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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Rethinking education

While the human resources development ministry is currently focused on weeding out poor-quality private education providers in the higher education space, a very different picture obtains as far as primary and secondary education is concerned. At a time when the government is almost certainly going to increase expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) and is still working on the costs of the Right to Education (RTE) Bill, the findings of the latest Annual Status of Education Report (Aser) should make us pause and consider increasing the role of the private sector. But first, the good news. Take almost any age group of children and, over a period of time, the proportion of those not in school has declined — from 10 per cent in 2006 to around 7 per cent, for instance, in the case of girls in the 11-14 age group in 2009. Of the 96 per cent of all children enrolled in schools, around 22 per cent are in private schools, with the figure touching 40 per cent in states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. This is up from 19 per cent in 2006 and would be higher if you remove states like Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal where private schooling is very low but private tuition is very high. The other piece of good news is that, at the first-standard level, the standards of learning are rising — the proportion of children recognising numbers has gone up from 65.3 per cent in 2008 to 69.3 per cent in 2009; the proportion recognising letters is up from 65.1 per cent to 68.8 per cent. The bad news is that in the fifth standard, the levels of learning have dropped and well over 40 per cent of all rural children cannot read text that someone three levels below them (in the second standard) should be able to read. The proportion of fifth-standard kids who can read second standard books fell from 56.2 per cent in 2008 to 52.8 per cent in 2009; for maths, the proportion of children who can divide in class five hasn’t increased — it has fallen for government schools.

The rise of private schooling, and their education quality, in fact, is the key takeaway from the Aser report. Aser finds, for instance, that the proportion of children in standards one-five who can read at least a standard one text in their local language is 52.2 per cent in private schools as compared to 43.6 per cent in government schools, or a difference of a fifth. The same order of magnitude applies to being able to do division — 48 per cent of those in the fifth standard can do division in private schools as compared to 38 per cent in government schools. The difference in the ability to read English is much larger, around two-thirds. While the difference is large, it could have a lot to do with the background of those in private schools — typically, richer and more educated parents send their children here. Having corrected for this, Aser finds the difference reduces to 5 per cent (from 20 per cent) in the case of local language texts and to 41 per cent (from 67 per cent) when it comes to reading English. Combine this with the dramatic difference in costs of teachers — private school teachers cost around a third or less of what government school teachers do — and there is a very clear case for involving private schools in programmes like the SSA and for a larger role for them in the RTE.