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Class monitor needed
New planning commission targets on primary education will have to depend on
the success of the ongoing Sarva Siksha Abhiyan. The government doesn't know
it yet but field-level data doesn't hold out much hope. There has been
little improvement in primary school completion rates.
LAVEESH BHANDARI
THE eleventh five year plan lays down these monitorable tar gets for primary
edu cation: cut primary school dropout rate from 52.2 per cent to 20 per
cent and in crease literacy rate for age seven and above to 85 per cent.
The government's main programme for primary education is the Sarva Shiksha
Abhiyan (SSA) launched in 2001. Briefly, the SSA aimed at getting all
children into school; achieve universal primary school completion by 2007,
and universal middle school completion (8 years of schooling) by 2010. It
aimed at doing so by a combination of increasing supply of primary schools,
infrastructure-improving quality of education, and through other measures
such as enrollment drives.
Other programmes such as the midday-meal (MDM) scheme complimented this initiative. Then there've been many state-level incentives to get children into school. Overall there is a large variety of such incentives ranging from free food to free clothing to cash stipends for
learning material and transport provided by central and state governments.
Since then tens of thousands of crores are spent annually on SSA and MDM
As a consequence, enrollment rates have shot up dramatically. Some believe
that these incentives have worked; still others believe that high enrollment
rates are largely a procedural issue.
That is, in many parts of the country children are 'automatically' enrolled in the school registers when they get into the school going age. Many such children do not actually attend. But this authors' experience has been that attendance rates are also quite high
across the country - the primary reason being the mid-day-meal - who would
refuse a free lunch?
When the SSA and the MDM were launched many educationists had said that the
problem was related to the quality of education and these wouldn't work. The
common counter-argument to this continues to be - let us at least get them
into the school and then we'll improve quality. This, the argument goes,
would be easier to implement and ensure adequate basic learning for all.
That's not how it works. Learning is related to a child's age, and if we
haven't caught the child's imagination at the right age then the
difficulties in sustaining her interest mount. Even if a child is in school,
if quality of teaching isn't appropriate it wouldn't help.
So then what is happening? The government is ramping up primary school
infrastructure and increasing teachers, and has already started schools very
close to all villages. It is also providing mid-day-meal in large numbers
more or less across the country. And surprisingly, the leakages in these
provisions appear to be lower than in most other schemes and programmes. The
government machinery is also in motion pressursing teachers to get all
children in their villages enrolled in school.
However try as it might, the government has been unable to improve the
quality of teaching. Many teachers are not motivated, absenteeism is high,
teaching methods are no different from those before, and overall interest in
providing a good learning environment is missing. So, children do go to
school, wear free uniforms, have the free food, and then come back home.
They do this for a few years and then drop out. Learning and educational
achievement have remained at the same aggregate levels.
One measure of educational achievement is the completion rate - which
measures the percentage of children within a particular age group who have
completed a particular level of education. All indications are that that has
remained the same over the past few years for primary education.
Note the emphasis on the term 'indication'. For this to be confirmed we need
to use comparable data across time - the best source for such a measure
happens to come from the large employment surveys conducted by the National
Sample Survey Organisation. The NSSO conducted such a survey in 2005, but
for reasons best known only in the government, has not released the data for
anyone to study. As a consequence we are left with second best alternatives.
One such alternative is the Reproductive and Child Health Survey that
queried about 600,000 households on the age and educational status of their
children in 2002 and 2004. The results are fascinating and worrying (see
table).
There has been little improvement in primary school completion for children
in the 10 to 12 years of age.
In other words, the children may be enrolling in very large numbers; most
may also be also going to school. But they are not attending for the sake of
education but for food and clothing and perhaps other incentives.
Why has the government been unable to identify the problem? Where is it
going wrong? And why has it been unable to undertake midcourse corrections?
One of the biggest weaknesses in government programmes has to do with
extremely poor monitoring and evaluation systems. First, what goes in the
guise of monitoring is essentially the transfer of administrative data from
the lowest tier (service provider/primary school teacher in this case) to
the highest tiers of governance. Monitoring and evaluation of government
programmes requires that the consumers of government services - households -
report the level of usage of these services.
Most data collection happens to be through the administrative end (put together by providers themselves) and is therefore inappropriate as a means of monitoring and evaluating the
impact of the program. Second, measures that can capture quality are
missing. Data on how many teachers took a training programme for instance,
doesn't imply that the teacher got trained adequately. Third, it takes too
long for the information to be processed, when it should not in this day of
computerised information technologies and electronic communications. Fourth,
there are numerous internal power plays that many times delay the public
release of data.
The problem of low education achievement levels is not a problem of
infrastructure but of teacher orientation and motivation. It is well
recognised that schools should be under control of local governments. Local
control ensures the maintenance of decent quality as it has in most
developed countries. In India, however, a range of factors have prevented
the Panchayats from exercising adequate control over teachers, teaching and
content. Effectively the block and district level officials of the state
governments continue to exercise total control.
So, teachers and head teachers are answerable to their superiors and not to the parents or the Panchayats. Since these superiors' performance is also measured through
number of students enrolled and number of teachers trained ensuring these
objectives remains the motivation of the teachers as well.
And the government is unable to take a mid-course correction not because it
isn't interested, or because there are political lobbies against, but
because it depends on information sources that are inappropriate. It will
know what everyone on the field knows in another four or five years. The
writer heads Indicus Analytics, an economic research firm
email-mailto:email-laveesh@indicus.net
URL :
http://70.86.150.130/indianexpress/ArticleText.aspx?article=20_10_2006_009_003
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