The infrastructure of opportunity

A civilised society can't give up on government schools

Writing from Jail in 1942 Jawaharlal Nehru asked, “If life opened its gates and offered them education, how many among the millions of Indians would be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers and artists, helping to build a new India and a new world?” Eight decades later, he would surely be disillusioned with India’s government school enrolment of 55 per cent — on a trajectory to decline to 40 per cent — compared to 85 per cent in America, 90 per cent in England, and 95 per cent in Japan. This decline is hardly a case against private schools or a call for higher regulatory cholesterol for them; our social, economic and political progress of the last two decades is unimaginable without them. But it is surely a failure; if anything for our citizens should be free with quality, it should be school education. We’d like to make the case that the Diet Coke approach to reform — the taste without the calories — does not work and the multi-decade tinkering with class sizes, teacher qualifications, salaries, resources, curriculum, and infrastructure is not sufficient to fix government schools. We must take on the difficult issues of government school governance and performance management.

India’s 100 per cent school enrolment ratio masks many challenges; a 30 per cent dropout ratio, policy making that confuses school buildings with building schools, only 50 per cent children of grade 5 being able to read grade 2 text, and learning outcomes declining despite spending Rs 1.2 lakh crore spent on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan between 2009 and 2014. Almost 400,000 of our 1.5 million schools have less than 50 students (70 per cent of schools in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttarakhand). We have too many schools; China has a similar number of students with 30 per cent of our school numbers. And school learning outcomes have become more important for India than they were in the past for three reasons; First, the new world of work has redefined employability to include strong foundations (3Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic) and soft skills (the fourth R of relationships). Second, these can’t be taught in three months or three years but need 12 years. Finally, India’s farm to non-farm transition is not happening to factories but to sales and customer services where the wage premium is directly dependent on 4R competency. 

Recent government school reform — reduced class sizes, higher teacher salaries, raised teacher qualifications, and increased spending — have helped but reached the point of diminishing returns. Government schools don’t need more cooks in the kitchen but a different recipe yet education reform has often danced around the difficult issues of governance and performance management. Performance management is often equated with teacher attendance yet teachers need to be evaluated on outputs (skills and scores) and inputs (competence and classroom management). Scores can be measured based on continous assessments or end of year exams. Skills and concepts are harder in a world where soft skills — curious, courageous, confident, risk taker, team player and communicator — are hard skills. Teacher competence needs judging on criteria like child interaction, knowledge, planning capacity, communication, feedback abilities, collaboration and drive towards excellence. Classroom management needs assessment by classroom observation of teaching and learning (teaching often happens without learning), classroom setup, instructional differentiation (for process, product and learning styles), and communication (clarity, questioning, responsive). 

Governance in most schools revolves around control of resources. But school governance is about learning planning and design, responsiveness to students and parents, teacher mentoring and management, building community relationships, integrity, training identification and planning, feedback capability (formal and informal), role modelling, and fair decision-making. School policies and procedures play a very important part in learning outcomes but the current allocation of decision rights lets down learners. Any builder of institutions know that governance and performance management must combine to if they want to create a culture of excellence. A fair culture of fear of falling and hope of rising is today absent in our government schools.

Education figures on Lists I (Centre), II (State) and III (both) of India’s Constitution. Socrates once said that a slave who has three masters is free; performance management and governance in government schools is sabotaged by this constitutional fragmentation. The annual central government allocation to primary education (about Rs 53,000 crore) is a fraction of the total state government spending yet Delhi exerts an influence disproportionate to their monetary contribution through legislation (for instance, RTE), National Boards (CBSE) and drafting for other work (election, census, etc). Delhi must dump the overly centralising Right to Education Act (similar to the replacement of the overly centralised No Child Left Behind Act of the US being replaced by the Every student succeeds Act). And state government must figure out how to consolidate schools (this will reduce the teacher shortage and multi-grade teaching), dump opaque transfer policies (in a system where tenure and compensation are off the table, location is a potent tool for performance management) and introduce budget flexibility. 

The challenges of fixing our government schools are economic, ideological, and political but are not uniquely Indian nor uniquely current; Abraham Lincoln filled up an election form describing his education as “defective”. The most dangerous lies are the lies we tell ourselves but it’s time to take on vested interests that are stealing our future. Becoming a $5 trillion economy depends on productive enterprises and workers. The skill of our workers greatly depends on the 12 years they spend in school because of a new world of education (Google knows everything), new world of organisations (employment has shifted from being a lifetime contract to a taxicab relationship), and a new world of capitalism without capital (intangible assets are more valuable than physical assets). India missed her tryst with destiny for many reasons but one of them was surely our weak government schools. She has now made a new appointment but meeting meeting this new appointment surely involves fixing the governance and performance management of our government schools because they are integral to our infrastructure of opportunity. 

The writers are co-founders of Teamlease Services