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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | RTE law and a court judgment won't fix broken public education system

RTE law and a court judgment won't fix broken public education system

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published Published on Apr 14, 2012   modified Modified on Apr 14, 2012
-The Economic Times

The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Constitutional validity does not mean sense - after all, being stupid is not illegal. Public opinion is most exercised about all schools, even those that get no aid from government, being asked to provide 25% of their seats free to poor students. 

The court has pronounced this a blow for affirmative action. Private schools had opposed provisions of the RTE saying that they infringed on their right to do business or trade. They now worry how state governments will fund the costs of teaching poor children in private schools. We feel that the court has, by its order, justified the collapse of the government schooling programme across most states. 

In almost every state, government schools employ teachers who get paid even when they do not bother to teach, prompting those with the ability to pay even small fees out of public schools, into privately-run ones. Some states like Madhya Pradesh tried to fix this around 15 years ago by making funds for public education available at the panchayat level and fixing accountability and appointments at the local level. 

More recently, a Delhi organisation has launched a voucher project that allows poor children to shift from government schools to private ones by using vouchers. 

We need more experimentation in methods of delivering education and better governance to make teachers teach in state-run schools and regulate the conduct of private schools that often pay their staff a pittance even while collecting extortionate tuition fees from students. 

Educational reform cannot end with RTE legislation and a court order. The government must fix its public schools. It is not starved for resources: last fiscal, the Centre mopped up Rs 22,471 crore from taxpayers for the sole purpose of funding education. 

New Delhi and the states have to put their heads together to figure out how to fix schools and stem the pilferage/wastage of public money from the school system. A right to education is neither sufficient nor necessary to get a population educated. It essentially calls for political will to effect structural reform and to make the reformed system work.

The Economic Times, 14 April, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/editorial/rte-law-and-a-court-judgment-wont-fix-broken-public-education-system/articleshow/12657249.cms


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