Regulating Itself

A year has passed since I last posted here. Time has been in short supply and my offering this time is another note I wrote for the Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting.

QUOTE

Government is by far the largest provider of education in India. Between 50% and 80% of children depend on government schools for their entire education. The figure is much larger for the poorest and the most disadvantaged segments of our population, for whom government schools remain the only affordable way of getting a conventional education.

The government is also the sole regulator of the education system, and its powers of regulation have become far more codified and pervasive after the passage of RTE Act. At the higher education level, there are autonomous bodies such as UGC and AICTE for such regulation, but primary and secondary education is regulated departmentally.

The poor quality of education in India’s schools has generated some comment in recent years but, by and large, it has not been at the centre of attention it deserves. RTE Act reinforced the trend by devoting so little space to quality that it requires considerable effort to find the relevant mentions tucked away in Sec 29. And surveys like ASER, which have for years highlighted the distressingly low levels of educational proficiency among India’s children, now seem to only provoke yawns among the educational establishment.

It is time to ask whether the dual hats that the education departments around the country wear, as dominant provider of education as well as its regulator, are serving the nation. When a provider is its own regulator, efficiencies are likely to be low, quality compromised, innovation undervalued, competition stifled, and cronyism fostered. In India’s case, this is not just a reasonable supposition; we have empirical evidence that it is so. The yawns are no surprise; they are the inevitable response of a provider that has no external regulator to answer to.

The public has responded by voting with their feet. Enrolment in government schools has declined continuously over the last several years. However, in the absence of a high quality regulator, the alternatives available to most children are almost equally pathetic – the large majority of private schools do little better on quality measures. The public can express a vote of no-confidence; they can’t replace a professional regulator who has the ability to conceptualise, demand and guide.

Unfortunately, UGC and AICTE provide little comfort that the presence of an external regulator in education makes a positive difference. However, they were both installed at a time when the quality concerns hadn’t become as pressing; their organisational structures and philosophy reflect the priorities of the times. They have failed to change from there, but there is no reason why an institution created to respond to today’s challenges should be similarly ineffective.

Telecommunication sector provides an instructive example. For the first few years of mobile telephony, DOT was entrusted with regulation of the sector. Short-sighted self-interest led to a spate of litigation and, for a while, the sector came to a stand-still. The government showed great sagacity in installing the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which has shown an exemplary grasp of key issues and a deep concern for public interest. Today, India has among the lowest telephone rates in the world and a service that reaches some of the remotest parts of the country.

We already have regulation of the education sector. Now let us have regulation that serves. It is time for institutionalising independent education regulators.

UNQUOTE

If you wish to see the full Annual Report which describes in some detail the work we did during 2013-14, you will find it here.

Towards a Coherent Vision of Education

As many of you know, I serve as the Director of Centre for Learning Resources, based in Pune. We recently released our Annual Report for the year 2012-13 and I felt the need to share the note I wrote in introduction to it. I have reproduced it below.

QUOTE

CLR has been, and remains, wedded to work towards improving the delivery capacity of public education systems, especially those addressing children from birth to about 14 years. We have done this for a simple reason: an overwhelming majority of India’s children will receive their entire educational inputs from the public system. If we wish to bring their voices and contributions into greater prominence in our society than has been the case so far, we must address the problem of effectiveness of the public education system.

Even as India makes big advances on several technological frontiers, its progress in making the public education system more effective must be judged grossly inadequate. More than three years after the law on right to education came into force, a distressingly large number of pointers suggest not only that the intent of the Act is far from being achieved, but that its implementation is actually resulting in a worsening of the quality of education in India’s public schools.

The cause of this is not, as superficial analyses often claim, that the Indian education system lacks high quality teachers. That is undoubtedly the case, but it is more a symptom of the disease than the cause. The pervasive loss of effectiveness among teachers must be put down to poor management – a distressing lack of attention to hiring, induction, skill building, assessment and personal and organizational growth paths of teachers, supervisors, and other officials within the education system.

The lack of vision is not confined only to the management of the human resource aspects of the education system. In preparation for the introduction of RTE, Technical Support Group of SSA advocated strongly for the “harmonisation” of six key pillars of the education system: curriculum formation, syllabus preparation, preparation of text-books (and other) materials, teacher training, evaluation of children and community participation. Today, nearly five years later, it is hard to say that there has been meaningful progress anywhere in the country towards taking such a systemic view.

A concerted push towards developing a coherent vision of good quality education must rank among the most pressing needs of the country today. There is, of course, the so-called demographic dividend that its favourable population structure, strengthened by good education, can provide. Much more importantly, if we pay sharp attention to what is worth learning for children in today’s world, what organisational structures we need to ensure it happens and what resources we need to make available for that to happen, we will have a good shot at weakening the oppressive, highly-unequal structures of our society that sap hope, promote violence and deny the largest numbers of our people a real voice in community-building.

Accordingly, at CLR, our work increasingly seeks to build educational leadership capacities among those who are responsible for providing leadership. In our projects, we seek to demonstrate, on a small yet replicable scale, the possibilities of building these capacities. We do this through active engagement with the day-to-day tasks of the leaders involved – by locating these tasks in larger, systemic concerns, a more meaningful vision of education and a more compassionate understanding of the children involved. At the same time, we seek to expand our advocacy efforts, directed both at the communities involved as well as the government. With this, it is our hope that we will help build both the public demand for quality services and the capacity on part of the government to respond to that demand.

These are complex challenges. We hope that our efforts will continue to receive the enthusiastic support that all of you have provided in the past.

UNQUOTE

If you wish to read the whole report, which provides highlights of our work last year, please see it here.

Age-appropriate is Inappropriate

Age-appropriate admissions and special “make-up” training for those who have missed schooling are a part of  India's Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act. However, just because they are a part of the Act, it doesn’t mean that the notion shouldn’t be subject to critical comment. A great many of our laws contain provisions that are illogical, unreasonable or unimplementable. When this is the case, suspending criticism, as seems to have happened in the case of this provision, can make the eventual (but perhaps inevitable) correction take longer.

Let us, first of all, acknowledge the nobility of the intention. An unconscionably large number of our children finds it impossible to pursue schooling consistently for reasons ranging from homelessness and poverty to migrant parents and lack of adequate academic support. They have “fallen through the cracks” as an education system, almost designed to promote inequality, has turned its back on them. The “age-appropriate admission” provision of the Act seeks to remedy this disability.

When a child can’t attend school for any reason, the obvious consequence is that he doesn’t learn what is being taught in the school. The Act requires that in such cases the child be given a special training for a period of three months to two years (maximum) to bring him on par with the others in his “age-appropriate” class.

The most obvious question that arises is also the most damning: is the education that is being imparted in schools so worthless that eight years (or six, depending upon how you interpret the Act) worth of “learning” can be made up in two years? In fact, the most sensible response to this system would be to spend the eight years outside school, learning valuable craft, connecting with the world, working together with others, failing and succeeding. You would then make a dash to the school for two years, take the special training and gain that much-beloved school-graduation piece of paper.

The other question is also interesting. The Act makes the mandatory nod, for this day and age, to constructivist and child-centred approaches to education. But the “special training” provision is quite effective in revealing what this education is really intended to be. It is not a gradual formation of understanding by the child through questioning and engaging with learning opportunities, which can only happen in real time. An education that is capable of being summarised in a quarter of the time and injected into the child through previously-constructed modules produced by a remote state agency can scarcely be constructivist, or even broadly child-centred.

Then there is the question of teachers who will perform this miracle. By common consensus, our teachers need a huge amount of support, extending perhaps over a decade or more, to simply help children access eight years’ worth of learning in eight years. The current dismal state of educational outcomes is a testimony to that fact. If there ever is a teacher who can distil eight years of learning into two, she would have to be super-human and certainly well beyond the capabilities of practically every teacher in the current system.

There is also the question of the state agencies who will prepare the “modules” both for the children on “special training” and the “modules” for the teachers who are to be trained as special teachers. These are the very agencies who have been responsible for preparing the curricula, the text-books and the teacher education that have led to the quality of learning we witness in today’s classrooms. It would take another miracle for them to figure out how to facilitate this “learning on steroids”.

These questions do shine a light on the conceptual soundness of the RTE Act. However, the more immediate concern is this: what is so sacrosanct about age as the basis for forming a cohort? We know different children learn different things at different rates and at different ages. For schools, we have a huge amount of evidence that child-centred practice practically mandates children of different ages learning similar things, whether it is through multi-grade classes or through small sub-groups of a single-age cohort doing different things.

If we want to really make a difference to the lives of children who have been, and may continue to be, deprived of opportunities to learn what schools teach, the notion of age-appropriateness in RTE Act must be dropped. Instead, room needs to be made for the notion of a child being allowed (and fully supported) to take as long as she needs to develop a sound understanding of what needs to be learnt. The Act needs to ensure that all children are supported in reaching an acceptable level of learning, not merely in attending eight years of school. This will require radically different ways of approaching admissions, learning, assessment and granting of diplomas. But until this is done, RTE Act will only be a reminder that we are more interested in the cosmetics of school attendance, not real learning among our children.