Focus on quality

Focus on quality

RTE failed students through piecemeal non-detention. Don’t punish them again by piecemeal reform.

With Parliament passing the Right to Education (RTE) Amendment Bill that scraps the controversial non detention policy, the mistakes of the RTE Act must not be repeated. Its heavy emphasis on inputs like physical infrastructure in schools rather than on qualitative outcomes like learning levels and teaching standards was misplaced. Alongside no-detention, the original RTE Act mandated a rigorous Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) of children in schools.

While children were casually promoted forward, CCE which would have required a comprehensive systemic overhaul fell by the wayside. And now when detention of students returns to our education policy, complacency must not set in under the cavalier assumption that the fear of failure will prompt children to study with renewed vigour. This would be a tragedy because it penalises children for no fault of theirs. No child is a failure; it is teachers, educationists and governments that fail them. Detention must be accompanied by stricter norms of accountability demanded of teachers and schools.

Unfortunately, many teachers have made their way into the education system without requisite qualifications or teaching skills and then enjoy security of tenure that doesn’t weed out non-performers. In 2016, Centre had reported that government schools faced a shortfall of 10 lakh teachers, with vacancies touching 22% and 34% respectively in pivotal states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. For a reset in the sector recruit the best teachers for these vacancies, especially when India now has a large army of “overqualified” jobseekers who apply desperately even for Group-D/ Class-IV jobs in government.

HRD minister Prakash Javadekar assured sceptical Rajya Sabha MPs that dropouts will not spike despite detention of failing students. The last ASER survey had found 86% of children in the 14-18 age group enrolled within the formal education system. Even as high enrolment is an important marker of education access, ASER also revealed abysmal outcomes like 25% in this age group being unable to read fluently in their mother tongue and nearly 50% having difficulty doing basic math and reading English sentences. In this context of poor skill acquisition, Javadekar’s assurance of arresting dropout rates is hardly convincing as detention will only further hit the confidence of parents and students in education raising their worldly prospects. This is where schools must show improvement in teaching and learning outcomes. The discourse must move forward from universal access to right to quality education, not backward to increasing dropouts.