Beware school nationalisation” (March 15) makes an important point. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 is seeking to nationalise elementary education in the country. Our political system is inclined to substitute real development with a system of showering state patronage and privileges. The government, therefore, is considering the move to reserve a few seats for children belonging to weaker sections and disadvantaged groups instead of addressing the challenges confronting Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or Jawahar Navodaya Schools. Despite being provided with better infrastructure, government schools lag behind private schools in both rural and urban areas. Parents also prefer private schools with poor infrastructure but better educational inputs, even if it means coughing up more money out of their meagre resources.
It seems that the government, unable to upgrade the quality of education being dished out by government-run schools, intends to achieve parity between public and private institutes by pulling down the level of private schools, even if it requires doing away with assessing students (and thus assessing the teachers and the school also), which is the only logical and measurable differentiator allowing parents to choose the right school for their kids.
Another aspect of the new law is that it does away with school management committees’ control of salary, increment and promotion of teachers in government schools, thus handing out the control to politicians, who often use their powers to distribute teaching jobs and award contracts for constructing school buildings as a way of returning favours to loyal party workers.
Ajay Tyagi, Mumbai
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