Ways to make the school dream come true
Right to Education Act can transform the lives of crores of children from poor backgrounds; schools, government must come together to plug the gaps
Wearing a uniform, carrying textbooks and sitting in a classroom is still a distant dream for more than two crore children in India, despite an act that makes education their right.
The good news is, there are ways to ensure the Right to Education Act (RTE) is implemented better — from increasing education budgets to better student enrolment drives and investing in teacher training, academicians and education activists said.
ENROLMENT DRIVES
Crores of students across India are out-of-school; they are being denied their Right to Education, but efforts to bring them into the fold seem half-hearted, said Herambh Kulkarni, a Pune-based activist.
Take for instance a day-long survey done on July 4, 2015 by the education department did to identify children who were never enrolled in school and those who dropped out later.
Around 40,000 such children were found across Maharashtra alone.
But activists said this survey barely scratched the surface, and that the actual number of out-of-school children was much more.
After a couple of more surveys, the drive ran out of gas.
“The problem is that there is no willpower to implement the Act. While the RTE Act states it is the school’s responsibility to ensure all children in their neighbourhood have access to education, the government is not holding the schools accountable,” said Kulkarni, adding that for these drives to be successful, co-ordination between different departments, such as the labour, social welfare, tribal, and women and child development departments, is necessary.
“The drives weren’t effective because these departments do not coordinate their efforts. Children who are out of school are from varied backgrounds — child labourers, children of migrants or from different tribes. Thismeanstheeffortsto reach out to them have to be taken jointly by all departments,” Kulkarni said.
QUALITY CONCERN
The quality of education in schools is another area of concern, said experts.
The Maharashtra government has taken up several initiatives to improve education standards, but they are focused only on creating model schools. The others remain neglected.
For instance, a recent state government initiative aims to bring 26 civic-run schools at a par with international standards — again an effort focussed on only some schools.
Educationists said instead of developing a few schools as models, the government should work to bring all schools up to the level of the centre-run Navodaya Vidyalayas and Kendriya Vidyalayas that are known to be benchmarks of public schooling.
“The government wants to develop ‘model schools’, but this would mean not too much effort is put into improving other schools,” said Girish Samant, the author of a book on the RTE Act and a trustee at the Abhi Goregaonkar English School.
Samant said because of poor training, several schools misunderstood initiatives that can improve the quality of education, such as the no-detention policy (in which the students are promoted till Class 8 irrespective of their grades) and the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), which focuses on the allround development of the children.
“The CCE was a big change over the 150-year-old tradition of rote-learning and exam-oriented assessment. But teachers were not trained to understand how it works,” Samant said.
What’s more shocking is that the concept of CCE is not even part of the syllabus in the courses aspiring teachers take, such as the diploma in education and bachelors in education (BED).
“When CCE forms such an important part of the new evaluation style under the RTE Act, teachers more than anyone else need to be proficient with its working,” said Samant.
“Merely holding training programmes for teachers in service is not enough; we need to ensure that the new recruits are also
POOR SECURITY
Security in schools, especially in state-run residential schools or ashramshaalas, is another area that needs immediate attention, said activists.
In November last year, several cases of minor girls being raped in ashram schools in Buldhana brought to light the deplorable conditions in which these girls live .
But even with such incidents rising across the country, the infrastructure and security in most of these schools are yet to be upgraded, said Shubadha Deshmukh, a member of the district and divisional committee to monitor ashram schools.
The main problem is the shortage of schools — there are more students than schools.
This puts tremendous strain on the existing schools, Deshmukh said.
“In some of the schools, we observed there are only 15 beds for 48 to 50 girls. The rooms are so crammed, and the girls often have to change their clothes Deshmukh.
These schools lack the most basic of amenities, such as continuous water supply, separate and clean toilets for girls and uninterrupted electricity.
Wardens and women attendants are also absent in most of these schools, which has activists demanding security bells in the girls’ rooms.
“The bells can be sounded if the girls are in trouble. These bells can be connected to a main security station or to the local police station,” said Deshmukh.
But instead of improving the condition of such schools, the government recently started a scheme that gives private, reputed English schools Rs40,000 a child for enrolling tribal children.
Activists pointed out how this again was an example of misplaced focus, as it will only benefit a few students.
“Instead of spending money on this, the government could have looked at using it to improve the condition of all