What is stopping India from Quality Mass Education?

            Given that India is so vast and diverse, it is just not possible for any individual to summaries its highly complex problems. Nonetheless, I shall attempt to touch upon some of the overall factors that hinder improvement in quality of mass-education.

·         Lack of clarity of measurable objectives of education at all administrative levels (from central government to individual classrooms): At any level of administration, there is no consensus on what kind of future citizens do we want. I understand some objectives may differ depending on the social context. However, objectives in India differ depending on who is responding to the question even at school-level. Therefore, educators and administrators often do not see any unified purpose of their actions. In addition, the idealistic goals that various governments declare often find little policy support and are hardly ever systematically evaluated.

·         Cycle of Deteriorating Teacher Quality as explained in figure below:

Note: There can always be exceptions. Teacher in elite-private schools are much better off.

·         Highly Hierarchical Centralized Structure: Curriculum, school calendar, text books, school fees, all physical resources are usually decided by state governments. System is based on lack of trust and assumption seems to be that people will abuse their power if granted to them. Furthermore, the hierarchy descends in order of Ministers → State administrators → district administrators → cluster coordinators → principals → teachers (full time senior, junior, contract teachers). Generally, person at lower-level is “supposed” to be an obedient servant of the higher authority. It is highly unlikely that a teacher expresses displeasure regarding policy decision to a district or state administrator face to face in Indian system.

·         Low accountability of teachers, principals, educational administrators at all levels in public education: Government jobs in India are often considered as the most secured jobs. Educational administrators at any level and teachers/ principals in government schools may get fired only in rarest of the rare cases. In their study Kremer and colleagues found that during unannounced visits 25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were involved in teaching activity (Kremer, Muralidharan, Chaudhury, Rogers, & Hammer, 2005). This study surveyed nationally representative sample of more than 3700 schools during three unannounced visits. Results suggested that a 10% increase in teacher absence was associated with 1.8% lower student attendance, as well as with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores of 4th-grade children. One good thing is that inefficiency of teachers is at least being studied systematically. There is no research done to examine how efficient the principals or educational administrators at district or state-level are. Nonetheless, India does not have any effective mechanism to tackle irresponsible behaviour of her public servants.  

·         Memory-based assessment: Research shows that the teaching methodology of teachers and the learning methods of students greatly depend on the type and quality of questions asked in educational assessments. Thus, if the majority of Indian students are choosing rote memorization and superficial learning strategies to crack the scholastic examinations, something must be wrong with the assessment system. Most educational assessments focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. In addition, replication of the text of the textbooks is often considered as an “ideal” answer and is well rewarded by the examiners. Thus, persistence of this trend and high proportion of knowledge-level questions have basically converted educational assessment into memory-tests.

·         Poor understanding of Educational Science: Education as a field of study is often narrowly understood as “teacher training”. India has not developed educational infrastructure for producing curriculum designers, educational administrators and school leaders, school psychologists, educational policymakers, psychometricians and so on. In addition, educational researchers have hardly ever found significant voice in national or state-level policy making. Also, educational researchers have shied away from both electronic and print media and there has not been informed public debate on various educational issues. I would be surprised if any Indian, except an educational researcher him/herself, would be able to name even three Indian educationists.

I hope this article helps address the last point at the very least.