State Kills The Classroom

Instead of improving the quality of government schools, the state is passing the buck by enforcing legislation

Upgrade Government schools to solve India’s education woes. Penalties on private institutions isn’t the answer.

The Right to Education ( RTE) Act, passed by Parliament in 2009, crossed its final hurdle in law on April 12, 2012, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the Act, in particular the controversial clause which requires all unaided private schools to reserve 25 per cent of their seats for children from economically weaker sections. The Supreme Court imprimatur doesn’t however mean that it is a good law. The RTE Act is seriously flawed. The Act penalises the minority of schools in the private sector which actually provide quality education, while it does nothing to reform the majority of schools that are run by the Government, those which have singularly failed to provide even basic learning to the children.

Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan, the dissenting judge in the 2:1 Supreme Court verdict on RTE Act, admonished this “outsourcing” approach of the Government. “The state cannot free itself from obligations… by offloading or outsourcing its obligation to private state actors… or to coerce them to act on the state’s dictate,” wrote the judge ( see box: Lucid in Dissent).

The reality is that 93 per cent of schools are in the Government sector, either directly operated or funded. That Government schools are of poor quality is evident from the fact that 40 per cent of school-going children in India attend private schools, which constitute only seven per cent of the schools. According to the Annual State of Education Report ( ASER) for 2011, compiled by the NGO Pratham, in states like Kerala and Manipur private enrolment is as high as 60 per cent. Parents are keeping children out of sub-standard Government schools. India’s primary education standards, determined predominantly by Government schools where a majority of the population still studies, are dismal. The RTE Act has not helped until now. The 2011 ASER revealed that less than 50 per cent of Class V students were able to read a Class II textbook, down from 56 per cent in 2010, the year in which the RTE Act first came into effect. Only 30 per cent of students in Class III were able to solve a two- digit subtraction problem, down from 36 per cent in 2010. Also in 2011, a comparative study of learning across 74 regions by the Programme for International Student Assessment revealed that students from the two participating Indians states— Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, which are high performers within the country—ranked ahead of only Kyrgyzstan in learning outcomes in reading, mathematics and science.

Instead of focusing on upgrading the quality of the 93 per cent Government schools, the RTE Act pins its focus on the seven per cent private schools. In its most debated provision, it mandates that all private unaided CHILDREN AT AGOVERNMENT PRIMARY SCHOOLIN HYDERABAD