given to those schools which agree to implement the teachers’ salary as per the government pay structure.

In such circumstances, a number of good schools, whose economic condition is poor, could face the prospect of closure. The committee has said teachers should not be exploited by private schools and government should provide financial support to sustain.

All schools in the city should be governed by a single body instead of different departments for benefit of students as well as ensuring quality in education, it suggested.

Advocating that a single body could well be the Delhi Government, it said the body should also be accorded rights to approve all proposed academic changes, such as textbooks, pattern of evaluation and medium of instruction. It should also be referred to for closure of any schools.

The committee felt the present system, whereby different bodies like NDMC, MCD or Sarvodaya are running schools, is harming the interest of the students. The bodies are giving more importance to their separateness and are making a mockery of the service provided by them. It suggested that there should be a unified website for school education in Delhi with all information about all kinds of schools with a report card for every school.

Stating that present practice of appointment of heads of schools based on seniority is hampering proper school administration, it said selection of 75 per cent of the heads of schools should be done direct through selection processes, and only 25 per cent through limited departmental examination. The committee also suggested strengthening of the State Council of Educational Research and Training SCERT and DIETs in Delhi.

Deccan Herald, 7 March 2010

The National Commission on Higher Education and Research Bill, 2010, is a testimony to much sincerity of purpose and major investments in time, and the quality of the intellectual approach it represents is notable. Yet, a reading of the Bill gives the prima facie impression that it has been prepared for a country that so far has had no system of higher education in place.

The conclusion drawn by many that the National Commission would subsume the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teacher Education is not correct. All three of them will stand abolished and an entirely new body will be established.

Unfortunately, the Bill has so fatal a flaw that the Commission cannot be established without an amendment being made to the Bill before it is introduced in Parliament.

The process of its establishment is to begin with the nomination of the core Fellows, the election of co-opted Fellows by the core Fellows, the formation of a Collegium, and the Collegium sending on a panel of three names for the chairperson and each of the members, to the selection committee. Ultimately, the chairperson and members are to be appointed by the President of India.

But the Bill neither specifies the number of core Fellows nor lays down the procedure for their nomination. The soul of the institution is missing. It is such a fatal flaw as to render the Bill unimplementable. The provision for the choice of core Fellows is a formidable task since it is difficult to find a method of nomination that will ensure the independence of this really core component of the structure.

The Collegium is to meet once a year. Its major functions are limited to the choice of a panel for the position of chairperson and each of the positions of members and the preparation of a National Registry for posts of Vice-Chancellors. The strength of the Collegium will depend on the number of core Fellows, but this number is not specified in the draft Bill. If the number is around 10, the strength of the Collegium will be 40. Scholars they may be, but they are some 40 strangers among themselves who meet once a year under a chair elected at the particular meeting or in an earlier one. It is doubtful whether such an assembly could be guided to scan the academic horizon for talent and choose appropriate persons for the preparation of a panel for the vital positions of the chairperson and members of the Commission. The entire exercise involves a great amount of responsibility and perhaps some risk. All the executive powers are vested in a single body, that is, the Commission, which is not directly answerable to any authority and is not bound by the advice of any larger representative body.

A body comparable to the Commission that is now envisaged does not seem to exist in the field of education in any advanced country. What we have before the nation really is a totally new experimental design for the management of higher education. Any experiment, when it covers a whole nation, needs consultations on a much wider scale: the exercise that is now being carried out by the Task Force is a very limited one.

The Commission recognises only two providers in higher education: the State and Central governments. Central institutions are very few in number and the State universities are what really count. The long-winding procedures that have been proposed in granting authorisation to establish a university are amazing, even when the applicant is a mighty State government. Eight steps are contemplated. First will come the decision of a State government to establish a university. For this it will have to obtain an assessment report from an accreditation agency, and apply to the Commission with the assessment report. The Commission, after examination, will decide to grant authorisation or return the application seeking more information. The Commission, when it is satisfied about the case, will issue a public notice calling for views and any objections. The next two steps involve referring the views back to the State government and examining the replies received. Thereafter, permission is granted or rejected. If permission is granted, the institution will remain on probation for 10 years. During this period the permission granted could be revoked.

For a State government, the running of a university is tantamount to providing social service. For it to go through the hurdles of a bureaucracy as though it is an applicant for a licence to run a business is totally unacceptable. If this is not centralisation, then what could be so called? Again, it is not as though State governments are anxious to establish more universities and are rushing in with proposals. Many of them are, for want of funds, quietly trying to transfer their responsibility for higher education to private providers. By 2006, as much as 63.2 per cent of all educational institutions and 51.5 per cent of the total enrolment were already in the private sector. The authors of the 11th Five-Year Plan have recorded that out of the additional student enrolment of seven million that is contemplated between 2007 and 2012, the share of the private sector is expected to be 3.5 million.

The Task Force does not seem to recognise what is happening in the country and seems to be sitting in a world of its own. It seems to be drafting rules and regulations to ensure academic quality as a theoretical exercise. While the overwhelming need is for the promotion of avenues of higher education, the inherent characteristic of the Bill is restrictive at every step.

Having thus got the requisite authorisation, the State government has to appoint a Vice-Chancellor. Here again, the Commission will maintain a national registry of persons eligible and qualified to be Vice-Chancellors. From the registry the Commission will recommend a panel of five names for the State to choose from, perhaps based on the biodata, or maybe again through a committee of its own. It is amazing that anyone could think of a registry that would contain the names of, and do justice to, all the academics in this vast country who are qualified to be Vice-Chancellors. The preparation of such a list, which will be a really exhaustive exercise, is not practicable even at the State level. The list is to be prepared by the Collegium from among names received from the Central and State universities and governments. One can imagine the degree of lobbying that will ensue at the levels from where the list would emanate, and the part played by prejudices, malpractices and manipulation for patronage. How will anyone ensure fairness and exhaustiveness in the lists received for the preparation of the registry?

Why should one assume that this procedure would be superior, and preferable to, the appointment of a Vice-Chancellor at the State level by means of a search committee? The seeming disbelief in the honesty of all the instruments that are closer to the scene of action and are answerable to the people around, and unconditionally trusting an authority that is far removed from the field of occurrence and is not answerable to the stakeholders, is basically a negation of the principle of autonomy. It devalues the credibility of elected governments, the university authorities, and even the Chancellor.

From the time of Plato to Thomas More to Francis Bacon, there have been many efforts to design an ideal society. But it is a grievous error to believe that we will ever be able to create a system anywhere by means of rules and regulations that would ensure virtuous conduct far above the level of the people who ultimately go to make the system. The reasonable path to relatively honest behaviour is decentralisation and making every authority answerable to the immediate stakeholders.

The reference in the Bill only to the existing deemed-to-be universities indicate that there will be no new deemed universities. Misuse of the power to grant such status by the regulatory authority in some cases, and abuse of the privilege so acquired by certain institutions, cannot be considered adequate reasons to abolish the system itself. Remediable ills do not demand drastic solutions. The prevailing mood seems to be in favour of closing all new channels and opportunities for higher education rather than opening the gates for new providers — which today is the pressing need.

V. C. Kulandaiswamy, The Hindu, 2 March 2010

Inside a classroom in Mumbai’s Vile Parle neighbourhood, eight-year-olds are intently listening to the sounds of English characters and words, and watching them take shape on a television screen.

A year ago, such classes weren’t taking place at Shri Madhavrao Bhagwat High School, a Marathi-medium school run by Shilpa Abhyankar. That was when some parents approached her, requesting English classes for their children.

Amused initially, Abhyankar had to eventually give in. She hired Language Labs Inc., a Mumbai-based private language training institute, to teach English to primary section students at the school.

A not-so-quiet linguistic revolution is under way. Abhyankar’s is just one of innumerable schools who are turning to English as either a full or a partial medium of education as demand for speakers of the “global language” surges nationwide.

The Union government has itself recognized English as a vehicle of economic expansion and is moving to bridge the divide between those who speak it and those who don’t.

Intellectuals view English as the “link language” India needs to be on the same wavelength as other countries on a host of common global concerns.

But not everyone believes English is a cure-all. British linguist David Graddol argues in his soon-to-be-launched book English Next India that forcing primary school children to learn everything in a language that is not their mother tongue will only breed an under-educated generation. He recommends that English-medium teaching should begin only at the secondary level.

Historians see the introduction of English in India by British administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835 as an attempt to create a class of interpreters to do business in the colony.

Since then, English has come to be seen as the language of opportunity, and the number of English speakers has kept on rising. Some 191,000 Indians returned the language as their mother tongue, the language first learnt by a person, or the native language, in the 1971 census. Thirty years later, the number had increased to 226,000. The increase of English speakers from 1991 to 2001 was almost 27%.

Plugging the hole

Nonetheless, the spread of the language remains limited. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2009, released by Pratham—the largest non-governmental organization in the education sector— shows only 43.8% of students in class I could read the English alphabet, even in upper case.

Plugging this hole is a central thrust of the government’s skill development programme, which promotes the teaching of English in schools and colleges as a key vocational education component among other courses. For the programme that seeks to impart skill-based training to 500 million people by 2022, the government has also set up a national skill development board and a national skill development funding corporation for policy direction, review and finance.

At the Central Board of Secondary Education, the examination body for secondary schools in India, chairman Vineet Joshi says he receives most applications for affiliation from English-medium schools.

The Maharashtra state board embarked on starting semi-English medium schools in 2008 in response to growing demand, opting to teach science and mathematics in English at the secondary level.

English-medium teaching is often viewed as synonymous with private school education, and is thus reflected in the rising percentage of private school enrolments. According to ASER 2008, the percentage of rural children who studied in private primary schools went up from 16% in 2004 to 26% in 2008.

Government schools are also doing their best to gain ground. Abhyankar’s school in Mumbai, for instance, runs audio-visual lessons for spoken English for classes III-V even though it is unable to provide headphones.

“We are a government school. This is not the ideal way, but this is better than nothing,” says Abhyankar. Tea-ching English, she adds, would boost the confidence of her students, who are mostly from lower middle class and slums.

Graddol, however, told Mint he doesn’t agree with the idea of teaching English at the cost of everything else.

English’s disadvantage

“The whole task of trying to teach English in government schools is an incredibly difficult one. It’s still a mystery to me why people study English when they cannot speak it. If you continue, you will have another generation coming out of schools which didn’t study other subjects properly because you put children prematurely in an English-medium school,’’ he says.

Graddol’s coming book follows the evolution and reform of the English language in India. It will be released in March this year, a decade after his first book English Next.

The new book argues that the advantage offered by its large population of English speakers, which has given India an edge over other developing countries until now, will be neutralized in the coming years.

China has launched an English teaching programme and is likely to have more English speakers than India in a decade. In Russia, English has already become the working language. Even in Latin America and parts of Europe, Graddol says, English is now being seen as a basic skill, and India would get no special benefit once the language is spoken by everyone everywhere.

But the skewed focus on teaching English would mean a “half-baked education” for many Indians, and could see the country losing out to China, the linguist says.

English Next India cites the example of Malaysia, where the government in July 2009 annulled an earlier decision to teach science and mathematics in English after concerns that children’s education was suffering as only 10% of teachers were well-versed in English.

ASER reports, released annually since 2004, have also pointed out a drop in learning levels in schools. Various other studies, including a 2008 report by software lobby group Nasscom, have shown only 10-15% graduates are “employable” in business services and only 26% engineers in technical services due to educational deficiencies.

Graddol suggests using the mother tongue at the primary level and adopting English as a medium of instruction only at the secondary level to ensure that the learning process is meaningful.

He also says consolidating multilingualism could be India’s strength and recommends a three-language formula codified in 1968. The formula promoted primary education in the mother tongue and the teaching of English, Hindi as well as other regional languages at the secondary level.

The linguist points out another danger. “Smaller languages will decline and regional languages will also lose domains of use,” he says.

Threat to vernaculars

In Gujarat, for instance, a poor pass percentage in Gujarati-medium schools compared with English-medium schools has led to the closing down of several vernacular schools.

In Maharashtra too, the mushrooming of English-medium schools has caused a sharp decline in the number of Marathi-medium schools. In Pune, widely regarded as the cultural capital of the state, the number of Marathi-medium schools came down from 719 in 2006 to 604 in 2007, according to the Environment Status Report of 2008.

The Holy Family School in Andheri, Mumbai, which has both Marathi- and English-medium wings, has seen a steady fall in enrolment of students in the vernacular medium over the past five years.

Principal Francis Swamy recalls children whose fathers farmed their lands or had occupations such as driving buses and autorickshaws, and mothers who worked in households as maids. Yet, when many of them pulled their children out of the Marathi-medium wing of Swamy’s school, they only moved to an English-medium school. “Such is the craze for English that it cuts across class,” Swamy says.

The National Curriculum Framework for School Education in India, drafted in 2005, also makes a strong pitch for multilingualism. States where English is not the official language have largely seen government-run schools adopt regional languages as the medium of instruction, even as private schools have taught in English.

Graddol calls for broader reforms in education, including infrastructure, quality of teachers and academic practices. “English may be a useful catalyst, but the final goal must lie beyond English,” he says.

But Meena Kandasamy, a Dalit activist and poet who teaches English at Anna University in Chennai, sees a larger role for English in Indian society—one of a link language.

“Today, people all over the world face similar problems— terror, violence, exploitation —and they need to learn and understand from each other’s resistance struggles,” she says. “They are all different stories, but they are also extremely similar. If you have to say these stories simultaneously, you would be using English.”

Pallavi Singh, The Mint, 4 March 2010

Come April 1, the right to free and compulsory education will finally be notified and become a justiciable right. At least on paper, the government is duty-bound to provide every child aged between six and 14 a proper school with qualified teachers. The government has a two-year window to make it available. Parents, community leaders and activists can go to court and demand answers. But going over the commentaries, it looks as if the only issue is one of funds — to hire more teachers, convert all transitional schools into proper ones, upgrade them to Class VIII and adhere to the definition of a school as spelt out in the 2009 Right To Education (RTE) Act.

Is that really the case? Are we really on the brink of realising the right to education?

The real issue is not only to do with money, but with the ability of the government to turn around the system. Providing funds to state governments is no doubt a necessary precondition, but it is not sufficient to realise the goals of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). The recent mid-term review of the Eleventh Five Year Plan takes note of the poor use of funds by many states, lack of relevance, endemic corruption in teacher training, poor teacher and student attendance, and most importantly, very little progress in learning. Worse still, close to half the children who enroll in Class I do not reach Class VIII with a majority dropping out after Class V. More than half the children in Class V cannot read a Class II text, or solve simple Class II arithmetic problems.

We are also a long way from ensuring that every child can access schooling. One of the huge lacunae in the RTE Bill was that it did not include the right of children with disabilities. The failure has less to do with money, and more with a lack of conviction about the right of every single child.

Another area that needs attention is identifying and reaching out to the most disadvantaged. The plight of migrants is well known. Equally, the terrible state of education in remote and tribal areas is acknowledged. The persistence of child labour has also been documented. Despite the compelling evidence, there is little in the SSA that turns the spotlight on such children.

As a first step, the ministry — in collaboration with national and state task forces — must initiate a state-by-state and district-by-district stock taking of access and learning, especially of children who have either never enrolled in, or have dropped out of, school. Plans relevant to a community or an area need to be evolved. To make this possible, the SSA has to move out of its rigid template budgeting and create mechanisms to respond to diverse situations. This needs to be done with an understanding that it would require more per-unit cost and a greater flexibility in financial norms.

Equally, the government needs to invite the private foundations and philanthropies to participate in targeted schooling initiatives for the most deprived. For example, the tremendous response received by the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya scheme — where girls who have dropped out after primary school are given a chance to pursue schooling at a fully-funded residential school — is a model that can be replicated. Our schools can also be made disabled-friendly through partnerships.

From April 1, the government has to plan for specific groups with a determination to realise the spirit of the right to education. It should not hide behind a maze of data doctored to show the world that all is well. We owe this to our children.

Vimala Ramachandran, Hindustan Times, 3 March 2010

Did Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee fail to give due share to children in the Union Budget 2010-2011? Though Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan gets Rs 15,000 crore, Rs 14,433 crore is realised directly from the common man through education cess. Thus, what will be the contribution of the Union government which is committed to provide for education under the welfare state principles?

“The current budget is not child friendly and the Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL) opposes it,” said Rajnikant, the UP convener of CACL and director of Human Welfare Association (HWA). The CACL’s partner HAQ Centre for Child Rights, a New Delhi-based organisation working for the recognition, promotion and protection of rights of all children, in its analysis observed that the Union Budget does not include children, who make up over 42 per cent of the population. Out of every rupee spent in the budget, the FM has allotted only 4.63 paise to children. Even with a substantial allocation to elementary education, children’s share of education remains only 3.2 per cent.

According to the report, there is a 15 per cent rise in the outlay for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to Rs 15,000 crore and an 18 per cent increase in the outlay for in the mid-day meal scheme. However, most of this increase is funded by the education cess (Rs 14,433 crore) collected from the common man for the Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh. The citizens are paying for the education of the children and yet getting inadequate quality and poor access.

“With 52 per cent children in India either not attending school or dropping out before class eight, we are still a long way from universalisation that the right to education law promises,” he told TOI. Referring to the report, he said while the share of children’s education is 3.20 per cent, other sectors like development has a share of 0.90 per cent, health 0.49 per cent, and protection 0.04 per cent.

According to the report, there are 164 million children in the 0-6 age group in the country. According to the third National Family Health Survey conducted over 2005-06, 37 million children below the age of 3 are underweight, while almost 50 per cent of under-fives are moderately or severely malnourished. Will less than one paise share allocated for development, of which Integrated Child Development Services forms a major share, suffice to address the needs of all these children?

The ICDS, one of the world’s largest programmes for early childhood development, has received Rs 7,932.71 crore in the budget, an 18 per cent jump over last year’s. So far, according to Ministry of Women and Child Development, around 69 million children aged 6-72 months are covered by the Supplementary Nutrition Programme under ICDS and only 34 million children are covered by any kind of pre-school initiatives, including ICDS. Against a target of 1.4 million Anganwadi centres (one in every habitation), there is still a shortfall of 95,731 centres as of March 2009.

The 15 per cent increase in the health sector allocation for children is due to the allocation of Rs 351 crore for the new Conditional Maternity Benefit Scheme. This is to tackle the problem of low birth weight. There is also a 14 per cent increase in the Reproductive and Child Health Programme and 33 per cent of the health sector allocations remains externally funded by programmes like Pulse Polio Immunisation. Without adequate health infrastructure access to health will remain a challenge.

The report further says that child protection in every budget over the years has received the least attention. This year too it receives 0.04 per cent of the budget. With the designing of the Integrated Child Protection Scheme the effort was to create a protective environment for children so that they do not become vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. It is indeed heartening to see a 300 per cent increase in the allocation for the ICPS this year (Rs 54 crore to Rs 270 crore). However, this is still not enough to even implement the Juvenile Justice Law in the country. The specific programme for Juvenile Justice entitled Prevention and Control of Juvenile Social Maladjustment no longer exists.

Protection should ideally be taken up on a war footing. India has the highest number of working children in the world, 12.66 million as per the 2001 census. More alarmingly, crimes against children went up by 7.6 per cent in just one year in 2007, according to Crime in India 2007 published by the National Crime Records Bureau.

India also has the highest number of sexually abused children in the world, with one in every 10 children sexually abused at any point in time, and a child below 16 years raped every 155th minute. Children are also getting more vulnerable in an increasingly politicised environment. Children in 19 out of 28 states are growing up in internal armed conflicts. This has an effect in juvenile crimes, which are rising three times faster than all crimes. Since 2001, juvenile crimes have gone up by 38.5 per cent, as compared to a 12.5 per cent rise in all crimes, says the report.

Binay Singh, The Times of India, 4 March 2010

The Bill to provide free education for all children in the age-group 6-14 (which has now become an Act) ensures that any child can demand provision of free education to him or her in his or her neighbourhood right up to the 8th class. It is also claimed that the state will provide compulsory elementary education. Here there is some confusion. Right to education implies that the parents of some children want to get their children educated but fail to do so because there is no school in the neighbourhood, or if there is a school, the school is not of their choice or they cannot afford to pay the fees and/or bussing and other charges. Violation of the right implies that the parents are willing to get elementary education for their wards but are unable to do so for reasons beyond their capacity or control. Compulsory, on the other hand, implies that there are parents who are unwilling or unlikely to send the children for schooling even when the facilities for free education are available in their neighbourhood. The state can and should compel them to send their children to school in the interest of the future of the children, their family and the society as a whole. If, however, compulsion is on the state for providing free education, then it is implicit in the right to education itself.
While it is true that a substantial number of students do not get education because there is no affordable school in the neighbourhood, specially in the tribal hilly areas and sparsely populated desert districts, in a very large number of cases education is not the first priority of the family. Survival is the top priority. Children working as rag-pickers, shoe-shine boys, domestic help, regular or contract or piece-wage workers in several kinds of factories and on farmlands is a regular phenomenon all over India, especially in the poorer districts. For example, there is the case of seasonal migration of child workers to work on Bt cotton farms from the tribal districts of Dungarpur, Banswara and Udaipur to Gujarat. In case of monsoon failure as in this year there is large scale migration of families. Child labour also works as an insurance mechanism against fluctuations in parent’s income.
To attract and retain children of these families to/in schools is not possible through compulsion alone, nor is it a question of opening of schools in the neighbourhood. The children of these families remain uneducated because of the mere accident of their birth in such families. They must not be allowed to suffer for no fault of theirs. They have the right to be educated. The state has to step in. It should be noted that though often the trade-off between school and child labour has been underlined, the two activities need not be mutually exclusive. Education strategies should examine the possibility of combining work and school by reducing the duration of school to just half-a-day and/or by changing the school timings. Special problems require special solutions. Schooling may be provided when the children are free from domestic duties or paid or unpaid work through night schools, mobile schools and the like. This will involve no cultural break and no cost to the family. Involvement of NGOs and teacher entrepreneurs would be necessary in such conditions.
The task to provide universal education to the girl child is even more complicated. The primary school enrolment of girls is far below that of boys even in the urban areas; the gap is much wider in the rural areas. The gulf widens as we move to the final years of elementary education. This implies that even those parents who send their sons to schools do not send their daughters and, in any case, they withdraw them from schools much before the completion of elementary education. The reasons for this are well known: social taboos, priority to education of sons, poverty, sibling care, domestic work, fuel wood gathering, fetching of water, cooking, early marriage, early parenthood and the like. These hard cases, where the parents have no inclination to send their wards to schools whether schools exist or not, whether they are free or not, are not exceptional. In several regions, especially in the BIMARU States, these cases are too large to be ignored. Therefore, tackling the schooling problem without tackling the basic livelihood and social problems is well nigh impossible, RTFE or no RTFE.
For the same reasons, even though universal or very high enrolment in primary education may be attained, class repetitions and school drop-outs and push-outs are common. In addition, because of the inefficiency in the country’s schooling system, actual school attendance is much lower than enrolment, and the rates of grade repetition are very high. Recent findings reveal that although about 93 per cent of Indian children in the age-group 6-14 years are in school a very large percentage either drop out or are repeaters and their learning achievements are very low. About 26 per cent of the students in the primary education system were bound to repeat in the first year itself, and retention rate at the primary level as a whole is only 70 per cent. As a result, many children abandon school with relatively low levels of completed education. The gap between age and grade is large. The problem is particularly acute in poorer and SC and ST neighbourhoods.

Now suppose an unwilling parent is persuaded to send his ward to school and subsequently the student drops out without completing his or her elementary education then who will be held responsible and penalised specially when retaining a student is not merely a function of the quality of teaching?
Implementation

The Right to Education Act is to be implemented through PPP (public private partnership). PPP here implies that the private sector will be encouraged to start primary and middle schools in non-served areas and they will have to admit wards of the weaker sections up to at least 25 per cent of their total intake in each class in the case of unaided schools and up to the percentage of annual recurring grant-in-aid to their annual recurring expenditure in the case of aided schools. The special category and unaided schools will be reimbursed the fee of such students to the extent of actual per child expenditure incurred by the state or the actual amount of fee charged whichever is less. Thus, the voucher system is to be implemented.
This arrangement raises several questions. PPP is not a new idea in India although the phrase is being popularised as something of a new innovation. It existed even in the British period and even in the princely states. Historically it operated in two ways. Some community groups, in most cases religious and caste associations as also secular bodies interested in the welfare of their community, initiated the idea of a school, received donation of land from some member or members, collected contributions from members and built a school building. The schools then applied for grants-in-aid to the government and were usually able to obtain the same in varying degrees. In such schools the fee structure, pay-scale of teachers, and syllabus etc. of the government schools were followed. Nobody was denied admission. Such schools are to be found in most of the cities and towns in all States. There was competition between different communities for starting schools and colleges specially in the urban areas. In fact, such schools helped spread education very rapidly in some communities with low education level. There are also some such schools started by individuals or religious bodies which do not depend on government aid. Nonetheless these are not run on a profit-making basis and they also charge low fees. In fact, to call these schools as private schools is a misnomer. These are real public schools started by the public for the public. These are ‘not-for-profit’ institutions and are run by NGOs and are quite different from the other private schools which are surprisingly called ‘public schools’. The latter are in fact ‘for-profit’ private sector undertakings established to take advantage of the urge of the emergent middle class for exclusive and branded education for their wards. This class, which reaped all the benefits of free education provided by the government or government aided schools, colleges and universities to reap huge rental incomes and high positions, has now become the most self-serving class and derides education provided by these very government institutions.

PPP

Now PPP has been given a new twist. There are to be no grants in aid from the state. At most you will get land for the institution on concessional basis. And now under the RTFE there will be reimbursement of the vouchers presented for admitting the poor. Let us see whether it will solve the problem.
Let us have a look at the present school system. Of the 12,50,775 schools imparting elementary education in the country in 2007-08, 80.2 per cent were all types of government schools, 5.8 per cent private aided schools and 13.1 per cent private unaided schools. Almost 87.2 per cent of the schools are located in the rural areas. In the rural areas the proportion of private unaided schools is only 9.3 and that of aided schools is 4.7. However, in the urban areas, the percentage of private unaided and aided schools are as high as 38.6 and 13.4 respectively (Arun Mehta: Elementary Education In India, Analytical Report 2006-07 and 2007-08, NUEPA) Thus running private unaided schools is mostly an urban phenomenon. Of these, several schools are special category schools, community schools like unaided madarsas or convent schools and private sector non-fee or low fee charging schools run by philanthropists.
Of the total students enrolled in primary classes in 2007-08 about 75.4, 6.7 and 17.8 are enrolled in government, aided and unaided schools. The total number of teachers working in these schools in 2007-08 was 56,34,589 of which 69.3, 10.4 and 20.7 per cent are teaching in government, aided and private schools, the average number of teachers per school being 3.9, 8.3 and 6.7 respectively. Nearly 10.3 per cent of the schools are single-teacher schools. Government schools have the highest percentage of teachers who are professionally trained at 43.4, followed by aided school (27.8 per cent) and unaided private schools (only 2.3 per cent). Thus very many private-for-profit schools are small-sized ones relying mostly on the services of relatively cheaper, untrained and locally available teachers.

The Elite Institutions: Corporate Schools

In the most unlikely possibility of elite institutions opening schools in the rural areas will they be able to fulfil the objectives of RTFE? Firstly, the reimbursed fee will be very small compared to the usual fees they charge. Lowering fees in general will change the elite character without which they will not be able to attract students from middle and upper classes; they will also not be able to maintain the standard of buildings, grounds and other services. The new entrants from the poorest strata will not find courage to enter the premises and even if they somehow enter, they will find the atmosphere alien. The dress, shoes, the bag, even the water bottle, the books, the stationery and the like are so costly that they can never afford them. These schools also do not provide mid-day meals. What kind of tiffin will these students carry? The medium of instruction will itself pose a problem. Will he/she not feel completely outcaste? Then there are several other expenses. Toffees are to be distributed on one’s birthdays. There are educational trips. There will be need for sport shoes and equipment. There is an atmosphere of intense competition necessitating private tuition and coaching. Why will the school make effort and expend money on special coaching of these lagging students? Can anybody expect this poor kid to complete education in such an atmosphere? Dropping out is the only real possibility. In that possibility, the school management can always claim that that they cannot help, they want to admit poor students but nobody is coming forward.
In the urban areas, elite schools are already there. And to be sure, there are usually many juggi-jopdis near these localities. In theory, students from poor families can be admitted to these schools and fees can be reimbursed by the state. However, the first generation students from below-poverty-line families will have to face all the problems enumerated above. Thus, these schools do not provide a feasible solution to the problem of providing universal elementary education.

Small Entrepreneurs
However, not all private schools are high-fee-charging exclusive schools. For instance, Tooley (Tooley, James, 2001, The Global Education Industry, 2nd edition, Institute for Economic Affairs, London 2001, p. 13) observes:
Any visitor to the `slums’ of any of the big cities in India will be struck by the sheer number of private schools—there seems to be one on almost every street corner or down every alleyway….. they are wholly private in every way and are certainly not elite institutions.”
Similar obvservations are made by Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Asim Ijaz Khwaja (2008) in a World Bank study (A Dime a Day, The Possibilities and Limits of Private Schooling in Pakistan, WPS4066) regarding schools in the rural areas in Pakistan:
These schools are overwhelmingly for-profit enterprises—they have sprung up around the country without much state regulation or subsidy.
These private schools charge relatively low fees in comparison to the elite schools. They further observe that:
They hire predominantly local, female and moderately educated teachers who have limited alternative opportunities outside the village. Hiring these teachers at low cost allows the savings to be passed on to parents through very low fees. This mechanism—the need to hire teachers with a certain demographic profile so that salary costs are minimised—defines the possibility of private schools—where they arise. It also defines their limits. Private schools are horizontally constrained in that they arise in villages where there is a pool of secondary-educated women. They are also vertically constrained in that they are unlikely to cater to the secondary levels in rural areas, at least until there is an increase in the supply of potential teachers with the required skills and educational levels.
If the private sector is to be made partner in the task of universal elementary education, only these small scale private entrepreneurs will be of any help. They will gladly accept the vouchers. Since the scale of operation in villages has to be small and prospects of high profits would be limited and the student intake would also not be to their liking, no elite institution will offer its services.

NGO (Aided) and Concession Schools
Domestic NGOs should be encouraged to take the lead in providing educational services in underserved areas and segments of population. Studies comparing the performance of NGO schools and other educational providers show that non-profit NGO schools are more successful in encouraging literacy and imparting elementary education specially to girls. Considerable externalities arise from their independent interventions in the form of impact on the formal, conventional providers of public services such as state and state-aided private bodies. [Mohammad Niaz Asadullah and Nazmul Chaudhury (2008): Madrasas and NGOs: Complements or Substitutes? Non-State Providers and Growth in Female Education in Bangladesh, World Bank Research Paper, WPS 4511] NGO intervention has directly increased enrolment, specially of girls, and also lead to the opening up of predominantly all-boys religious education madarsa system to girls. In India, aided schools can be termed as NGO schools. They should be encouraged.
Another form of PPP is private provision of public (government) education as followed in the charter school system in the USA and the concession school experiment in Bogota Colombia in 1999. (See Felipe Barrera-Osorio1: The Impact of Private Provision of Public Education: Empirical Evidence from Bogotá Concession Schools, Impact Evaluation Series no. 10, WPS4121).
The programme is a partnership between the public and private education sectors, with private schools providing public education in the 25 selected schools for a period of 15 years. The state provides the infrastructure, selects the students and pays a pre-agreed sum per full-time student per year. The concession schools are allowed relative flexibility to contract administrative and teaching staff and can freely implement their pedagogic model. The concession schools must meet performance standards (on quality and quantity) set by the Secretary of Education.
Tests show that the system has yielded positive results. This is simply contracting-out the schools to NGOs and private providers. However, this option has limited scope. You cannot hand over lakhs of schoolteachers to the private sector; moreover, no private provider will accept permanent government teachers. Then where will the government school teachers go?
Government Schools
However, the major burden of providing education to the unserved and mostly unmotivated sections, especially in the rural areas, will have to be borne by the government though, no doubt, presently the government school system is in a very bad shape. Absenteeism of teachers and lack of serious teaching activity even when present is a major problem, specially in the rural and remote areas. Moreover, the quality of their services in terms of impact on schooling outcomes is quite weak. Motivation and accountability are two major factors determining the outcomes. Poor learning in schools is, in part, also due to the incapacity of parents to monitor and help the study of the child at home and in school.
In their study of differences in the learning level of students in different category of schools in Pakistan and UP in India, Jishnu Das, Priyanka Pandey and Tristan Zajonc (2006): Learning Levels and Gaps in Pakistan, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4067, November 2006) report some revealing and interesting results. Levels of learning and the structure of the educational gaps are similar in these countries. Children know little relative to what they need to know to function in society and relative to their curriculum. Differences across schools account for at least 50 per cent of the overall variation in test scores. While there are differences across children from different parental backgrounds (children from wealthier backgrounds or with more educated parents know more), these differences are dwarfed by those across government and private schools and across good and bad government schools. In English, the difference between children in private and government schools is twelve times as large as the difference between children from poor and non-poor households after controlling for observed differences between children.
While the best schools are not always private schools, the worst schools are almost exclusively government schools. These dismally performing government schools often record achievement levels so low that the pupils tested must have virtually no cumulated knowledge or skills after four years of education.
However, not all government schools are the same—the difference in learning between a high-performing and a low-performing government school is twentyfour times the difference between children from poor and non-poor backgrounds after controlling for observed child-level differences. There are indeed very large differences between schools in the same village, there are some good (and some bad) schools in every village. There are no “bad” villages and “good” villages.
Therefore, for improving learning, we need focus on the characteristics of schools. Thus, improvements in learning can be achieved by designing appropriate policies that influence teachers to come to school and put their effort and also goad parents to improve their parenting and oversight practices.
As already pointed out, all public sector or private sector institutions are not equally efficient or inefficient. India’s number one export is manpower—unskilled as well as highly skilled workers, scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, professors and even writers and teachers in English can be found all over the developed world. However, not more than three per cent of all schools can be categorised as the ‘efficient’ private sector ‘public’ schools. Surely, India is not competing globally on the strength of this minuscule proportion of population. Moreover, even these have received, in a majority of cases, their higher education in government colleges and public sector university departments other than IIMs and IITs despite the fact that government schools and colleges have lost some of their glory in recent years. This is because governments are also bent upon weakening the public sector education system by starving them of funds, blocking appointments, encouraging part-time per period teachers, and gross political interference. The government sector educational institutions, small or large, schools or colleges or universities are run as normal government departments.
Though government schools have the highest percentage of teachers who are professionally trained at 43.4 and unaided private schools the lowest (2.3 per cent) learning achievements are higher in private schools. Private schools may be better able to fire teachers with low levels of intrinsic motivation and performance. In private schools, pay is linked to performance. In contrast, government teachers are paid according to a fixed-salary scale that rewards experience and training, but little else. And they cannot be fired. Moreover, in several States they receive time-bound promotions which are mostly unrelated to performance. There is no pressure on them to perform, innovate and experiment. There is no effective incentive/disincentive system. Thus, better training as well as higher pay packets alone do not ensure better results if motivation to perform and accountability are lacking.
However, government schools are not inherently inefficient providers of education. This is evidenced by the fact that test-scores are vastly different across government schools and there is a huge variation in teacher effort across government schools and across regions and States. Then the question arises: why are schools that used to perform very well and were rated very high in the past are rated very low now? Explanations have to be found.
Some 40 years back when government and aided schools were almost exclusive providers of education, they catered to all sections of the population, there was enough competitive pressure from students and parents on teachers pushing them to higher and higher efficiencies. Now because of the migration of wards of competition and quality conscious parents to elite private corporate sector schools that pressure is missing. The culprit is thus the segregation of schools into elite and commoner schools.
Presently, the liberalised, sensex-sensitised elite have created their own India with exclusive schools for their children. Parents monitor the progress of their ward. However, this all is missing in the schools which cater to the poor. Thus, quality school education cannot be provided to the poor in this socially and resource segregated school system of today. Establishment of the neighbourhood school system wherein parents from all educational, social and economic back-ground are required to send their wards to a school in their neighbourhood, whether it is private or government school and the school cannot refuse admission, is the best solution. This will also abolish the need of bussing. However, the emergent middle class that controls the bureaucracy, political parties, judiciary, media, think-tanks and universities have seen that this policy is not implemented so as to monopolise on good education and the benefits derived from it. Hence, the public (government plus community school) system has to be strengthened so that students from all classes are attracted to these schools as is the case of the central school system.
Central schools, Navodaya schools and military schools are all government schools. Their standards are not in anyway worse than the so-called ‘public’ schools. Similarly, central universities and institutes, IITs and IIMs are all government institutions; still they are well known for their high teaching and research standards. In contrast, government educational institutions in several States are mostly the worst performing institutions.
Mostly wards of Central Government employees of all ranks seek admission to schools run by the Central Government. The parents are highly competition conscious and motivated, so are their wards. They are highly demanding of the teachers and the schools. Moreover, there is practically no political interference in appointments, posting, transfers and evaluation of teachers. The political centre is too far away from the widely distributed network of schools to indulge in political and bureaucratic interference. There are well-thought-out rules and regulations for promotion and evaluation based on results. The oversee committees are also effective. Therefore, the teachers are motivated to perform. If the non-served children are admitted to these schools then they will also perform well and the problem of drop-outs will be minimised.
In the State government schools, on the other hand, political interference in appointments and transfers have gained epidemic proportions in several States. There are annual transfer melas. Transfers and promotions are not related to performance. For example, in Rajasthan, promotions to higher scales are almost automatic even if the teacher does not fulfil the qualifications for that scale. Mass transfers have become an annual feature. Transfers are unrelated to performance and results. Much time, energy and taxpayer’s money is wasted in this unnecessary political exercise. Now, when it is proposed to promote all students upto the fifth class and class X examinations are to be discontinued, the teachers are almost given the license for not working. Moreover, only poor families get their wards admitted in government schools. The parents have no motivation, no time and above all no capacity to press for high performance.
Priyanka Pandey, Sangeeta Goyal and Venkatesh Sundararaman (2008) (Public Participation, Teacher Accountability, and School Outcomes: Findings from Baseline Surveys in Three Indian States. World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper WPS4777) conducted a baseline survey of teachers and students in randomly selected government primary schools in MP, UP and Karnataka in 2006 for assessing public participation, teacher accountability, and school outcomes.
The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan initiated in 2001 to universalise quality education, envisages increasing accountability of schools to the community through greater involvement of village education committees and parent-teacher associations. The situation has not improved much in the case of most. States as evidenced from this study of MP and UP Karnataka is in a better state. Learning achievements differ substantially across States, these are very low in both MP and UP and much higher in Karnataka. For example, in UP and MP only 46 and 54 per cent of children after four years of schooling can read three or more words from a list of five compared to 92 per cent in Karnataka. And barely 22 per cent in UP and 33 per cent in MP at the end of grade 4 can read a simple sentence compared to 73 per cent in Karnataka. Knowledge in Mathematics is still more miserable.
Teacher attendance and engagement in teaching are low in both MP and UP and much higher in Karnataka. On an average, 88 per cent of teachers were present in Karnataka, 65 per cent in UP and 67 per cent in MP. However, low rates of teacher attendance and teaching activity are only part of the problem of low learning achievement. What is going on in classrooms when teachers are present and teaching takes place is obviously quite important. The researchers found that the average fraction of teachers present and actively engaged in teaching was 68 per cent in Karnataka, 25 per cent in UP and 30 per cent in MP. In all the States, a high proportion of teachers are male and from the high caste. More than 50 per cent of the teachers have a college education in MP and UP unlike Karnataka where 72 per cent of the teachers have a grade 12 degree or less. Both MP and UP have a large cadre of contract teachers who have significantly higher attendance and activity compared to regular teachers. Despite these positive factors, learning achievements are much lower in UP and MP in comparison with Karnataka. An interesting result is that more qualified and permanent male teachers are less likely to perform well. Salaries and qualifications of government schools teachers are above the norm for the country. Indeed, if anything, absenteeism increases with salary and qualifications. Trade unionism is often blamed for this mess. This is only partly true. Trade union power has been reduced considerably in the liberalised post-1991 scenario. One probable reason is that election work in India is almost exclusively done by teachers and they can help in silent booth capturing and other election related mal-practices. Hence political parties in power try to keep them pleased. This explains the transfer melas and complete absence of monitoring of the teaching work.
One basic reason is thatin MP and UP, the communities do not have the capacity to hold the teachers accountable or communities are largely uninformed or unprepared or unmotivated about the controls that have been devolved to them. Parent members of Village Education Committees (VEC) and Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) are not actively participating in their oversight capacity and have very low levels of awareness regarding their roles and responsibilities. The headmasters seem to be executing most of the functions of VECs and PTAs. The communities at large are not even aware of the existence of these committees.
In another study, the researchers launched structured campaign providing information to communities about their oversight roles in schools. They found a positive impact on process and behaviour outcomes, delivery of inputs to students, teacher effort and learning outcomes in all three States. Outcomes at baseline were much higher in Karnataka suggesting greater efficiency in delivery than in MP and UP. The differences in impact may be due to the differences in the initial conditions and also in the different decentralisation set-ups in different States..
Better results regarding teacher attendance as well as teacher effort can be obtained if the school committee is obligated to verify the teacher’s presence in order for the teacher to receive his or her salary as in MP. The changing behavior of oversee committee members and villagers to change school outcomes requires time to take place. Barriers to collective action take great effort and much time to be overcome. It is also important to induce teachers to be highly motivated and altruistic.
Better performance out of the highly paid teaching staff in government schools in the educationally backward States can be extracted if lessons are learnt from central schools as well as from the better performing States like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and the recent experiments even in the laggard States like MP. Political interference in management of education at all levels will have to be given up. One way out is that teachers are appointed on contract basis for upto five years, though in the same grade as the permanent teachers, and with leave facilities and PF contribution from the employer. This is the practice in Law universities. The Education Minister proposes to introduce this pattern in other institutions too. If efficiency cannot be ensured by high wages or high degrees alone, neither can it be achieved by giving starvation wages to teachers. Examinations have to be retained in some form so that teachers are made accountable. Contract teachers are not to be transferred. In other cases too, transfers should be minimised and should be based on set rules and regulations. Contract renewals and promotions should be strictly based on performance as verified by the VEC or PTA or as per the social audit. It is necessary to introduce social auditing as in the case of the NREGA. The problem of achieving cent per cent elementary education is also acute in areas under the coverage of the NREGA. Social auditing of the NREGA can and should be extended to schools in areas covered by RTFE.
Concerns about too heavy burden and tension of frequent examinations and grade achievements may be valid in the urban schools catering to the middle and upper classes. But not so in the rural schools catering to the first generation students. Promoting all students upto 5th or any standard in their case will be counter-productive. What will be the guarantee that the students are really taught and there are no fake admissions, fake promotions to higher classes and therefore fake universal education just to collect the voucher money?

B.C. Mehta and Kranti Kapoor, Mainstream Weekly,1 March 2010

This report presents a regional overview of accountability and transparency in primary education management in seven African countries. It has been produced within the
framework of Africa Education Watch (AEW). Since the late 1990s the management of primary education in much of Africa has been subject to structural changes intended to bring it closer to the ‘user’, and to give citizens at the local level (particularly parents) a greater stake in management. The goal is to increase accountability, oversight and responsiveness.
The new administrative and fiscal arrangements have placed more responsibilities on regional, district, communal and school level authorities.
TI’s AEW programme seeks to discover whether these new decentralised systems are effective in controlling malpractice, monitoring the flow of resources, and preventing corruption, resource leakages and delays. Particularly, it asks whether school administration is now a genuinely accountable and participatory governance system.
Click here to read the report

Transparency International, Feb 2010