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Weekly Update on Education (Issue No 267) 21 Jan 2014
- Shantanu Gupta
Path-breaking review report on Delhi School Education Act 1973

Indian education policy space might not have seen a report as progressive as “The Report of the Review Committee on the Delhi school Education Act and Rules, 1973”, thanks to former Chief Secretary of Delhi, Shailaja Chandra, IAS (retd.), the chairperson of the drafting committee of this three volume report.

The review committee has consulted more than 100 people from education directorate, non-governmental organizations, MCD, DDA, NIC, legal fraternity, parent’s association, SCERT, various principals and teachers of private and government schools, private school associations, and various eminent educationists to compile the report. Though this report reviews Delhi School Education Act, 1973, its commentary on legal cases related to education, references from various national committees on education, use of empirical data on different types of schools and learning outcome data from ASER (Pratham) makes this report very robust and applicable to all the states in India.

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Research

Teaching Quality Counts: How Student Outcomes Relate to Quality of Teaching in Private and Public Schools in India
Authors: Renu Singh and Sudipa Sarkar

Abstract: This mixed-methods paper investigates whether the ‘private school premium’, as manifested in student learning outcomes, is the result of better-quality teaching in private schools. Using school-, community- and household-level data from the Young Lives longitudinal study in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, this paper makes a detailed comparison of 227 government and private schools attended by the children in the sample. We use detailed information on school-based components and information from classroom observation, as well as household- and individual-level information and qualitative interviews, for our analysis.

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Education News
 

Education service delivery State regulations may cause more harm than good: expert
- Business Recorder, 19 Jan 2014
Parth stressed that school recognition standards in terms of infrastructure requirements pose a serious challenge to the existing low cost, private schools, which are often unable to finance these standards and face a choice between closing down and increasing their fee, causing loss to enrolment in both cases.

Education quality worsens under UPA: ASER
- Live Mint, 15 Jan 2014
Despite levying a tax to fund education and enacting a law to ensure access to education for all children between the ages of 6 and 14, the government hasn’t succeeded in improving learning outcomes in India’s schools, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published on Wednesday.

Delhi: HC rejects plea of schools on nursery admission guidelines
- Hindustan Times, 20 Jan 2014
In a setback to unaided private schools, the Delhi high court today dismissed their plea seeking a stay on city government's nursery admission guidelines that included scrapping of 20 per cent management quota.

Reduce gap in pay for school, college teachers
- The Times of India, 17 Jan 2014
The Higher Secondary Teachers' Association of Goa has demanded that the Goa government should represent their case before the proposed seventh pay commission in order to reduce the gap in pay scales of school teachers and college lecturers for which there is a wide gap at present.

Education to be in focus at Barack Obama's State of the Union address
- Economic Times, 19 Jan 2014
President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address on January 28. 'Too many parents and too many kids just don’t take education seriously enough and don’t want to put in the work needed today to really excel?'

Poll
Should the Supreme Court of India interfere with the Right to Education Act in context of the no-detention policy?

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Factoid
Only 8 per cent schools are RTE compliant in terms of infrastructure and teacher availability in 2013. (Source: RTE Forum)

Publications

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