Official discussions on the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) have heavily concentrated on funding: the finance ministry recently raised the Centre’s share of total RTE funding to 68 percent, with the states’ share declining to 32 percent. While ensuring adequacy of funds is welcome, the whole basis of the Act is problematic — it mainly addresses the issue of inputs and not the arguably much larger problem of poor accountability and inadequate preparation of the country’s primary school teachers.
Unfortunately the Act ensures little more than improved access to primary and upper primary schools. It seems oblivious to the reality that access to poor quality schools doesn’t translate into improved learning outcomes.
The consensus of informed opinion in Indian academia is that the most important problems in Indian school education are poor quality and low accountability. Countrywide, 20-25 percent of the 5.5 million teachers in India’s 930,000 government primary and upper primary schools are absent from class on any given day. When they are in school, teacher effort (as measured by time on task) is low, as testified by the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE), 1999; Teacher Time on Task (2008) and SchoolTELLS (2009) reports. Reflecting this class-room reality, children’s knowledge absorption and learning levels are also pitiably low, as testified by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) published by Pratham, the respected Mumbai-based NGO. Consequently children’s school attendance percentages are very disappointing — 40 percent in Bihar, 55 percent in Uttar Pradesh, and although better, averaging only 70-80 percent countrywide.
Against this backdrop what can the Central, state and local governments do to improve the quality of education in the country’s nearly 1 million state schools? In my opinion, two strands of reform are urgently needed: (i) improved quality of teacher training and preparation and (ii) systems to improve institutional and teacher accountability, with revised incentives if necessary.
On the issue of teacher preparation, large deficits in teachers’ knowledge and skills (found in SchoolTELLS survey) suggest the need to thoroughly revise pre-service and in-service teacher training curricula. There’s urgent need to supplement the philosophical and theoretical content of teacher training programmes with greater practical inputs to familiarise teachers with, and raise their own knowledge of the content of school textbooks; improve teachers’ classroom communication skills and enhance their ability to spot mistakes commonly made by children.
Secondly, on the issue of teacher acco-untability, chronic absenteeism suggests a degree of indifference to school, parents and the community. Clearly centralisation of management authority in state capitals or district headquarters (rather than in empowered local, on-the-spot committees) hasn’t worked. Although the original 2005 draft of the RTE Act proposed decentralised management of schools by creating locally accountable school-based teacher cadres, and entrusting school management committees (SMCs) with powers to appoint teachers, pay salaries and punish absentee teachers, these provisions were omitted from the final draft of the RTE Bill, 2009, neutering SMCs.
What internal pulls and pushes led to the exclusion/dilution of these important clauses is unclear. Yet it’s hardly a secret that teacher unions have opposed decentralisation reforms (in relation to this Act, and generally over the past 40 years). Studies conducted in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan suggest that performance-related pay (based on teacher-attendance and/or on improved learning outcomes of children), substantially improves child learning levels. However, proposals for performance-related pay are anathema to government school teachers.
The strength of teachers’ unions and powerful vested interest lobbies makes it difficult to legislate accountability reforms in government schools. The RTE Act tacitly acknowledges these constraints, as reflected in its decision to utilise private schools for publicly-paid seats to “provide education of equitable quality”. The Act mandates the most ambitious public-private partnership in education in post-independence India by requiring all recognised private schools to provide 25 percent of their seats to poor children in their neighbourhood (paid for by government).
All this leads to the rather pessimistic conclusion that despite the government’s good intentions in legislating and funding primary education reform, the RTE Act will be ineffectual in raising schooling quality because it misses the elephant in the room, while belabouring discredited input-based policies. Courageous reform is needed to address school/teacher accountability rather than pandering to vested interests. This means ensuring that chronically lax teachers can be ousted, and linking a proportion of teacher rewards to their (reliably assessed) classroom performance. This requires bold systemic reform as well as fundamental improvements in the quality and relevance of teacher training programmes, rather than merely legislating that all teachers should be trained.
(Geeta Kingdon is chair of education economics and international development at the Institute of Education, University of London)