The Fault Lines in India’s Public Education Policy: A Personal Experience
Tags: Education Reform, Public Policy

When the NGO that I was involved in wanted to start a pan-India initiative providing free-education to underprivileged children, I was entrusted with the responsibility of spearheading the pilot center in Navi Mumbai. The task was to address the segment of children coming from the poorest families that had been left behind by the Government education system due to what I realized, after speaking to the parents and visiting the government school nearby, were multiple structural policy issues.

Under the Right to Education Act (RTE) 2009, which made education free and compulsory for all children in the 6–14 age group, a no-detention policy was adopted wherein children up till 8th standard cannot be detained to encourage enrolment and promote better learning without the pressure of a pass-fail testing regime. This policy was premised on a well-functioning teacher support system and appropriate teacher-pupil ratios with skilled teachers making continuous assessments of each child’s progress and following through with the necessary interventions to help each child along.

In reality, these preconditions did not exist in most schools and the unintended consequence of this policy was a substantial impact on the quality of education and a high failure and drop-out rate in the 9th and 10th grade. The Economic Survey 2015–16 pointed out that only about 42% of students in class 5 (in government schools) are able to read a class 2 text, a decline from 57% in 2007. For the purpose of evaluation, Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) was introduced which aimed at monitoring the progress of students through regular class tests and assignments but the implementation was faulty and the results unreliable.

Teachers in the government sector in the country were also not held accountable for the performance of the students, with their incentive structures flawed. No detention, misinterpreted as no assessment, has led to reduced accountability among teachers, especially at primary and upper primary levels. This complaint is often heard not only from school heads or educational administrators but also from the teachers in secondary schools. That the children turning up at secondary grade levels are not at grade-appropriate competencies is a common grievance. Research exists to clearly indicate that standards-based testing leads to greater accountability among teachers, thus improving student learning outcomes. The high number of vacancies in teachers’ posts was further aggravating the pressure on teachers and impeding efficient learning.

Grouping children strictly by age, not their learning level and automatically promoting all students was further creating ‘multi-level’ learning environments and increasingly making an average classroom a multi-grade class which poses significant challenges that our current pedagogical practices and teacher training cannot address.

Back in 2009, when India participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses the learning level of a 15-year-old, it ranked 72 among 74 countries participating. The reaction of the government was to pull out of the assessment altogether questioning its credibility. Recently in 2019, the government announced its plan to re-join PISA after a gap of 10 years, however, it is limiting the study to only certain types of schools and in only one city.

Even though the RTI act was amended in 2019 to remove this provision, the Draft National Education Policy (2019) recommended that the amendments to the RTE Act on continuous and comprehensive evaluation and the no-detention policy must be reviewed. Some states have scrapped the policy but it has been retained in the majority of states so far. Hence, it seems to be seen how this policy issue will be dealt with.

You could see the effects of this policy problem in the slum in Navi Mumbai that housed close to 700+ households, with a significant number of children either taking up sundry jobs or sitting at home after dropping out of school due to a poor learning experience. While developing the pilot model, I studied in detail and subsequently incorporated the concept of Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) into the model, which is an evidence-backed educational approach pioneered by the Indian NGO Pratham and rigorously tested through randomized trial evaluations in India by J-PAL-affiliated researchers since 2001. The approach works by dividing children according to their learning needs, not age or grade by regularly assessing their performance. For example, we noticed that there were some students across all age groups that could not read or write well. They were grouped together for foundational skill training.

We also incorporated aspects of the model used by BRAC, the international development organization based in Bangladesh which offers quality, non-formal education to drop-out, disadvantaged children. We have regularly monitored their performance since the start of the program and the improvements in the learning level of children over the first ten months of implementation have been extremely promising. The test scores of the children have increased by between 0.12 and 0.60 standard deviations, with the lowest-performing students experiencing the highest gains.

This is yet another example of the not-for-profit sector filling gaps by responding to the failures of the public education system and it will have to continue trying to do so until the public sector addresses the structural policy issues that have been hampering effective education delivery in India, a skill which is of critical importance considering India is demographically one of the youngest countries in the world.