Plethora of problems continue to plague government schools

The recent high court order requiring the children of state officials to attend government schools shows righteous indignation at the poor quality of government schools. The HC order decries the government schools’ ‘shabby’ physical condition and their students’ pitiably low learning achievement levels. Officialdom – including at the ministry of HRD and at the NCERT in Delhi - has often been in denial of the problem of low achievement, dismissing as invalid the alarming findings of the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER reports).

While analysts work out the feasibility of compliance with the high court order, a constructive dialogue would also analyze ways to improve the quality of government schools. Section 18 of the RTE Act states that no private unaided school shall be allowed to function unless it fulfills the physical infrastructure norms of ‘recognition’ but, paradoxically, it allows the dysfunctional government schools which arguably need quality improvement the most, to function without fulfilling the recognition norms, i.e. it removes government schools from the ambit of the only quality-related provision of the RTE Act 2009.

Unfortunately, even having good physical infrastructure and adequate teacher inputs (good pupil-teacher ratios) is not a guarantee of education quality. Teachers must be present in school and teaching. They must know the subject-matter that they are meant to teach. Nationally, teacher absence rate in government schools is of the order of 25%, i.e. one out of every four days the teacher is absent. Probably reflecting this low teacher effort, student attendance rate on any given day in UP’s government schools is only 57% (MHRD data). Absence rates of contract teachers (who had annually renewable jobs) were about half the absence rates of regular teachers, but UP regularised all 176,000 contract teachers in 2014.

Moreover, teachers’ competence levels need attention. The SchoolTELLS survey showed that in Uttar Pradesh, only 28% of teachers could correctly do an ‘area problem’ which is usually introduced in grade 4 or 5 maths textbook, and only 25% teachers could do a percentage problem at the grade 5 level of difficulty. Only about 45% teachers could meaningfully summarise a grade 4 story text, and 60% of teachers had spelling mistakes when they wrote this summary. As many as 80% teachers admitted to having problems with their students’ maths queries. The teacher eligibility test (TET) is meant to identify competent candidates for appointment as teachers, but the pass rate in this test has been a dismal 5% or less in most Indian states. Such deficits in teachers’ own subject-matter knowledge can be plugged by reorienting teacher training curricula (in both pre- and in-service training courses) and ensuring that they focus on strengthening teachers’ subject matter knowledge.

Lastly, an important reason for low quality is the problematic ad hoc-ism about the way in which time, space and staffing are organised in government schools. In the SchoolTELLS survey of UP, only 25% of schools had classspecific time-tables and, among this small group, only 35% were found adhering to it. It is also noteworthy to know that 54% of schools opened late and one-third of the sample schools always closed earlier than the mandated closing time. About half the classrooms were multi-grade, and had considerable instability in grade-groupings on different days. An obvious policy implication is to assign specific teachers to specific classes and ensure that a steady and stable grade-grouping arrangement lasts throughout the year. Class-specific time-tables need to be mandated and adherence to them, and to the specified opening and closing times, needs to be encouraged and monitored.

The writer holds the Chair of Education Economics and International Development at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.