Learning curves

ASER reflects challenges for govt's education programme

The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), by non-government organisation Pratham, has both encouraging and discouraging news that reflects the gap between people’s expectations and the quality of institutions. The gap afflicts all social infrastructure delivery systems in India. On the one hand, school enrolment went up even during the pandemic when educational institutions were shut. Hearteningly, the enrolment of children in the 6-14 age group rose to a record high of 98.14 per cent. No less significantly, the report shows a jump in the proportion of children enrolled in government schools, up from 65.6 per cent in 2018, the last time the report was published, to 72.9 per cent. This much was clear last year when Pratham’s “mini-survey” showed children in rural areas had shifted to government schools possibly on account of the closure of private schools or the relatively exorbitant fees they charge.

Pratham’s Chief Executive Officer Rukmini Banerji has posited that the shift could be influenced also by the fact that government schools, being attached to the state, were in a position to deliver textbooks and midday meals at a time when private schools’ economics were fragile. The signals from these statistics suggest that more Indians are beginning to understand the importance of a basic education for their children in meeting the aspirations for a better lifestyle. Most reassuring is that the number of girls in the 15-16 age-group not enrolled — typically a high dropout cohort — has continued to drop. The proportion has fallen steadily from 16.1 per cent in 2016 to 13.5 per cent in 2018 to just 7.9 per cent in 2022.

But a deeper dive into the quality metrics by ASER points to an urgent need to improve teaching standards, which appear to have plummeted to greater depths. The ability to read, for example, was down to pre-2012 levels, with only a fifth of the children in Class 3 able to read a Class 2 textbook. In 2018, the proportion was 27.2 per cent, itself hardly a healthy statistic. Maths abilities appear to have worsened only slightly less. Only about 26 per cent of the Grade 3 students could do two-digit subtraction (with borrowing), a two percentage point drop from 2018 levels and below 2010 levels. In both cases, the drop in standards has been appreciably sharper for the government schools than the private ones.

These statistics point to the challenges for the government’s NIPUN Bharat programme, launched in mid-2021 with the ambitious objective of achieving foundational literacy and numeracy for Grade 3 children by 2026-27. Indeed, the chronic problems with the quality of teachers and fundamental lack of accountability in government schools are clear from the steady rise in the booming tuition industry. At an all-India level, the number of children attending tuition jumped from 26.4 per cent in 2018 to 30.5 per cent in 2022. A closer look at the disaggregated numbers shows that the tuition business has grown mostly in states that have high population growth and low human development indicators — such as Bihar, UP, and Jharkhand — or those that have large numbers of educated young people joining the services industry in mainland India (Nagaland, Manipur, and Assam). Taken together with a rising dropout rate over 2021-22, as reported by the Ministry of Education, the picture on education in India cannot be called encouraging and acts as a reality check on the narrative of India’s impending economic ascendancy.