What is the issue?
- A committee has been constituted under the chairmanship of K Kasturirangan to formulate a new education policy.
- But its time that India assesses the need for an action plan instead, given the challenges and differences in school education.
How is the education sector at present?
- The infrastructure (school buildings) has certainly shown remarkable improvement in the last few decades.
- Also, the mid-day-meal scheme has made it possible to get the child to the school.
- Besides, enormous amount of investments has gone into the school education sector.
- Also, the number of teachers has gone up substantially and the average pupil-teacher ratio is close to the required levels.
- However, the poor quality of education imparted in most of the government schools is the most worrying scenario.
- Evidently, the learning outcomes have actually come down during the past decade.
What are the drawbacks and challenges?
- Teachers - A large number of teachers are not qualified to teach, yet they are teaching.
- Roughly, out of 8 million teachers, around 1.4 million fall in this category.
- Politics has played a key role, resulting in a skewed distribution of teachers in most of the states.
- It's because the tendency is to hang in and around urban areas.
- RTE - The Right to Education Act did little to address the quality issues.
- In some cases, like the no-detention policy and the mandatory provision on qualification and number of teachers, it only created more problems than it solved.
- A tedious process of amendment had to be resorted to correct some of the wrongs in the Act.
- Diversity - Most of the action relating to education lies with the states.
- In States like Kerala, a teacher not going to school would invite public criticism.
- On the other hand, in some of the states of northern India, teachers consider it their right not to go to the School.
- There are instances of these regular teachers employing a “substitute” to represent them and even teach on their behalf.
- In any case, the country is too diverse to consider a single mandate by way of policy for the entire country.
What is desired?
- Given the regional differences, a national policy is less likely to be effective.
- The sector actually requires an action plan clearly outlining what, how, who and when things should be done.
- The roles of respective entities should be clearly defined so as to assess their performance.
- The entire value chain needs to be looked at, understood, and its interventions be clearly outlined.
- The action plan needs to focus on the teacher who plays a pivotal role in imparting education, including:
- the selection process
- pre-service and in-service trainings
- transfer and posting
- engagement of teachers in non-educational activities
- promotional avenues and morale
- An action plan for each state is essential, clearly outlining the roles of the Central government and the respective state government.
- There will have to be sufficient flexibility in the central schemes to accommodate differences amongst states.
- The whole approach has to be outcome-based rather than input-based as has been the case so far.
Source: Financial Express