The Classroom Test

Context: Covid reinforces the importance of fixing our flailing government schools. We must not fail our children

Contemporary issues in Indian Education:

• Low enrolment in government schools: The proportion of India’s children attending a government school has now declined to 45 %; this number is 85 % in America, 90 % in England, and 95 % in Japan.
• The cynical confiscation of 25% of private school capacity by the Right to Education Act is a tacit acceptance of state failure and parents’ “revealed preference”.
• Huge drop out ratio: Covid creates new urgency; reports suggest 25% of Haryana private school students may have dropped out this year due to parental financial challenges.
• Poor learning outcomes: Only 50 % of Grade 5 children being able to read a grade 2 text.
• Too many schools: We have too many schools, and 4 lakh have less than 50 students (70 per cent of schools in Rajasthan, Karnataka, J&K, and Uttarakhand).
• Low English acceptance: West Bengal banned English teaching in primary schools in 1981 (this may explain their lowest ranking among states in the proportion of English medium students at 5.3%).
• BR Ambedkar believed “English is the milk of the lioness, he who drinks it can roar”, yet only 26 % of our kids study in English.
• Federal issues: India’s constitution wrote Education Policy into Lists I (Centre), II (State), and III (concurrent jurisdiction), creating challenges in cooperation.

Way Forward:

• Reforms of governance:
  • The new world of work redefines employability to include the 3Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic and a fourth R of relationships; India’s transformation from the farm and non-farm jobs to services needs 4R competency and English awareness.
  • Covid accelerates the overdue move by schools from the factory model (same lesson for the same time) to a medical model (differential assistance for differential durations).
• Performance management: 
  • Teacher competence needs judging on child interaction, knowledge, planning capacity, communication, feedback abilities, and collaboration.
  • Classroom management needs assessment by classroom observation of learning (teaching often happens without learning), physical setup, instructional differentiation (for process, product, and learning styles), and communication (clarity, questioning, responsiveness).
  • Governance must shift from control of resources to learning outcomes.
  • Governance must enable performance management to be substantive and replace the current system best captured by the Tamil aphorism “naan adducha maadri addikyeren, nee arrara maadri aru (I will pretend as if I am beating you, you pretend as if you are crying)”.
• Focus on English instructions: English instruction is about bilingualism, higher education pathways, and employability.
  • Employment outcomes are 50%  higher for kids with English familiarity because of higher geographic mobility, sector mobility, role eligibility, and entrance exam ease.
• Decentralised decision making: For instance, recruitment at the block level will minimise teacher absenteeism and reduce the stakes and payments on the “transfer industry”, and school consolidation will reduce teacher shortages.