Making them work

EAR TO THE GROUND

With 93 per cent enrolment and 70 per cent attendance, 44 per cent of the kids in government schools between classes two and five can't read, 50 per cent can't do a simple subtraction sum.

About 60 million kids in India need help. Add to that four million teachers who are well-paid and trained but just won't work "" their absence rate of 33 to 43 per cent is worst in the world except Uganda and they teach only 45 per cent of the time when they attend school. It is untrained para-teachers who actually work, at a measly pay of often Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,500, less than what a contract labourer earns.

Pack them off with attractive exit options like VRS, suggested Abhijit Banerjee, professor of economics in the MIT, at a seminar organised by the London School of Economics in Delhi on bridging the urban-rural divide. But that still won't help the students.

The Karnataka government says it has found a way out. It has decided to give in adoption 9,000 of the 40,000 schools it runs. It also introduced a programme in 2005 to assess the quality of every school. This was not a sample survey but a student-wise and class-wise census on the quality of every child who studied in classes five and seven. State education secretary Vijaya Bhaskara says the assessment was done on 120 points of competencies where it found class five students scoring 49 per cent and class seven students 48 per cent.

The next step was to improve quality. So they adopted a model of remedial teaching programme in reading, writing and arithmetic, developed by NGO Pratham. In the next year's assessment, there was 14 per cent improvement, says the secretary.

The state then roped in parents to monitor the teachers. This was not like the Village Education Committees devised by the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan where the parents often have not heard about the existence of such an entity. Here, the parents had powers to give casual leave to teachers. Since teachers are often the elite in the villages, this led to a shift in the equation of power in the schools, says Bhaskara.

Teachers are the target for anyone who is disillusioned with the government schools. Sarva Siksha Abhiyan has found a queer way out by employing two lakh semi-qualified ad hoc teachers . (Karnataka has no ad hoc teachers).

Abhijit Banerjee advocates a mix of remedial teaching and some distance and computer-aided education. He also says that the government should hand over its schools to the private sector, admitting in the same breath how private sector is no guarantee to good teaching and excellent teachers. For, if 50 per cent of the kids in government schools can't solve a simple problem of maths between classes two and five, the figure for private schools is 38 per cent.

Excellence has made an exit from primary education for better career options in IT, medicine and engineering, and the ever-widening horizon of creative and remunerative work. There is a salary but no incentive for good work. Instead, the teachers are often cooking mid-day meals and writing government reports.

Teaching is hardly a choice for any brilliant student today. No one has bothered to make it attractive.