After
independence, India has significantly expanded its educational infrastructure.
Gross enrolment rates are near universal in most states. However, the quality
of education remains a major concern as many large scale educational
assessments indicate overall poor academic outcomes of students (ASER 2005-14; Education Initiatives, 2010; NCERT, 2008). Most academicians, media, and people
in and around policy circles acknowledge this dire state of education. However,
the discussion on “the way out of this mess” only revolves around school,
teacher and/or student level interventions. While micro-level (i.e., school or
teacher-level) reforms are essential for qualitative improvement, there are
some systematic macro-level problems which are more critical yet they remain
unaddressed.
Lack of Policy-relevant
Knowledge
Suppose
you are the educational secretary of a state and have to invest hundred crore
rupees in primary education. What will be your investment priority? School
infrastructure, hiring more teachers, performance pay for teachers,
psychological support for children, improving quality of school-meal,
subsidized text-books and school uniforms for the poor, celebrations of
numerous festivals in schools, or organizing sports and cultural events across
state? Will you distribute this money uniformly across all districts or in
certain priority? What proportion should you spend on the least developed
regions? All of these questions are extremely important and only empirical research can provide answers. Unfortunately, India has neglected
empirical research for so long that it cannot provide answers for effective
investment priority and policy formulation even for one state. There exists
very little empirical work on educational issues.
Moreover,
whatever little empirical studies that are conducted, are often not accessible
to policymakers, fellow researchers, and practitioners. In most cases, one copy
of the study is submitted to the funding agency and the other one could be
lying somewhere in the college/department library. Unfortunately, universities
do not even keep doctoral dissertations and theses accessible to wider
audience. Intervention studies in Indian context, which are available on the
internet, are mostly conducted by the researchers outside of India or funded by
International agencies. Muralidharan (2013) provides a nice summary of major
works in Indian education and their policy relevance, but not one study was
conducted by an Indian institution. In total, one gets a feeling that the
centre and state governments are not serious about generating indigenous pool
of policy relevant knowledge in education sector. Accordingly, most debates and discussions around educational issues are dominated by "expert opinions" and not by empirical work.
Arbitrary approach
to Policy Formulation
Apathy
for indigenous knowledge is a problem, but I am more concerned about the
process of policy formulation. State officials and policymakers are not formally
trained to consume research literature. Empirical research, especially field
experiments and causal inference, is a highly developed field which demands
technical expertise. It is highly likely that a state government does not have
a single competent educational researcher in its policymaking-team. In such
scenario, policy formulation is often based on a mixture of subjective factors
like majoritarian view, administrative ease, and policymakers’ intuitions,
world-views and/or personal-experiences. This is extremely dangerous way of
policymaking given that lives and careers of future citizens are at stake.
Absence of Valid
& Reliable Academic Outcomes
Another
major issue pertains to the absence of standardized grade-level outcomes across
various educational settings, from vernacular religious schools to elite
English medium private schools. Everyone talks about poor quality, but there is
no standard definition of “educational quality”. Without standardized
assessment of a representative sample, a state may not be able to evaluate the
effectiveness of educational interventions and policies. In other words,
everyone, including the policymakers, are clueless about whether their actions
are producing any good. In addition, teachers, parents and students remain
unclear of the expected knowledge and skills for a particular standard.
Lack of Understanding
of Human Resource Required in Educational Sector
Yes, there is a great dearth of education specialists across the country. But, more frustratingly one
gets a feeling that the policymakers only seem to understand two job profiles: teachers and
teacher-trainers. There has been little attention on developing human resource
for educational administration at state, district, clusters or schools,
curriculum and instruction design, testing and measurement, educational research, psychological support
in schools, and policy making.
As a
result of above discussion, India has not been able to establish consistency
between national human-resource requirement, knowledge-base, policy design and
implementation, and educational practices in the field (Figure 1).
I present a potential mechanism for
establishing these linkages in blog post entitled, Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution
Do share your thoughts...
