That little learning happens in India’s 1.25 million primary schools — particularly in rural India — has been repeatedly exposed by several indigenous surveys and studies including the Annual Status of Education Report (see p.14). In December, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), which measures the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science in 74 countries, detonated a bombshell which indicates that even secondary school education is of doubtful quality.
In the latest PISA results, released by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Development (OECD), the first batch of Indian 15-year-olds chosen from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh — reputedly India’s most well-educated states — was ranked 73 out of students from 74 countries, just above Krygystan. While India languished at the bottom of the heap, the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai topped the PISA rankings in all three categories — reading skills, mathematical and scientific literacy — followed by South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong (see table).
More than 16,000 students from 400 rural and urban government and a few state board affiliated private schools in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu wrote PISA 2009. Reacting, Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal says: “The basic flaw in the PISA study is that it takes only Shanghai into consideration and not the rest of China. We should compare rural China with rural India.”
The disastrous debut of Indian students in PISA has busted the myth that Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have superior school education systems. As in all the other 29 states of the Indian Union, they are bedeviled with problems of teacher absenteeism, inadequate government funding, abysmal infrastructure, and poor student learning outcomes in schools. “In Tamil Nadu, we have 99 percent enrolment, good school infrastructure including computers, and adequate teachers. Starting and equipping schools has become a ritual with the state government, which places little emphasis on improving quality of learning. Fortunately in 2003 the state government made an attempt to address the problem of poor learning outcomes and introduced activity based learning (ABL) in primary and active learning methodology (ALM) in upper primary schools. PISA assesses the skills of 15-year-olds in classes IX and X who are outside the ambit of ABL and ALM. Hence the poor ranking of our secondary school children in PISA,” says Dr. M.P. Vijaykumar, honorary state director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Tamil Nadu.
The lesson to be derived from the bottom-of-the-heap PISA ranking of Indian 15-year-olds is that the Central and state governments’ focus needs to urgently shift from chasing higher enrolments to focusing on improving learning outcomes. Time to amend the much-trumpeted RTE Act, 2009 to guarantee not merely the right of children to schooling, but learning as well.
