Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 1

This article discusses: 1) a brief overview of national policies in primary education, and 2) the challenges (obstacles) associated with such centralized national policies. For convenience, the article is divided into two blog posts.  

At the time of independence, India’s literacy-rate was close to 18%. Amid great external and internal socio-political conflicts, extremely limited resources and responsibility of a large population, the entire focus of national/provincial policymakers landed on raising literacy-rates. Governments across states built schools and one of the greatest mass-education systems started expanding. However, policymakers soon realized that mere building schools do not necessarily result into increase in enrollment-rates, and it is not easy to retain students into schools. Moreover, malnutrition in children was severe and widely prevalent. To address these multiple challenges, Kamraj’s government in Tamil Nadu implemented a midday meal scheme (1962-63) in which children were served meal at their schools for free. Enrollment rates increased while dropout-rates and malnutrition started decreasing. Gujarat and Kerala followed soon; and by early 90s twelve states had emulated this successful scheme. Later in 1995, Narsimhma Rao’s central government made it India-wide. After 1990, the economic liberalization helped generate more liquidity for school building. Rao’s government also launched District Primary Education Programme (DEPE) which had a prime objective of universalizing primary education. DEPE rolled out in several phases and was implemented in about one third of Indian districts. Later in 2001, Vajpayee’s government launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) which was basically a more comprehensive form of DEPE and was implemented throughout India. Access to within-village school with free meals resulted in increased enrollment from mere 22.3 million students in 1990 (Govinda, & Josephine, 2004) to more than 193 million in 2010-11 (Mehta, 2012). The basic education system, which consisted of around 200,000 schools in 1950, expanded to more than 1.1 million in 2010. As of 2011, India’s literacy rate was around 73% (which was 18% in 1947).

School buildings in neighborhood and free meals were great, but what about learning? Policymakers realized that pupil to teacher ratio (PTR) was skyrocketing (national average of 50.2 in 2000) because teacher recruitment lagged far behind the rapid infrastructural undertaking. Building a school was primarily perceived as onetime expense, and works great politically. Politicians could tell the voters – “we gave you this school!” However, teacher-recruitment was often perceived as a permanent burden on the state budget, and all state (and centre) governments were struggling with high fiscal deficits. To solve this, states started implementing the para-teacher policy (contract-teacher), where teachers are hired on contract bases and on meager salaries. At present, almost all state governments have adopted this policy; and direct teacher-recruitment has been abandoned. There are passionate (and valid) criticisms of this policy especially from educators and teacher unions, but this policy helped bring PTR down (national average of 30.15 in 2010) fairly cheaply.

Now there were school-buildings, teachers, and meals, but policymakers learnt that economic inequality gets translated into educational inequality. Those who can afford, send their kids to private schools. Because the quality of education in public schools is perceived to be of low levels, the percentage of students going to private schools is steadily rising (18.7% in 2006 to 28.3% in 2012 according to ASER Centre, 2012). Low performing government schools are likely to have students from lower socio-economic status and high performing elite schools often have all students from higher socio-economic background. In response, Manmohan Singh’s government introduced Right to Education Act in 2009 that guaranteed free public education to all children between ages 6 to 14 and mandated that even the private schools must have 25% of students from low socio-economic background.   

Moreover, there has been a wide-spread concern about the quality of education in the past couple of decades. Many large-scale studies have indicated poor learning outcomes of students across states. To address this concern, Modi-government recently introduced a sub-scheme of SSA called Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat which is aimed at improving reading and mathematics outcomes. Sample based yearly educational assessment by SCERTs in their respective states and by NCERT on nationally representative sample as prescribed by this scheme seems doable. Standardized academic outcomes should help evaluate existing educational programmes and decide future course of policy-action. This may help compare average learning outcomes across years and across schools/blocks/districts. Scientific identification of top performing schools/blocks/districts could help unpack specific components of best practices which can be emulated in other similar social contexts. This scheme also underscores the role of block and cluster administrators and involves them in monitoring and implementation. However, it goes into micro issues and prescribes specific classroom processes that the teacher and school staff need to follow – that seems over ambitious and difficult to gauge. Nonetheless, it is too early to comment on the effectiveness of this scheme. 

  

Based on the above discussion, we can say:

·         Policymakers need well defined outcomes for evaluation of the existing policies. Measurable clear outcomes also provide future policy directions. As we saw in the discussion above how various policies were basically proposed solutions for prevalent critical problems for respective times.

·         We can also conclude that some of the school-education outcomes that are of interest to the policymakers are: 1) number of schools, 2) enrollment-rates, 3) dropout-rates, 4) malnutrition in children, 5) PTR, and 6) math and reading outcomes. In addition, there are numerous sub-indicators like student enrollment and dropout by their background (various socio-economic categories/ gender/ region/ standard), teachers’ educational level and background characteristics, school infrastructural indicators and so on – which the policymakers often use.

Note: The second part of this post is: Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 2

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