by Vivek Kaul
This is one of the most important recommendations of the Committee. The idea of teaching shouldn’t be to just complete the syllabus, at least not in the initial classes. The teachers need to ensure that the basic learning outcomes of the ability to read, write and do basic maths are in place. In fact, the teachers would also have to be adequately sensitised to this fact. At the same time, the necessary training would also have to be given. This will require a fundamental reorientation of the system.
b) After learning outcomes, the most important recommendation of the Committee should have been on the teacher absenteeism front. Sadly, there are no magic potions available to set this problem right. Just like in the case of other Big Government problem areas, what it needs is strong political will.
As the Committee says: “Strong political and administrative will is needed to improve teacher attendance and discipline. Absenteeism and indiscipline have to be handled with the utmost strictness…. Teacher absenteeism, teacher vacancies and the lack of teacher accountability have destroyed the credibility of our school education system. These issues can be resolved only with strong political consensus; all efforts would otherwise be ineffective.”
The trouble is that this is far easier said than done. Teachers are well organised and also a very important and influential part of the community in villages. In this scenario, whether any government will crack the whip on absenteeism remains to be seen. My guess is that no government would want to take the risk. Take the case of a state like Uttar Pradesh. The state assembly elections are due in February and March 2017. The contest is expected to be three-and-a-half pronged (the half is for the Congress Party). Hence, alienating teachers, who have good influence at the local level, is the last thing a party would want to do, the educational outcomes be damned.
The Committee also found that the “selection of teachers has been a highly skewed operation, where the selection criteria normally include merit. However, extraneous factors relating to improper monetary considerations often become the decisive factor in the selection process”.
Furthermore, “there has been no credible or reliable system of measurement of a teacher’s output or performance – promotion or increments have generally had little correlation with merit or performance, the management of the educational manpower being largely non-transparent and arbitrary”. The Committee has come up with a set of recommendations to set this right. But this would again mean taking on the unions. The problem is that, unless some accountability is built into the way teachers currently operate, nothing is going to change.
c) There are other recommendations of the Committee that have been made in order to improve teacher performance. The Committee has recommended compulsory licensing for teachers of both government as well as private schools, based on independent external testing, every 10 years. Furthermore, the Committee has recommended a two-month compulsory vacation training every five years for existing teachers. Interestingly, the Committee clearly states that “some drastic, even unpopular, measures will need to be taken to improve the quality of teacher education and teachers”.
d) The Committee also talks about contract teachers. It says: “The appointment of unqualified and low-paid contractual teachers militates against the quality of teaching and learning.” This is a very good example of perfect being the enemy of good, which is a part of all that Big Government stands for. Research shows that contract teachers, who are paid significantly lower salaries than permanent teachers and have lower job security levels as well, do a much better job of producing learning outcomes in children. At the same time, they are less likely to be absent as well. What this clearly tells us is that the sharper incentives at work for contract teachers (of having a job from which they could be fired at any time) lead to their being more conscientious teachers, which more than makes up for their lack of formal training.926
It would have been great if the Committee had gone into some detail on the appointment of contract teachers (which many states are anyway doing) rather than simply ruling out the possibility of their utility altogether.
e) There is enough research evidence to show that private schools produce somewhat better learning outcomes than government schools. As the draft New Education Policy for 2016 points out: “Students in private unaided schools performed marginally better than [those in] government schools.... These findings suggest a serious challenge to the goal of ‘equity in learning’.”
The ‘private school premium’ is small, but positive. Also, the teachers teaching in private schools are not as well paid as the permanent ones teaching in government schools. The salaries of private school teachers are only around a third to a tenth of those teaching in government schools, but the teacher effort is greater in private schools.927
The trouble is that many of these private schools do not meet the physical infrastructure norms required under the Right to Education Act. Yet many of these schools provide a better education. The Committee has taken this into account and recommended: “Many private schools, located in slums and other congested areas, will not be able to do so because there is no space for building additional rooms or providing a playground. Such schools, even if they are providing good quality of education to poor children could face the threat of closure. The Committee is of the view that recognition of a school should not depend only on the availability of physical infrastructure, but also on an assessment of the quality of the education provided by these schools.” The Committee wants such decisions to be taken at the state level, instead of having blanket all-India provisions.
Also, the way the norms are currently structured, the government schools do not need to meet the infrastructure norms that are applied to private schools. The Committee has recommended that there should be “no discrimination between private and Government schools in the applicability of norms”. This is a step in the right direction.
f) The Committee has also tried to address the poor quality of the B.Ed. (Bachelor of Education) courses on offer all across the country in a systematic way. It has recommended that integrated “4-year B.A./B.Sc./B.Ed. courses … be introduced in all States”. It has also suggested the introduction of a “5-year integrated course after Std. X for elementary school teachers”. While on the face of it, this seems like a good suggestion, it again falls in the ‘perfect being the enemy of good’ trap. The question is: How many individuals would want to put in fourfive years of their lives towards training to become teachers?
g) The Committee has also recommended the merger of small schools in the same neighbourhood to make them more viable. “With merger and consolidation, teacher availability will improve due to redeployment, and it will also be possible to appoint full-time principals/headmasters for schools with viable student populations. It will also be possible to provide better sports infrastructure, computer and science labs, and facilities for extracurricular activities.”
Like most committees set up by the Indian government to study an issue and come up with recommendations, the Subramanian Committee Report did a good job of identifying the problems facing Indian education and coming up with recommendations to tackle these problems. The question is whether these recommendations will be implemented or they will be confined to the dustbins of history, like most recommendations made by most committees set up by the government over the years.
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From the way things stand as of now, it doesn’t seem like the government is serious about implementing the many recommendations of the Subramanian Committee. In fact, the title of the Subramanian Committee was changed, with the original words ‘Drafting Committee’ being dropped. As Subramanian said during the course of an interview: “We have done wholesale criticism. Unfortunately, there is nothing to praise. We showed [them] the reality.”928
During the course of the same interview, Subramanian said that the full report had not been published and only extracts had been published. In fact, in late June 2016, the Ministry of Human Resource Development came up with another doc
ument titled Some Inputs for the Draft National Educational Policy.
The draft National Educational Policy (NEP) starts with the following line: “India has always accorded high importance to education.” The fourth paragraph goes on to point out: “The concern for the improvement of education had been at the top of India’s development agenda since Independence.”
A few pages later, the draft NEP contradicts itself when it says: “The relatively slow progress in reducing the number of non-literates continues to be a concern. India currently has the largest non-literate population in the world, with the absolute number of non-literates among the population aged 7 and above being 282.6 million [28.26 crore] in 2011.”
So, if India has accorded such high importance to education, why do around one in four Indians continue to be illiterate? This is nearly seven decades after Independence. Over and above this, India also has the maximum number of youth and adult illiterates in the world. The youth literacy rate (15-24 years) is at 86.1 per cent, whereas the adult literacy rate (15 years and above) is at 69 per cent.
To cut a long story short, the ‘concern for the improvement of education’ has hardly been at the top of India’s developmental agenda. In fact, if that had been the case, things would not have been as hopeless as they currently are. Furthermore, it needs to be pointed out that only in a document written by a faceless bureaucrat (the document doesn’t name the author) could something as ridiculous as this have been written.
After the initial spin, the draft NEP cuts to the chase in identifying what is holding back the Indian education system. As it points out: “The biggest challenge facing school education relates to the unsatisfactory level[s] of student learning. The findings of the National Achievement Surveys (NAS) covering Grades III, V, VIII and X suggest that [the] learning levels of a significant proportion of students do not measure up to the expected learning levels.”
The draft NEP further points out: “In 2014-15, the retention rate at the primary level was 83.7 per cent, and it was as low as 67.4 per cent at the elementary level. This indicates that, roughly, four in every 10 children enrolled in Grade I leave… school before completing Grade VIII.”
It then goes on to blame a number of factors for this, including student and teacher absenteeism.
And how does the draft NEP hope to tackle a problem as serious as teacher absenteeism? As it points out: “Issues relating to teacher absenteeism… and lack of teacher accountability will be resolved with strong political consensus and will.” The draft NEP does not specify just how the government will go about achieving this ‘strong political consensus and will’. A document running into 43 pages could have spent a few paragraphs discussing this, given that it is one of the most important issues holding back the Indian education system.
The draft NEP also says that: “Principals/ head teachers will be held accountable for the academic performance of the school and its improvement.” It further points out: “Programmes for enhancing the… accountability of teachers to deliver quality education... will be accorded priority.” Nevertheless, as Geeta Kingdon puts it: “But who will do these in what time frame is not specified.”929
The draft NEP also talks about the need for greater public investment in education. It points out that the earlier National Policies of 1968, 1986 and 1992 had recommended that 6 per cent of the GDP should be the national outlay on education. The actual expenditure on education in recent years has remained at around 3.5 per cent of the GDP. This needs to go up, the Subramanian Committee also suggests.
The immediate conclusion that one draws from this is that Indian teachers are not well paid. This, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is incorrect. In China, where the overall literacy rate is 95 per cent and the literacy rate between the ages of 15 and 24 is nearly 100 per cent, an average teacher’s salary is the same as the per capita income.930 In India it is about three times the per capita income. In states like Uttar Pradesh, it is nearly 17 times the state’s per capita income.
In fact, there is another way of showing that way too much money is being spent on teachers. In 2014-2015, there were 10.53 lakh public elementary schools in the country. Of these, around 3.72 lakh schools had 50 or fewer students. The average number of students per school was 29. This meant a teacher-student ratio of 12.7 pupils per teacher and Rs. 40,800 being spent per year per child, leading to a teachers’ salary bill of Rs. 41,630 crore. Kingdon calls it “a diabolical and unconscionable wastage” of public resources “on pedagogically unviable tiny schools”.931
The Subramanian Committee report had called for the merging of schools. The draft NEP suggests something along similar lines when it says: “Efforts will be made to convert existing non-viable schools into composite schools for optimum utilisation of human, physical and infrastructural resources, better academic performance and cost-effective management.”
The trouble is that this will continue to remain a pipe-dream unless the issue of teacher accountability is addressed, which the draft NEP in its current form clearly doesn’t.
The Right to Education essentially guarantees to every child between six and 14 the right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school. If there was no school in a particular neighbourhood or area, the Right to Education Act called for its establishment within a period of three years of the commencement of the Act by the appropriate government and local authorities.
Between 2011 and 2015, the number of public schools went up by 9,448. Despite this, the total number of students studying in these schools fell by 1.13 crore. During the same period, the enrolment in private schools rose by 1.85 crore students.932
What this tells us very clearly is that anyone who is in a position to pull out his or her children from government-run schools is doing so. Hence, the issues of teacher accountability and learning outcomes need to be addressed quickly.
The draft NEP is on target regarding learning outcomes. As it states: “In most cases, the learning assessment is limited to testing the students’ ability to reproduce content knowledge. The whole assessment system needs to be revamped to ensure comprehensive assessment of the students, including learning outcomes relating to both scholastic and co-scholastic domains.”
It also makes the right noises about teacher training, about which it states: “It will be made mandatory for all in-service teachers to participate in training/professional development programmes once in every three years.”
It also talks about the non-detention policy of students being limited to Standard V. These recommendations are in line with the recommendations of the Subramanian Committee report.
But they will turn out to be as good as useless if strong steps are not taken to rein in teacher absenteeism and introduce some teacher accountability. The draft NEP states that its “main thrust will be to devise effective strategies to address the divergent challenges for the growth of education in India and realising the potential of the country’s ‘demographic dividend’”. While that sounds great on paper, again this can be taken seriously only if the government works seriously on teacher absenteeism as well as accountability.
Furthermore, like the Subramanian Committee, the draft NEP also talks about doing away with contractual teachers, who are doing a much better job of teaching than the permanent ones.
The Subramanian Committee and the draft NEP of 2016 also talk about using information technology “as a vehicle for monitoring and management”. In fact, some experiments have already been conducted on this front, and the results are encouraging. In the Udaipur district, digital cameras were used in single-teacher rural schools run by an NGO to monitor teacher attendance. At the same time, teachers were given a financial incentive to reduce their absence. Teacher absenteeism had stood at around 44 per cent and was nearly double the all-India rate.933
Teachers were given tamper-proof cameras. They were supposed to ask students to take date-stamped photos of them and other students at the beginning as well as at the end of the school day. This provided proo
f of whether or not the teachers were present. Their salaries were linked to their attendance.934
What were the results? As Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav write in the research paper titled ‘Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options’: “Comparing attendance for teachers who were given cameras and incentives with a control group who did not receive either, the authors found that absence was reduced by 50 per cent in the treatment classrooms. More importantly, teacher attendance actually translated into improved educational outcomes for the students.”935
Another experiment was carried out in Andhra Pradesh. Teachers in 300 government schools in the state were offered an incentive that gave them a bonus of up to three per cent of their salary based on the performance of their students in tests. After two years, it was observed that students did better in maths and language, the two subjects whose results were linked to the teachers’ receiving of bonuses. What was also observed was that test scores also improved in subjects whose results were not linked to the teachers’ receiving of bonuses. What this tells us is that the greater teaching effort of the teachers spilled out on to other subjects as well and wasn’t just limited to the subjects linked to their bonuses.936
The success of this experiment tells us that more such solutions need to be looked at.
Neither the Subramanian Committee nor the draft NEP of 2016 talk about taking any measures on the demand side, where people can actually have some bargaining power. A bunch of the problems facing the education system in India can be tackled by looking at the problem differently. As Joshi writes: “There is a crucial distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the state paying for goods and services and, on the other hand, the state producing goods and services.”937 What does this mean in the context of education? It essentially means that the coupon system discussed in Chapter 12 in the context of the Public Distribution System (PDS) would work just fine in the case of the education system as well.