CONCERN FOR QUALITY in school education has become stronger than ever during the recent past, as a number of studies by government, NGOs, and the private sector have highlighted the low cognitive skills of Indian children. The 12th Plan document acknowledges the importance of learning achievements and has set the goal to “improve learning outcomes that are measured, monitored and reported independently at all levels of school education”. The Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) is also backing the drive to raise learning outcomes as evidenced by the emphasis given to measuring learning and ensuring good learning outcomes in its joint review mission report of July 2012.
While typically, the solutions for remedying low achievement and improving education quality involve increasing schools’ physical resources, teacher-pupil ratios, teacher certification and remuneration, the failure of such inputs-based solutions is well-documented worldwide. Most contemporary literature based on global best-practices suggests that reform of incentive and accountability structures in school systems is the best way to improve institutional effort and student learning outcomes.
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One powerful way of improving learning outcomes is by increasing the information flow to parents and communities about the learning attainments of their children, which will enable the former to hold teachers/schools accountable. In addition, sharing information with parents and communities about school performance also introduces an element of institutional competition which can stimulate greater efforts to improve teaching-learning standards.
Students’ learning outcomes vary greatly from school to school. However, in the absence of institutional information about schools’ performance, parents are left to judge the quality of schools on the basis of the size of school grounds, infrastructure, reported use of technology, availability of language and math labs, etc, which are inadequate and sometimes misleading indicators of school quality. Institutional opacity prevents parents from making inter-school comparisons and informed school choices.
The Indian secondary examination system is exclusively focused on testing the eligibility of students for undergraduate education. Noticeably missing is the use of examination data to identify high and low-performing schools, geographical regions and socio-economic groups. This leads to inefficient decision making and hinders remedial action in specific schools, regions or socio-economic groups. The magnitude of a problem needs to be measured before it can be solved. Similarly, unless there’s reliable evidence to prove how every school is performing academically relative to its peers, their managements have little incentive to improve teaching-learning standards.
A very simple ‘information liberalisation’ option is regular release of rankings of schools, based on the performance of their students in annual board examinations. Currently, parents choose schools for their children purely on the basis of perception, or at best, perceptual rankings which don’t capture the reality of actual academic performance. The advantage of publishing detailed information about the relative performance of students of every school is that it makes objective performance data of all schools available, which is surely better than perceptual information.
Several countries have been publishing school performance data for decades. The history of the liberalisation of factual data relating to the academic performance of every school in the UK indicates that initially only the press published rankings in the form of school league tables. However, from the mid-1990s onward, the UK government’s ministry of education publishes its own league tables which allow parents, students and managements to rank schools on several parameters.
However, this official initiative was not universally welcomed and in 2001, school academic performance league tables were abolished in Wales (one of the four major autonomous regions of the UK). A couple of years after publication of league tables was banned, the performance of students in formerly lower ranked schools dropped dramatically, even though the top 25 percent of schools continued to perform very well. Thus abolition of school rankings led to a significant increase in inequality between the best and worst performing schools. Several studies indicate that lack of pressure on poorly performing schools has made them unaccountable for poor learning outcomes.
Similarly, in the United States, publication of assessment/performance data by schools is an essential requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act, 2001. Research studies indicate that comparison of tests data across schools has made them more accountable. Chronically under-performing schools suffer government funding cuts and other impositions. The Act requires states and school districts to provide information to parents about the adequate yearly progress (AYP) of all schools in their neighbourhood, which is a measure of how a public school or school district is performing in standardised tests.
The main resistance to publication of school league tables comes from teacher unions. In Australia for instance, teachers complain that league tables are unreliable indicators of school quality, that they harm education rather than improve it and that publication leads to greater social segregation. But while it’s true that socio-economic backgrounds of students influence school rankings enabling wealthy and well-endowed schools to top league tables, greater public scrutiny also generates pressure on low performing schools to improve. And, as was demonstrated in the Welsh example discussed above, banning the publication of school league tables can dramatically depress students’ achievement levels in low performing schools.
The most reputed league tables of schools in India are published annually by EducationWorld magazine in partnership with C fore. These tables are compiled on the basis of perception scores awarded by a sample of educational stakeholders, mainly school principals, teachers and parents on several parameters including academic reputation, teacher quality, co-curricular education, infrastructure, etc. On the basis of subjective perception-based scores, schools are ranked in several categories — day, boarding, co-ed, single-sex, etc.
However, an analysis of 96 schools affiliated with the Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) confirms what has been anecdotally suspected: there is poor correlation between the perceptions-based ‘academic reputation’ scores and the actual academic performance of students of top-ranked schools in class XII board examinations. The co-efficient between perceptual scores and the mean actual academic score is only 0.58, indicating that perceptual scores substantially fail to indicate the underlying reality. This strengthens the case for publishing objective school rankings based on actual exam performance data.
A similar analysis of the perceived academic scores and factual academic data for CBSE schools resulted in a correlation coefficient of 0.72, i.e. the correlation is only moderate, and not accurate enough for parents to base critical decisions on, when it comes to choosing a school.
Of course, while we can compare school rankings based on subjectively rated academic reputation and objective rankings based on schools’ actual academic performance in board exams, we cannot make such a comparison in non-academic dimensions such as extra-curricular activities, global exposure, infrastructure, quality of teaching faculty, community service, etc. included in the EducationWorld School Rankings as hard data is unavailable and almost impossible to access.
Therefore, education policy formulators and the academic community including the CBSE, CISCE and state examination boards, need to seriously consider publishing factual data relating to the actual performance of schools in board examinations. By doing this, India will join the growing number of countries which compile and disseminate information on schools’ academic results, enabling parents to choose the best schools for their children.
(Geeta Kingdon is chair of education economics and international development, Institute of Education, University of London, and Prashant Bhattacharji is a data scientist at the Hyderabad-based Interviewstreet)