Sops galore but not much on giving better education
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016 is out and it is not a pretty picture for Uttar Pradesh. This wholly rural education report shows rapid privatisation of education in rural UP, with the proportion of rural children attending private schools in the state increasing from 30.3% in 2006 to 52.1% now.
Learning levels continue to be pitiable, with only 7.2% of government school students and 36% of private school students of Class 3 being able to read a Class 2 level text, and the condition in maths being even more worrying, with only 9.1% of children of Class 3 being able to do simple division. Attendance rates are also low, with only 56% of enrolled children and 85% of teachers being present in school on the survey day.
Private fee charging schools are a visibly ubiquitous phenomenon, and many if not most rural private schools are unrecognised.
On the one hand private schools are in high public demand and rapidly growing in numbers, on the other, in public discourse their growth is dubbed the ‘mushrooming of fake teaching shops, playing with the lives of children’ when in fact the ASER numbers suggest that these schools are holding up whatever little quality of education and learning that exists in the system as a whole.
National Sample Survey data 2014-15 show that the median private-unaided schools’ fee in rural Uttar Pradesh was Rs 117 per month and in urban UP it was Rs 250 per month, when the per pupil expenditure in the government school system is estimated at Rs 1092 per month in 2014, as per a paper by Ambrish Dongre and Avani Kapur of the Delhibased Centre for Policy Research, published in September 2016 in the Economic and Political Weekly. Since even the unrecognised private schools are imparting at least somewhat better quality education at a small fraction of the per-pupil-cost of government schools, it seems the time has come to revise the conventional hunch-based negative perceptions about these schools.
Moreover, the requirement on education authorities to penalise and shut down private schools that do not comply with the recognition norms of the Right to Education Act 2009 has led to official closure notices to many such schools. For example, on August 31, 2015, the education authorities of the Lucknow district reportedly sent notices to 108 unrecognised private schools to shut down, and on 16 February 2016, to another 151 such schools to shut down. The closure of such schools which charge low fee and thus are unable to fulfil all the infrastructure norms of the RTE Act would represent a tragedy since the children from such schools would not necessarily be able to get admission in (or afford the fee of ) the recognised private schools.
Education policy needs to take a more sympathetic rather than punitive approach towards the lowfee budget private schools, recognising their contributions in an otherwise bleak education quality landscape. One option is to give them subsidy to comply with the expensive infrastructure norms; the other is to ease the most infeasible recognition norms, e.g. that the school building should comply with the National Building Code. In a parliamentary question last August, the HRD ministry admitted that less than 7% of government schools comply with the recognition norms of the RTE Act.
Given their preponderance and omnipresence, the government is dependent on the low-fee private schools for providing education to around half the children of the state. Efforts are needed to liberalise the sector and support these budget private schools, rather like the economic liberalisation of Indian industry from the shackles of over-bearing regulation.
Nothing will be gained by vilifying private schools in UP, to which even many poor parents have turned to, in desperation. Sensible education policies would improve education opportunity for the poor through school vouchers for BPL families so that the poor also get the entitlement to study in private schools of their choice, rather than being constrained to study in non-performing schools.