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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Maintain no-fail policy but increase accountability for schools and teachers
-The Times of India


There was some grumbling when Indian taxpayers were told in 2004 that they would have to begin paying an education cess of 2%. But the move also inspired a lot of positivity, because of a widely-shared belief that upgrading education is the most effective thing our government can do to lift Indians into affluence. Although it took the Parliament another half decade to enact the Right to Education Act, the new legal and financial provisions have ensured that enrollment in primary education has become almost universal today. The story is not one of unmitigated progress, unfortunately. Learning outcomes in reading and maths have seen a disturbing diminution. The question is what should be done about this.

One theory puts most of the blame on schools' incapacity to fail or expel students till Class VIII, arguing that student's motivation to study is diluted when they are guaranteed a promotion in any case. It's in line with such thinking that a parliamentary standing committee on human resource development has suggested a rethink of the policy of automatic promotion up to Class VIII. But this policy was formulated in response to another real problem - high dropout rates, where failing demotivates many students from staying on in school. Since dropout rates remain a cause of concern, we need to look for alternatives to reversing the policy of automatic promotion.

The pressing need for better trained teachers suggests an obvious alternative. Post-RTE teacher eligibility tests have thrown up abysmal pass percentages in state after state. But even as teacher vacancies pose a serious hazard, India's low gross enrollment ratio in higher education underlines the challenge of filling such vacancies in the future. Still, global data stresses the need for better teachers to deliver better learning outcomes. One US study has concluded that replacing a teacher in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of a student's lifetime income by more than $250,000!

Accountability and incentives promise metamorphosis. Abandoning annual exams doesn't have to mean junking regular assessments-of both students and teachers. When we look at countries with exemplary school systems, we see high levels of both accountability and autonomy. In India, we need to punish teachers who hardly turn up to teach (by docking their pay, suspension and so on). But we must also reward those whose lessons are first-class and transformative.