Should failing government schools be leased to NGOs?
Government-NGO cooperation has become urgently necessary to revive and re-establish the country’s 867,000 plus government primary and secondary schools as genuine centres of learning, providing the 200 million children who enroll in them annually a fair chance to step aboard the escalator of fast-track, shining India. Dilip Thakore reports K. Mariappa and his wife Anjana are daily wage (Rs.65 and Rs.50) construction workers helping to build tony homes for Bangalore’s technology entrepreneurs and professionals. Their son Anil Kumar (13) and his two younger sisters attend a neighbourhood government primary school. Anil is a class VII student of a publicly-funded school run by the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagar Palike (Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation). Mariappa and Anjana’s neighbour in a slum colony is Ramamurthy Reddy, a peon in a private printing press earning three times the monthly wages of Mariappa and Anjana. Reddy and his wife Neelima have two children — Shashi (10) and his sister Thangamma (8) — enrolled in a private school in the same neighbourhood, which levies a monthly tuition fee of Rs.100 per child. Although Anil Kumar’s school has a large playground and he and his sisters get a free mid-day meal in the school, he is dependent upon the younger Shashi for tutoring him in Kannada, maths and English twice a week. "Though my children are happy in the government school, very little learning happens in their classrooms because the teachers are often absent. I would like to send my children to the convent (private) school where they teach English. But unfortunately I can’t afford it," says the emaciated Mariappa, speaking through a translator and wiping a tear from his eye.
But tears may be in store for the Reddys as well. The cramped two-storied private primary school to which Shashi and Thangamma go may be closed down on the orders of the Karnataka state government. The school’s management has committed the cardinal sin of teaching — more accurately attempting to teach — with English as the medium of instruction. However when it was licensed 12 years ago, it had undertaken to teach in the Kannada medium. The state’s recently-appointed education minister Basvaraj Horatti is incensed by this breach of contract by over 2,600 schools (with an aggregate enrollment of 3 lakh children) to which government inspectors turned a blind eye for over a decade in return for regular pay-offs by their managements, and is determined to close them down unless they switch to teaching children in classes I-V solely in Kannada as per their licence agreement. Appeals by KUSMA (Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association) to the high court for a stay order have proved infructuous. Now the Reddys are frantically searching for a legally established English medium school for Shashi and Thangamma, with little success because most of them are full up and/or much too expensive.
This perhaps over-detailed morality tale with strange twists and turns provides an insight into all that’s gone wrong with post-independence India’s primary school system. The modest aspirations of hundreds of millions of illiterate parents such as Mariappa and the Reddys desperate to enroll their children in schools which would equip them with the knowledge and education denied to themselves, are being squashed by the dead hand of indifferent Central and child-hostile state and local governments. While their parents are only too aware that English medium education is a vital pre-requisite for Anil Kumar, his sisters, Shashi and Thangamma, to enter the organised sector of the Indian economy growing at an unprecedented annual rate of 9 percent plus, politicians and bureaucrats with their own agendas and rackets don’t give a jot.
They seem blissfully unaware of the power of education to dramatically pitchfork the poor onto the escalator of fast-track, shining India whose dividends are cornered by themselves and an expanding urban elite currently enjoying unprecedented and spectacularly insensitive prosperity. Pre-occupied with the perquisites of office, the nation’s me-first politicians and bureaucrats seem unaware that never before in the history of the subcontinent has it been as easy for youth with passable English language commu-nication skills to secure remunerative employment, as it is today.
Therefore with the over-whelming majority of the country’s 876,951 government primary and secondary schools caught in a time warp and dispensing worthless ritual education, there is a massive exodus from government schools into privately promoted, tightly managed schools. According to Arun C. Mehta author of the authoritative Elementary Education in India (2006) even in the poorest states of the Indian Union such as Bihar (pop. 84 million) and Uttar Pradesh (180 million), the percentage of rural students enrolled in fees-levying private schools has risen consistently. Countrywide, the number of private aided schools rose from 53,660 in 2004 to 59,339 in 2005, and the number of unaided private schools from 72,282 to 97,929 during the same period. Currently an estimated 16 percent of rural and 35 percent of urban students aged six-14 attend fee-charging private schools."The increasing prevalence of rural private schools appears to be a recent phenomenon with nearly 50 percent of private rural schools in our sample having been established in five years before the survey (2006) and nearly 40 percent of private school enrollments being in these recently established schools. The prevalence and enrollment share of private schools is widely believed to be significantly higher in urban areas," says Karthik Muralidharan a Ph D student at Harvard University writing in the Delhi-based monthly Seminar (September 2006).
Against this backdrop of a massive nationwide loss of confidence in government school education characterised by pathetic learning outcomes and chronic teacher absenteeism, a question being increasingly debated within the intelligentsia — even if not the somnambulistic groves of Indian academia — is whether the public interest would be better served if the management and administration of government primary schools are leased or entrusted to NGOs (non-government organisations), particularly to those with a good track record in education provision.
"It’s very heartening to witness an intensifying debate on the performance and management of government schools. If only this debate had started 50 years ago, Indian education would not have been in the abysmal state it is today. However handing over the management of the occasional government school to an NGO won’t solve the country’s education problems. Instead it would be better to open up the education sector and unshackle it from absurd over-regulation and allow non-state entities to enter this sector in a more meaningful and inclusive manner. Right now the government is a dog in the manger — neither allowing private educators to do their best, nor doing its own best. The plain truth is that the investments currently being made in education at all levels — right from pre-school to university — are pathetically inadequate," says Rohini Nilekani chairperson of the Bangalore-based Akshara Foundation (estb. 2000 with an endowment corpus of Rs.100 crore) which provides remedial (after school) education and a reading support programme to 1,400 government primary schools in the Bangalore urban district.
Although like Nilekani most NGO leaders balk at the prospect of taking over non-performing government schools because of the sheer scale of the problem, a small but growing number of education NGOs are receptive to the idea. "I’m excited that you have mooted this proposal. My answer to the roposition is a loud and resounding ‘yes’. I think it makes very good sense for state and municipal governments to delegate the management and administration of their collapsing, non-performing schools to NGOs. This is already happening in the US under the charter school scheme. We have been discussing this proposal with the Brihan Mumbai Corporation (municipal corporation) for over a year without success. But yes, if given total control over management and staffing for a minimum of five years, we are ready and willing to assume the responsibility of sharply improving learning outcomes in government schools," says Shaheen Mistry an education alumna of Manchester University (UK) and promoter-director of Akanksha (estb. 1991), a Mumbai-based supplementary education NGO which has pioneered the concept of transforming office and school premises into after-hours learning centres for street and working children. Currently Akanksha runs 55 learning centres with an aggregate enrollment of 4,600 children in Mumbai and Pune.
The idea of NGOs with proven track records in education being given charge of failing government schools also appeals to Shukla Bose, an IIM-Calcutta alumna and once the most well-remunerated woman CEO in Indian industry, who switched vocations to promote the Bangalore-based Parikrma Humanity Foundation (PHF) in 2003. Today PHF runs four high quality free English medium class I-VIII schools scattered across Bangalore with an aggregate enrollment of 800 slum and underprivileged children. The landmark social significance of PHF schools is that abjuring the tacit apartheid inherent in the existing education system (under which the children of the poor learn in under-developed vernacular languages), they provide socially disadvantaged children with comprehensive English medium education, following the syllabus of the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), Delhi which has 1,600 of India’s front-rank private schools affiliated with it.
"For over half a century state and local government schools haven’t been able to deliver acceptable quality education to their unfortunate students. This is a very strong argument for them to exit school management altogether and pass the responsibility to proven NGOs. The hesitation that government has on this score is its concern for poor children. But now there are many NGOs including PHF, which have demonstrated that they can look after the education and related needs of poor children much better than government. Several local government schools in Bangalore with good infrastructure are non-functional because parents don’t want to send their children to these low-performance institutions. We would be quite willing to revive and manage some of them with full accountability to government. Indeed we have held discussions on this very issue with several education secretaries of the state government, but the discussions haven’t led anywhere, having to start from scratch every time an official is transferred, which is often," says Bose.
Case for voucher system One of the solutions for reversing the trend of plunging teaching-learning standards in
government schools, resulting in an unacceptably high number of children dropping out before completion of primary education, is the voucher system. This system is vigorously advocated by the Centre for Civil Society, Delhi and its president Dr. Parth Shah in particular. According to them it confers the twin benefits of offering parents/students the option of choosing their school while forcing government schools to upgrade teaching-learning standards for fear of migration of students. "The basic idea of an education voucher is that the government funds students instead of schools and the money follows the student and gets paid to whichever school a child chooses to enroll in. In such a situation, even the poorest parents would be able to send their child to private school if they felt it was superior to the public school, but they would be just as free to send their child to a government school, if they feel it was the best option for their child," writes Karthik Muralidharan in an essay published in the Delhi-based monthly Seminar (September 2006). Given that because of substantially higher teacher salaries and overheads, the actual education allocation for children in government schools is substantially higher than in the neighbourhood private school, introduction of the voucher scheme would enable socially disadvantaged children who are perforce obliged to study in government primaries and secondaries to choose from an array of private or better performing government schools. Some local governments especially the Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore municipal corporations expend Rs.1,500-1,800 per capita monthly on students in their schools where learning outcomes are lamentable. If given these amounts by way of fee vouchers, children trapped in non-performing government schools could access front-rank English medium private schools. An additional benefit of the voucher system is that it forces government schools to improve teaching-learning standards and reduce teacher absenteeism which is their bane. If a large number of vouchered students exit from a particular government school, the state or municipal government would be forced to close it down jeopardising teachers’ jobs. This possibility will force teachers to become more diligent in the performance of their duties which in turn would improve classroom learning outcomes, argue proponents of the school voucher scheme. "The point is not to claim that vouchers can be a ‘silver bullet’ solution that will solve all our educational woes overnight. Rather it should be thought of as an especially promising idea among a range of policy options we have to improve the quality of education across the board. The lack of empirical evidence regarding how a voucher-based policy would work in the Indian context means it is premature to think about large-scale systemic change along these lines in the short run. What we should be doing however, is to actively form partnerships between governments, academics, donors and philanthropists, and NGOs/civil society organisations interested in education to systematically pilot voucher programmes in the next three-five years in various locations, and to carefully analyse both qualitative and quantitative measures of the programme in this period..." writes Muralidharan. Certainly given that learning outcomes in government schools have assumed crisis proportions, this idea should be tested on a pilot scale to give captive government school students a choice to access preferable institutions. |
Yet if even proven NGOs which are often celebrated by government itself are not called upon to revive and take charge of clearly languishing government schools, the major impediment is the patent reluctance of politicians and education bureaucracies to relinquish the control they have exercised for the past six decades over the education system. Plainly, they have too much to lose if the status quo is upturned. It’s an open secret that politicians and bureaucrats, particularly in state and municipal governments rake in huge incomes from construction and equipment purchase kickbacks, textbook printing rackets, teacher appointments and transfers, and sundry other rackets ubiquitous in public education. Therefore they are less than enthusiastic about handing over these cash cows to NGOs. Which is why educrats tend to prefer NGOs chipping in with remedial or supplementary education rather than overturning the profitable status quo.Inevitably official opposition to NGOs playing a larger role in Indian education is couched in ideological and class rhetoric. But there’s growing acceptance within the education bureaucracy of limited engagement with NGOs although they are regarded as do-gooding nuisances to be tolerated rather than encouraged. "We are not considering handing over any of our schools to NGOs, although we are partnering with some of them in running our schools. We have listed 39 items in which NGOs can help us including expert guidance to teachers, counselling, health check-ups for children, etc and we are already associating with several of them in these spheres. So while there is no question of handing over municipal schools to NGOs, we are fully prepared to associate with them in areas in which we are weak, in order to improve the overall quality of education," says S.S. Shinde, deputy municipal commissioner (education) of the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation which manages 1,191 primary and secondary schools in Mumbai.
If government educrats tend to be suspicious of NGOs whom they often perceive as agents of foreign governments and churches, with the prime intent of religious conversion under the guise of education provision, the voluntary sector is not particularly enamoured by the prospect of working with/or being accountable to nit-picking bureaucrats, who know little about education and are widely perceived as incorrigibly corrupt. Therefore they are unwilling to rock the boat more than slightly.
"We firmly believe that education and health are the responsibility of government. Therefore as NGOs we can only play a supportive role. To improve the quality of education in government primary schools and arrest the high percentage of dropouts, we have adopted 12 schools where we provide after-school remedial education to over 2,000 children. We do this because we realise that in government schools there is the problem of quality of education, and as an education NGO we have a certain responsibility to ensure that children receive quality education," says Kallol Ghosh, secretary of OFFER (Organisation for Friends, Energies and Resources), an ISO 9002 certified Kolkata-based NGO (estb.1986) which provides remedial and supplementary education to over 10,000 children in West Bengal.
Such preference for limited engagement with government institutions is normative among NGOs. Even highly qualified and capable voluntary sector professionals entertain a visceral fear that taking charge of government schools is a crown of thorns and they could be inundated with the paperwork invariably demanded by government departments.
"NGOs don’t have the resources to take over and run government schools. Moreover not all NGOs can be entrusted with the responsibility of running schools and being accountable. Ideally government should fund schools and pay teachers’ salaries, entrusting management and quality monitoring to reputed education NGOs which could detect problem areas and improve learning outcomes. NGOs are best qualified to provide supplementary learning, teacher training and to measure learning outcomes. This is what we are doing with 15,000 government schools in ten districts of Tamil Nadu. And even this is not a formal arrangement; we have pushed our way into these schools through persuasion, advocacy and cajoling," says Dr. Balaji Sampath, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and Maryland University who promoted the Association for India’s Development (AID) while a student in the US, and registered AID-India in Chennai in 1997. Currently AID-India has 11 chapters countrywide serviced by 1,000 volunteers designing and implementing education, health, rural and community development programmes in 300 villages across the country.
Reluctance to become involved with government, i.e the serpentine coils of India’s notorious bureaucracy, is discernible even in heavyweight education NGOs with global reputations such as the Mumbai-based Pratham and the Delhi-based CRY (Child Rights & You). "Pratham has not made any such proposal to any state government or municipal corporation; we haven’t even contemplated it," says Madhav Chavan the US-educated founder director of Pratham (estb.1994) which runs 2,500 balwadis (crèches) across the country, and which has embarrassed state governments in particular by pioneering its unprecedented countrywide Annual Survey of Education Reports (ASER) which confirm that learning outcomes in government schools in rural India are deplorable. "In the unlikely event of Pratham being requested to take charge of a government school, we would be agreeable only if we are given full managerial control for a definite period of time; we can recruit teachers afresh as per our terms; we are assured of funding on a per-child basis to cover cost of teachers, materials and infrastructure maintenance, and there is a clear, mutually agreed definition of goals and indicators of learning outcomes," stipulates Chavan. The popular belief that reputable education NGOs are raring to take charge of failing government schools and turn them around is also dispelled by Vikram Srivastava, the Delhi-based development support manager of CRY. "Under the provisions of the Constitution of India education is a State responsibility. Therefore the onus of providing free and good quality education rests squarely on govern-ment, not on NGOs or individuals. By handing over non-performing schools to voluntary organisations, the state would be abdicating its responsibility. Moreover it needs to be borne in mind that a large number of NGO and private sector schools are also non-performing and poorly managed. There are very few NGO-run schools that are performing well and there are even fewer NGOs that can run free-of-charge schools," says Srivastava.
Dr. A.S. Seetharamu hitherto professor of economics at the Institute of Social & Economic Change (estb.1974) has an explanation for the mutual hostility and suspicion between government and NGOs. "During the past half century since independence, while the number of NGOs operating in India has multiplied, there’s been a conspicuous policy lacuna in government transactions with them. Therefore there’s an urgent need for enacting a policy framework within which NGOs can operate and be assessed and evaluated. Moreover it’s undeniable that some NGOs, especially those operating at the state level, have dubious track records with over 600 having been blacklisted by the Union rural development ministry recently. In the absence of any transactional ground rules, the mutual suspicion and hostility between education bureaucrats and NGOs is inevitable," he says.
Charter schools option Given that open, continuous and uninterrupted mass migration from state and local government schools to increasingly over-crowded private schools is now an indisputable countrywide reality, a promising option availaable to the Central and state governments to salvage the situation is to transform their non-performing primaries and secondaries into charter schools. These are publicly funded schools (operational in the US) leased to non-government organisations (NGOs) or individuals, freed of some of the rules, regulations and laws that ordinarily apply to government schools in exchange for lessees producing guaranteed learning outcomes and results. The charter school movement began in the US in 1988 when the American Federation of Teachers agreed to reform of the deteriorating public school system through the establishment of parallel ‘charter schools’ which would operate much like a private business — freed from adhering to government mandated processes or inputs but accountable for delivering guaranteed learning outcomes. Currently 40 of the 52 states of the USA have enacted laws permitting establishment of charter schools with over 70 percent of them operating in states with the strongest laws. In most of them charter schools are funded by transferring per pupil expenditure of the state or local government to the management of the charter school. Additionally charter schools also receive funding from private donors and foundations. "Charter schools are havens for children who had bad educational experiences elsewhere," according to a survey of students, teachers and parents associated with 50 charter schools in ten states of the US federation, conducted by the Hudson Institute in 1997. More than 60 percent of parents opined that charters were better than their children’s previous schools in terms of teaching quality, individual attention from teachers, curriculum, discipline and academic standards. Moreover most teachers reported feeling empowered and professionally fulfilled, says the survey. Back home in India, given the growing problem of non-performing government schools characterised by poor learning outcomes and chronic teacher absenteeism — a situation juxtaposed with the emergence of high credibility education NGOs such as Pratham (Mumbai), AID-India (Chennai) and the Parikrma Humanity Foundation (Bangalore) among others — there is a strong case for state and local governments leasing their non-performing schools to proven education NGOs on the US charter model. At the very least a few worst-case government schools need to be immediately chartered to ready, willing and able NGOs on an experimental basis. It could prove to be a win-win solution for all. |
Against this backdrop of teaching-learning conditions in the 876,951 government schools countrywide going from bad to worse and intensifying mutual suspicion between government educators and NGOs (and private sector educationists), Dr. Samuel Paul, the promoter-director of the Bangalore-based Public Affairs Centre (estb.1994), a voluntary organisation which has won global plaudits for auditing government public services, suggests greater community involve-ment in the management and administration of government schools. "Contrary to popular opinion, there is an established tradition of government-NGO cooperation in parts of India. For instance in Kerala the great majority of primary and secondary schools were promoted by NGOs — particularly the church and religious trusts — and are aided in terms of salary and other grants by the state government. Ditto in the states of north-east India. These states provide a good model for greater cooperation between state and local governments and NGOs in providing children with acceptable quality school education. However some remote corners of the country are beyond the reach of government and NGOs. In such areas community involvement in education of children — with citizens’ committees supervising the process — is a promising alternative. For instance community managed schools have proved very successful in the remote areas of Mexico," says Paul.
Quite clearly the continuous exodus from government schools across the country into ill-equipped and often fraudulent private sector institutions necessitates urgent remedial action. Under the unacceptable status quo, the public is getting very little by way of return on the estimated Rs.80,000 crore invested annually on primary and secondary education by the Central, state and local governments. On the other hand several education-focussed NGOs such as Pratham, CRY, AID-India and Parikrma Humanity Foundation among others, have demonstrated excellent capability to provide free and/or low-cost high quality school education to socially disadvantaged and underprivileged children. The national interest demands that government and reputed education NGOs overcome their mutual antagonism and cooperate to improve teaching-learning standards in government schools, which are the only option of the great majority of contemporary India’s 450 million high-potential children.
Charter schools on the model being essayed in the US (see box) under which non-performing government schools could be leased to proven education NGOs with current per pupil funding, is one alternative. But there is no reason to believe that other alternatives cannot be devised by Indian academia and the intelligentsia. In any event government-NGO cooperation has become urgently necessary to revive and re-establish the country’s 876,000 plus government primary and secondary schools as genuine centres of learning providing the 200 million children who enroll in them annually a fair chance to step aboard the accelerating escalator of fast-track, shining India. With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Autar Nehru (Delhi); Ritsumita Biswas (Kolkata) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)