Indian Education: Macro-level Systemic Problems

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 

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