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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Classroom struggle-Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Classroom struggle-Pratap Bhanu Mehta

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published Published on Apr 18, 2012   modified Modified on Apr 18, 2012

Court settles the class issue, but the real challenges of RTE have to be met

The debate over the Right to Education is beginning to display characteristic symptoms of Indian debates. Elites are inventing specious arguments to condone the economic apartheid in the current system. But India’s self-appointed anti-elites are often even more elitist. They are more fixated on taking down elites a peg or two rather than intelligently fixing real problems. There is also a good deal of unhelpful abstraction in the debate. The judgment on the Right to Education Act must be seen in this context. The majority judgment, rightly, comes to the conclusion that reserving 25 per cent seats for economically weaker sections is not unconstitutional. However, the reasoning in the judgment itself is perfunctory. It shoddily skirts difficult legal issues under the guise of uncharacteristically easy deference to Parliament; Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan’s dissent, on the other hand, has the greater internal integrity of argument.

Ideally, a government should be able to create a school system that mitigates class bias and does not perpetuate it. Unfortunately, neither the poor nor the rich trust the government to do that. There are cries that the government should do its job. True enough, and the RTE is a prod in that direction. But there is a brute sociological fact: no government school system can run successfully if there is a large-scale secession of elites from the public system. The accountability dynamics are largely determined by the presence of the powerful. In India this secession is almost total. We can have a chicken-and-egg argument about whether quality comes first or elite involvement. Against this backdrop, closing pathways to elite schools would be an argument in bad faith.

The serious problem with the RTE is not 25 per cent reservations. There is no expropriation insofar as schools are being compensated to some degree. But the court’s vague homilies on burden-sharing skirt a fundamental issue of fairness. In funding by taxation we usually adopt progressive taxation. In the current scheme there is a real danger that a proportionately much larger burden may fall on relatively lower middle class parents than rich ones. The argument for exempting minority institutions seems bogus. It says that all rights in the Constitution are to be interpreted in light of appropriate qualifications and directive principles of state policy, except minority rights, which have an “absolute” character. It is not clear why their minority status would be impaired by such reservation; at the very least they could admit weaker sections among minorities. If the objective is integrated classrooms, this goes against the grain.

The judgment is a missed opportunity to clarify the real issues in the RTE. For the core issue is this. All professions have to be regulated to some degree. But is regulating wages (over general minimum wage regulations) and infrastructure, and how you admit and who you can promote reasonable regulation? These issues will be more consequential for the RTE. Everyone pronouncing on the RTE is very confident in their answers: they range from revolution to disaster. But my honest answer is the three words policy analysts hate using, but should use more often: “I don’t know.”

This is because the real action is not in the act, but in the rules states are framing. These show wide variation on many issues. Is this going to be a disaster for the private sector or is it a voucher scheme in disguise that will lead to the expansion of the private sector? You could argue that there is going to be a minimum 25 per cent expansion in demand for new private schools among the moderate to high fee-paying population. There could also be political dynamics where citizens demand more private schools. Twenty-five per cent might turn out to be the beginning of a full-fledged voucher system. Will there be a supply response? It depends on land and labour markets. Complaints about the cost of schooling gloss over the fact that these costs are a function of these two markets.

Will recognition requirements kill low-cost private schools? Again, it depends. On current evidence, state practice varies widely. The real backbone of the private school revolution in India was flexibility in teachers’ wages. From a pedagogic point of view, this flexibility is important. Wages have no correlation with quality, especially in elementary education. States seem to have wide variations in their rules. Will quality assessments happen? As Parth Shah has pointed out, Gujarat has come up with a very sophisticated school quality assessment programme, while others are floundering. Will this system achieve social integration? I suspect you will get a varied story. For one thing, the neighbourhood criterion for determining eligibility seems too narrow. What will be the eligibility criteria and design of the lottery that allocates kids?

Everyone was so fixated on the 25 per cent reservation that the status of the real freedoms the schools need, on wages, infrastructure etc., were not clarified. The federalism currently being practiced is a good thing. But this will also be at some point litigated. We can only hope that the government and courts will go for more rather than less flexibility. It is something of a mystery the courts consistently choose to underemphasise the nuts and bolts of autonomy.

The current system is not pedagogically child-centric. But it is an open question whether the new system will be. Teaching the child is easier said than done. The RTE does not allow a school to hold back a child, no matter what their learning attainments. How do we compensate for learning disparities that set in by age six? As Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham reminds us, the real issue is going to be curriculum and pedagogy, and the jury is out on that issue.

Will the RTE improve accountability? Short answer: We don’t know. But the current system also has zero accountability. There are a lot of myths about prevailing structures of accountability. Even in high-end schools, teacher variance is very high. Would kids in most elite schools pass conceptual understanding tests in grades nine or ten without outside support? The RTE creates a new institutional locus for the politics of accountability that might be more tractable than the current institutional centralisation. It also creates incentives for a new politics of classification: it will be interesting to see whether there is a rush to establish “minority” schools. There will be the inevitable politics over inclusion in EWS. But sometimes opportunities to game the system also mean parents take more interest in it. Also, we may just be at a different historical moment in parental interest. The court has settled the class issue. But the real challenges of the classroom will not be solved by self-righteous elite versus anti-elite debates.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

The Indian Express, 18 April, 2012, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Classroom-struggle/937982/


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