Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 2

Note: This piece is in continuation of Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 1

What are the challenges?

            One of the biggest challenges I can see is to take all stakeholders on board, help everyone see what the problem is, and how the proposed solution (policy reform) addresses it. For example, looking at the national level enrollment data by gender, policymakers prescribe schools to “engage with their local community and emphasize on education for girls”. What if the state administrators, teachers, parents or community members in a particular social context do not even see lower enrollment of girls as a problem? How do you ensure buy-in from all stakeholders? If the change agents (people at different administrative levels, teachers and school staff) do not believe in what they are asked to do, the policy intervention fails.

            In addition, this one small piece of information (less girls enrolled on average) could be due to a broader social issue of gender equality, school infrastructure, safe commute to school, or even skewed ratio of boys to girls. While the intent of the policymaker could be correct, the proposed solution is too simplistic, vague (terms like engage, local community, emphasize remain undefined), and loaded with assumption of gender bias. Moreover, the causes for fewer enrollments of girls could vary across social contexts. This brings me to the second challenge: generalization of proposed policy intervention. One-size-fits-all way of policy intervention may not work at macro-level. The intervention needs to be sensitive to the local social context.  

            Continuing with the same example, several studies in India have indicated that access to toilets for girls in schools is significantly related to high dropouts in girls. Accordingly, building separate toilets for girls in schools could be more effective than asking teachers to spread awareness about gender-equality for raising enrollments of girls. This point highlights the importance of systematic empirical research across various social contexts prior to policy formulation. Unfortunately, India’s educational sector is highly understudied empirically. There are too few educational research institutes and very little interaction between researchers and the policymakers.

            Fourth challenge deals with highly centralized decision making structure. Because, the proposed policy interventions often lack grass-root level buy-in (due to reasons mentioned above), the state/centre administrators use their position of higher authority to muscle down implementation. Rather than the system supporting the teachers and school staff in serving children, the entire system has to support the administrators to implement their proposed interventions. In the educational administrative hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices from below. The IASs often do the same and cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.

            Finally, the macro-level policy reports talk a lot about all-round development of children, but the focus has been limited to the literacy-rates, enrollment and dropout rates, physical infrastructure of school, and reading and math outcomes (that too very recently). The challenge is to expand this policy focus and to include physical and mental health outcomes of children. Sports, music, performing arts, social cohesion, prevalence of bullying and teasing, relations between teachers and students and among students, psychological support to students, and many vital interventions have remained side-notes in policy drafts and have not found their worthy place in the grass-root level practices. One big reason for their neglect could be that these interventions may not have direct relations with the academic outcomes. However, these interventions are more likely to have positive effects on children’s physical health (e.g., age-level benchmarking of stamina, muscle strength, and flexibility by gender; and medical screening) and/or mental health (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety, and screening for more prevalent disorders). If we can integrate clearly defined health outcomes (physical and mental) as an integral part of national educational policy and develop measures for their systematic evaluation, the field practitioners (administrators at various levels, teachers and school staff) would employ interventions which are important for children’s overall wellbeing and not just for their academics. Perhaps, we may provide our children a more fulfilling school experience.   

            Current government’s emphasis on decentralization of policymaking is encouraging. The fourteenth finance commission gives relatively more economic autonomy to the states than before. However, the states do not have any premier research-driven think tanks to guide their policies. There are SCERTs, but one cannot find any link between production of policy relevant empirical research and policy formulation across states. The central government states that the Niti Aayog will assist states with policy formulation. However, India is too big and complex for any single institution. Also, Niti Aayog, at best, could assist with economic policies, because it does not have any human resource of researchers from the fields of education, psychology, psychometrics, or sociology. Perhaps a more apt approach would be for all states to develop their own multi-disciplinary Niti Aayogs (or make sure SCERTs play that role), and Niti Aayog in Delhi could then coordinate policies across state-level Niti Aayogs. I share some ideas regarding the functioning of these state-level research bodies HERE-Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution. 

I welcome your comments/questions/rebuttals...

Teaching Future Physicists

What if you realize that some of your students have the potential for becoming great physicists? What if you know that if you nurture their interest in science and help them develop knowledge and skills, they will extend human knowledge in future? They may work with the finest of universities and research labs and come up with breakthroughs for the problems that we are facing today. What can you do as their physics teacher to help them succeed as physicists?

            To explore these questions it is important to understand the critical elements of scientific inquiry. The development of science relies heavily on the following:

Empirical experimentation

A critical first step here is developing hypothesis(es). Basically, based on the things that we know, the idea is to take a step forward and make an educated guess about the scientific phenomenon, and the relation between various study variables. To test this hypothesis, experiment is designed, data are collected, and results are reported. Replicability of the experiment is one of the most important elements of scientific inquiry. It means that the results should be consistent under the same experimental conditions, irrespective of who conducts the study. Therefore, scientific experiments need high-levels of methodological rigor and transparency. Finally, the inferences are put in context of the existing scientific literature and the entire work is shared with the scientific community for further scrutiny. 

Theoretical development

A theory is basically an attempt to make sense of the results of a set of well-tested hypotheses often related to a particular scientific phenomenon. Clear rationale, logic, and mathematical computations often serve as corner stones for theoretical development. One critical utility of theoretical work is its predictability. It explains and predicts how nature behaves in given physical conditions.

            It is important to note that both theoretical and empirical works may develop simultaneously and/or sequentially, and there is no particular order for scientific development. Though professional researchers often specialize in a particular approach (theoretical or experimental), both approaches are heavily interdependent. Theoretical development provides direction for experimental work, which in turn, validates (or rejects) theoretical work. Both approaches collectively advance scientific knowledge. 

            Now, the critical question for teachers:

·         What kind of teaching approach (or learning experiences) in physics classrooms could help nurture the required skills for empirical and theoretical developments of science?

Let’s say a teacher wants to employ this teaching approach for the chapter – Lights, Shadows, and Reflection (Class VI, CBSE). The class is divided into smaller groups (3-5 students/group).

Steps for scientific inquiry	How the teacher can organize the lesson
Experimental tools	Flashlight, balls of different radii (ping-pong ball, tennis ball, and football), cardboard with small hole, vernier calipers, 1 meter ruler
Experiment	·         Allow students to play with flashlight through cardboard and balls. See if any groups are coming up with any patterns (e.g., as the ball is closer to the flashlight, the shadow gets bigger) ·         Help students identify study parameters (e.g., radii of different balls, distance between balls, and between flashlight and balls) ·         Guide students to more specific inquiry: o   When you put a ping-pong ball between the cardboard and a tennis ball, what happens when the ping-pong ball is moved closer to (or away from) the cardboard? Follow this up with more precise hypothesis. ·         Establish experimental conditions: 1)      For five different distances between the ping-pong ball and the cardboard (e.g., 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 cm), ask students to observe the point at which the shadow of the ping-pong ball completely covers the tennis-ball. And note down the distances between the tennis ball and the cardboard, and the tennis ball and the ping-pong ball. 2)      Repeat the above experiment for the condition where the tennis ball is between the ping-pong ball and the cardboard. ·         Discuss the results. Let students explain why the second experimental setup becomes redundant. ·         Let students write the procedure in their own words.
Theoretical work	Students write a summary of their understanding of light and shadows, and relation between distances between spheres of different radii and light source. ·         Give students a formula: R1/L1 = R2/L2, where R1= radius of smaller ball L1= distance between smaller ball and cardboard R2= radius of bigger ball L2= distance between bigger ball and cardboard (Note: L2>L1). The above formula holds when the shadow of smaller ball completely overshadows the bigger ball. ·         Ask students to measure the radius of the tennis ball and the football. ·         For a given distance of the tennis ball (e.g., 20cm) from the cardboard, ask the student to predict the distance between the cardboard and the football.
Follow up experimentation	In this step, students empirically test their theoretical predictions.
Sharing and discussion	Once the students have empirically tested their theoretical predictions, all student-groups present their work with the rest of the class.

Clearly, the lesson presented above will not fit into a traditional 35min class and may demand a 2-3 hour laboratory session. In addition, students may need time for writing the entire exercise in their own words. My personal experience and observation suggests that we do not emphasize enough on scientific writing in our schools. Writing in science is very different from writing in languages/liberal arts. One needs to be concise and lucid. The objective is to present your work to scholars, and you would not like to waste their time with unnecessary words or complex and/or unclear language. In addition, there is absolutely zero tolerance for plagiarism in scholarly work. Therefore, it is highly desirable for the students to get training in writing their scientific work in original language with appropriate citations right from the beginning. 

In conclusion, it is high time we treat physics (and science in-general) as a way of thinking and learning through systematic inquiry. As per UNESCO’s Science Report 2010, one of the biggest challenges for India in the coming years will be to revolutionarily improve both quantity and quality of scientists and researchers to become an influential participant in the global knowledge economy. We can no longer afford to segregate the subject-content from the fundamental dimensions of scientific development if we want to nurture scientific minds. I hope the ideas and the example presented in this article help educators integrate theoretical and empirical components of inquiry in their physics classrooms.  

[Note: This piece is also published in the Teacher Plus magazine.]

I welcome your comments/questions/rebuttals...

Educational Ecology of Memorization

It was January 2000. I received my class 10 preliminary exam results. Vividly remember getting 71 marks out of 100 in science. My teacher was very disappointed. She said –“Kathan, you don’t cover all points in your responses. Also, you write very slow and don’t finish exam within time-limits. You need a lot of writing practice”.

I learnt an important lesson. Simply understanding the content was not sufficient. If I wanted to score high, I needed to memorize each and every point mentioned in the textbook and reproduce the text in my answer-sheet without spending time on thinking. I practiced just that for the following two month. As a result, I scored 98% in Science in the Board exams.    

In India, when a student is preparing for school/university exam, it is most likely that s/he is

·         preparing model responses for all possible questions across subject content

·         practicing reproduction of available “model” responses through repeatedly reading and/or writing

A lot of policymakers/educators and people who “think they are educationists” label this learning approach as “Rote-Learning” and blame students and teachers. I would like to clarify that memorization is not necessarily rote-learning, but memorization without conceptual understanding is rote-learning. Nonetheless, the blame game is widely prevalent within policy circles and in media and the broader context is ignored. In this piece, I discuss the educational ecology that encourages memorization.

Assessment Practices

With exceptions of some of the elite K-12 schools and premier higher education institutions (e.g., IITs, IIMs), educational assessment in-general is based on the questions listed in the textbooks, previous exam papers (available to students) and/or practice-books at all levels (from primary to university-level). Even the state administered board examinations that are of extremely high stake follow the same trend. (Read: Unscientific assessment practices of Educational Boards) Note that the 12^th standard board exam result serves as a criterion (in most cases, a sole criterion) for the choice of career as well as admission to the higher education institution. These exams focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely see test items that measure higher levels of cognition (i.e., application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. Overall, key to academic success is reproduction of “model” responses (or textbook responses) in timely manner. Now, you see why students practice reproduction of model responses.

Before discussing what teachers do, it is important to understand the context in which they function. For this, let us see the administrative setup.

State-Administrators: Educational policy is mainly a state-level issue. Undisputedly, India’s state administrative setup is highly centralized and extremely hierarchical. On a side note, the Chinese system is much more decentralized. The state administrators decide and allocate resources to all public schools. States micro-manage, for example: hire/fire school staff, develop annual-activity calendars for schools, design curriculum, print textbooks, teaching tools, administer board exams, and conduct professional development programmes. Of course, this is extremely burdensome for the state-level officers, but the system has been like this since Nehru’s time and there has been no public debate on decentralization and capacity building at lower administrative-levels. If you observe the functioning of these state-administrators, you get a feeling that India basically has only one school per state with classes spread across that entire state.  

   

District/Block/Cluster Administrators

Accordingly, the district/block/cluster level administers function as eyes and hands of the state. They have very little autonomy, and are there to execute state-orders and monitor all schools within their purview.

Principal

The principal is basically a teacher with additional administrative duties like: taking responsibility of financial accounts and resource inventories, supervising teachers, keeping up with all state mandated year-round activities and submitting an incredible amount of paper work routinely, attending meetings whenever the higher authorities call on (meetings may be called on the same day and one is expected to be present). But, s/he does not have much say in teacher recruitment, or acquiring funding or resources.

Teachers

Teachers may or may not face problems on personal level, but this profession has been the biggest loser in India’s rapid educational-infrastructural expansion. Some of the big challenges include: Extremely poor pre-service and in-service training, harsh working condition (close to 30-40 hours of lecturing per week with average class-size of 40), little access to teaching aids, and no time allocation for lesson planning, test development, or homework assessment. Average entry-level pay can be 10-15 times lesser for teachers than that for engineers. Note that there is no tenure-track and hardly any pipeline leading to professional growth. Teacher can at the most be a principal if luck favours (but that may not have any monetary benefit). No reward/recognition for good teaching, and pay increases are solely based on seniority.   

            In this educational hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. I have seen principals sit on the floor while the state administrators sit at a dais and get an emperor like treatment. It’s difficult to imagine a government school teacher arguing on a policy issue with the state-administrators. The entire social context is set up to make teachers feel they are subservient to all higher-level administers. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices coming from below. The IASs often do the same. They cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.   

            In this tradition of catering to the bosses amid demoralizing social context, teachers do what it takes to keep things going. The dutiful ones cover their syllabus. It should be noted that the Indian curricula across various educational boards cover incredible breadth of subject content. To give an illustration, things that I studied in 8^th grade physics (e.g., Newtonian Mechanics) are taught at the undergraduate-level in the US. The only way this great breadth of curriculum can be covered is through the use of lecture method. Ideally, a teacher would be able to spend some time introducing a concept and then demonstrate solutions for some textbook questions before moving on to new content. There is little time for experimentation or critical classroom discussions and to go in-depth of the subject. And let’s not forget, the exams do not care for depth. It is very common for teachers to ask students to write responses for the textbook questions more than once for homework.

Parents

Parents in-general are concerned about the results and not the process. Unfortunately, the social context is set up where memorization is considered as a sign of being genius. I have an untested hypothesis that children whose parents are more involved with their studies memorize more content.  

Private Tutoring

The prime purpose of private tutoring is to get access to model responses and to drill and practice more memorization. It is very common for the tutors to share their own version of “model” responses with their students.

            Today as I look back to my 10^th standard board exam preparation, I wonder what if the exams had significant amount of test items at application level. I spent more than two months almost memorizing the entire textbook. What if I had spent that time designing some experiments, visiting museums, reading popular science magazines or watching sci-fi movies? I had this sort of question on my board exam:

What is Environmental Degradation? Mention the measures to control Environmental Degradation. (5 marks)

One definition and all eight points on ‘Measures to control Environmental Degradation’ mentioned in the textbook. Of course, I nailed it. But, what if I was asked the following question (which had no readily available model response):

Based on your knowledge of the science textbook, prepare a detailed plan of action to cope up with the Environmental Degradation in your home town/village/city. (5 marks)

What if we prepare a social context where students need to tap into their deeper levels of learning? This cannot happen overnight. It is a gradual process: increasing weightage of application level questions on exams, high quality teachers who are as professionally competent and as well-paid as any engineer, doctor, or scientist on average, more experimentation and higher order discussions in classrooms, entire administrative structure which caters to the students and not the bosses, and….

[Note: This piece sheds light on common patterns. There are always exceptions. A lot of administrators, principals, teachers and parents are putting incredible amount of efforts keeping the students at the centre; and there’s always a Rancho in every classroom.] 

I welcome your comments.

Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution

As discussed in blog-post entitled, Indian Education: Macro-level Systematic Problems, India needs a mechanism that connects national educational objectives with policy formulation, educational field practices and their continuous evaluation for course correction in policies. In this post, I briefly present a mechanism which may help establish such linkages while gradually decentralizing policy making. Note that the mechanism is not a solution in itself, but a means to collectively find solutions for in-numerous educational problems through informed inquiry.

The Mechanism

Education is primarily a state issue. Therefore, each state may like to set up a team of world-class interdisciplinary researchers for examining effects of potential interventions, evaluating current social/educational programs, and producing policy-relevant research. A trans-disciplinary approach in solving educational issues may help devise interventions and policies which in turn may drive holistic social transformation of communities. In addition to this prime responsibility of knowledge production, this team has three other duties: 1) regularly briefing state-level administrators and working closely for policy formulations; 2) engaging with the media and communicating educational issues, interventions, study-results, policies to the common citizens; and 3) developing next generation of researchers who get posted in district-level research teams.

Also, the university faculty members may be encouraged to contribute to this knowledge production through tenure-track that encourages empirical research. The present practice of most Indian universities looking only at the seniority of the faculty member for promotion needs to be re-examined.  Furthermore, the present leadership structure in Indian universities is ill-fitted for the pursuit of excellence and knowledge production. In his lecture on the higher education systems around the world, Prof. Heyneman (PennGSEVideoLab, 2013) made an excellent point explaining the difference between the top ranking American universities and the universities in the developing nations. The leadership structure in top ranking American university is very conducive for continuous pursuit of excellence. The board of visitors (mainly, donors and alumni) appoint the president of the university on contract-bases and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars. In order to get this lucrative job, the highly-skilled candidates have to present institutional goals and action plans for the same – how the institution will achieve and maintain excellence, increase research output, generate required resources and take all stake-holders on board. Therefore, from the day one, the president has a mission and s/he is highly accountable. On the other hand, the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in most of the universities in developing nations (including India) is based on job-seniority, personal influences, or even political loyalties. There is hardly any vision or action-plan presented for the institutional growth. In total, neither the institution leaders nor the faculty members face any negative consequences for not contributing to the knowledge production even at premier institutions.

In the subsequent phases, the research capacity can be developed at district-level and cluster-level to address more specific local issues. Also, states may design policies which encourage districts to develop data-systems and capacity for carrying out data-driven reforms. It may take at least a couple of decades to establish this entire mechanism at cluster-level, but we can eventually have a self-correcting mechanism where research informs policy, which is well connected with the field-practices; and these practices are continuously evaluated. Decentralization could help devise policies which are sensitive to the needs of local context. Note that the centre needs to play an important role in establishing national educational priorities, funding and coordinating various intervention programmes and research, and maintaining uniformity across educational curriculums and minimum standards across states.

In conclusion, a lot of research has already been done in the world. What works elsewhere should never be directly implemented in India, but definitely be considered as a hypothesis for experimental/quasi-experimental studies. Many major  interventions like – voucher programme; performance-based teacher pay; designing effective tenure-track for teachers, principals, district administrators; professional development programmes; interventions promoting learning through inquiry in students; counselling services and special-education programmes; technological interventions; and interventions to encourage parent-involvement – all need to be studied in various social contexts across India. The country is so diverse that what may work in one context may produce absolutely disastrous results in another. A few educational research institutions that the country is relying on at present are simply incapable of lifting this massive load of improving its mass-education system. India needs to put development of an indigenous pool of policy-relevant knowledge on high priority. If it succeeds in establishing the linkages between knowledge production, policy formulation, and field practices as shown in the Figure 1, it will be one of the major transformational phenomena of this century.

DO SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS.

The following video talks about the above mentioned self-correcting mechanism in more detail. Presented by Kathan Shukla (Author of Education in India: A Globian Perspective; & Blogger, Globian Perspective)

 

Please feel free to comment/give feedback and to share with others. 

हिंदी के लिए नीचेका विडियो देखे: 

For Hindi, watch the following video presentation:

Para-Teacher Policy: Neither Child nor Learning, but Money Centred

Suppose you buy a dog for the security of your home. However, when you wake up the next morning, you find your house to be broken into and the dog sleeping. The dog has not done what it was supposed to do, i.e., to guard your house. So, what would you do next? You may consider getting a better trained guard-dog or establishing a security system. You would do something that makes your home secure, which is the main purpose. But, if you were Indian educational policymaker, you would buy a cat. Two "compelling" arguments: 1) this would be much cheaper, and 2) a cat’s performance will not be worse than your dog’s performance which was a failure.

Believe it or not, but this is what is going on with the “para” teacher (or contract teacher) policy in India. Let me explain:     

          Though India has done well in building primary education schools and observed a rapid rise in enrolment-rates, its educational expansion has generated a great demand for more teachers and has put pressure on most of the state governments for securing funds given that teacher salaries occupy a big portion of education budgets. The Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTR), already high in most states, rose further in the 1990s. The aver­age national PTR for primary and upper primary classes rose from 35.6 in 1950 to 50.2 in year 2000 (Kingdon and Sipahimalani-Rao 2010). In order to deal with teacher shortage in a frugal manner (and to deal with high deficits), state governments across India started recruiting “para” teachers. There is no standard definition of para-teachers, as different states have different recruitment criteria for these teachers. However, it can be loosely defined as teachers appointed on contract and/or on terms and conditions which are different from the regular teachers in primary and upper primary schools (Kingdon and Sipahimalani-Rao 2010). In general, para-teachers are paid much less than regular teachers, and are appointed on temporary basis. However, the proponents of the para-teacher policy focus on the fact that after this policy the average PTR has reduced significantly from 50.2 in 2000 to 30.15 in 2011 (Mehta 2012) fairly cheaply. However, hiring cheaper teachers to reduce PTR is exactly opposite of what educationally high performing countries do. In relative terms, Luxembourg has invested more in smaller class-size through hiring cheaper teachers; whereas South Korea has focused on paying well and hiring highly qualified teachers even at the cost of larger class-size (Schleicher, 2012). It is worth noting that South Korea has been consistently one of the top performing countries in international comparative assessments, while Luxemburg remains an average achiever (based on OECD reports). Therefore, given a choice between hiring high quality teacher and having a smaller class-size, it is preferable to opt for the first option.   

          Nonetheless, some World Bank funded studies suggest that students taught by para-teachers have non-significant achievement difference from those taught by regular teachers. For example, a study conducted by Sankar (2008) used data from 360 schools, 920 teachers and 4,800 students of grade four across three Indian states (i.e., Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh). Controlling for pupils’ home background and school factors, this study found that children taught by para-teachers have slightly lower learning levels than those taught by regular teachers. But, when home background factors were controlled for, the researchers did not find significant difference between the learning achievement levels of students taught by para and regular teachers. Policymakers use such results to argue that the para-teacher policy produces more or less similar learning outcomes in cost-effective manner. However, there is hardly any consideration of deprofessionalization of the teaching profession, deteriorating socio-economic status of teachers, and stagnation in student learning outcomes. Moreover, not a single study explores longitudinal trends to decipher the long-term effects of deprofessionalization of teachers on student learning, and how cost-effective (or costly) that can be for the society as a whole.

It is important to note that para-teachers in India have more or less same duties and responsibilities as regular teachers. Different salary for the same job has been an issue of contention between the teacher unions and policymakers. In addition, most state governments have stopped hiring regular teachers, because the high unemployment-rate in educated youth provides fairly large pool of para-teacher recruits (Kingdon and Sipahimalani-Rao 2010). Apparently, there is a clear case of exploitation of para teachers and of teaching profession, in-general. Recent events of strikes in the state of Jharkhand can be considered as a culmination of frustration in para-teachers. The policy of para-teachers is best criticized in the following statements by Pandey (2006):

“The government itself on pragmatic economic and bureaucratic grounds is justifying the para-teacher scheme. Large scale recruitment of para-teachers within the formal school system and an attitude of resignation towards pre-service programmes have become an integral part of state provisioning for elementary education, which can create serious problems of quality and equity in education, besides creating differential kinds of inequalities among teachers themselves. There is also a general sense of dissatisfaction among various stakeholders that second class options are being passed on to the poorer sections of the society, thereby widening the gap between the rich and well educated and the poor and poorly educated children. By accepting the scheme of para-teachers the government is encouraging the states to evade their responsibilities of building a strong cadre of qualified teachers. The trend has diluted the identity of the teacher as a professional. The para-teacher scheme may serve the purpose of UEE [universal elementary education] in far flung, remote rural and hilly areas as a viable option, but adopting this scheme to replace the regular teachers is detrimental for the quality of education and effectiveness of schools and needs to be avoided” (p.333).

With the introduction of para-teacher policy across India, the policymakers seem to be focused on increasing enrolment-rates, reducing PTR, while controlling for teacher salary budgets. But, improvement of the quality of basic education seems to be out of their focus.   Across 18 Indian states, Education Initiatives (2010) conducted a large scale study (N=160000), in which students of class four, six and eight were sampled from 2399 government schools and were tested in language and mathematics through common-test papers in 13 language versions. In their executive summary, researchers reported –“learning levels are extremely low”. Many other large studies on nationally representative sample have suggested similar conclusions (for e.g., ASER 2005-11). NCERT (2008) collected data from 88,271 students, 10,796 teachers, 4787 schools from 105 districts spread over 27 states and 3 union territories to study learning achievement of students at the end of class five. Results suggested that student achievement was especially poor in mathematics, with 8 states having averaged scores less than 40% (i.e., pass-rate). How will para-teachers perform worse than regular teachers, given that the students’ achievement is already at bottom-levels? Unfortunately, instead of concentrating on achieving the prime objective of quality mass-education, Indian policymakers have focused on finding cheaper ways by replacing regular teachers with para-teachers as both have been ineffective. This is especially troubling given that the Indian Education Commission and the National Policy on Education states that teacher is the single most important factor influencing the quality of education (as suggested in Pandey 2006). India urgently needs a focus-shift on better quality of education. Do whatever it takes, but let’s secure the home.

Reference (not available online): Sankar, Deepa (2008): “Does teacher’s instructional time matter in school effectiveness in improving children’s learning outcomes? A study in three Indian States Using Hierarchical Linear Modelling”, World Bank, New Delhi.