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The current education landscape in India is characterised by nearly universal enrolment in elementary education (96 percent) on the positive side. But on the negative side, Indian primaries are notorious for the pitiably poor learning outcomes of millions of children, as testified by their performance in a PISA test of OECD; in tests administered by Pratham for its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) and the National Achievement Survey of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
I believe the prime explanation for poor primary education outcomes is continuous neglect of evidence-based policy formulation. In good education systems defined by real learning outcomes, education policy is not made on hunches, ideology or political expediency but on the basis of evidence of what works. Decision-makers evaluate evidence relating to the impact of differing policy interventions or commission evidence collection and assessment on the impact of particular interventions through pilot studies before deciding whether to scale up.
While poor quality schooling isn’t life threatening, it seriously affects the quality of life and even the longevity of children. Yet in most developing countries, ministers and bureaucrats cavalierly formulate education policies without evaluating evidence. This amateurish attitude towards policy formulation needs to urgently change.
Evidence can be used in several ways to improve the quality of primary-secondary education. First, by making school-leaving board exam results publicly available. This inevitably improves secondary education quality because parents can avoid badly performing schools. In turn, there’s pressure on laggard schools to improve their teaching-learning systems and outcomes to attract students/fun-ding. Publication of schools’ board exam results in the US and UK confirms the correlation between availability of school performance results and the quality of education they dispense. While after many mature debates OECD countries have chosen to publish school rankings for parental information, none of India’s school exam boards — CBSE, CISCE or the state boards — publish whole school performance results.
The quality of education delivered by schools can also be assessed by evaluating teacher competence. Unfortunately — perhaps deliberately — there’s rarely any meaningful testing of teachers in India. However, the SchoolTELLS survey (2008) which tested 600 teachers in 160 rural primaries in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar indicates an alarming deficiency of subject-matter knowledge, literacy and numeracy among class III-V teachers. A Unicef-funded study, Inside Classrooms (2011) corroborates the low teacher competence evidence of the SchoolTELLS survey in an additional five Indian states. It’s likely the evidence offered by these two studies prompted the Central government’s policy decision to introduce the mandatory Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) in 2012. Since then TET results have confirmed abysmal teacher competence unearthed by the SchoolTELLS and Unicef studies. Barely 4 percent of teachers pass TET in most states across India.
Nevertheless the performance of teachers in each TET paper is valuable but largely unused evidence. TET results could be but have not been utilised for diagnosing shortfalls in teachers’ knowledge and devising training programmes. While the CBSE board is to be congratulated for moving in this direction and sharing the Central TET data with the Centre for Assessment, Evaluation and Research (CAER) for analysis and diagnosis, CAER’s findings have not been shared publicly or used to design teacher training courses.
Fortunately — even if belatedly — there’s growing interest in evidence-based education policy formulation in latter-day India. The Delhi-based NCERT recently conducted a National Achievement Survey of class V pupils using ‘item response’ theory for the first time. Educational data is also becoming more easily available in India, thanks to the District Information System for Education (DISE) and Secondary Education Management Information System (SEMIS) of NUEPA, and the heroic primary learning outcomes data published by Pratham in its Annual Status of Education Report. Moreover, the idea of evidence-based policy formulation has received a great fillip from the Union human resources development ministry’s approval of the recommendations of the Panchpakesan Committee to establish a National Centre for Assessment and Evaluation.
While there are encouraging signs of the emergence of evidence-based policy formulation in K-12 education in India, attention also needs to be paid to developing decision-makers’ capability to separate good evidence from the bad and importantly, to appreciate the difference between correlation and causation. Moreover, it’s critical to underscore that availability of good evidence is insufficient. Education decision makers have to develop the will to collate as well as evaluate evidence. For this, they need to be financially independent, free from political interference, and empowered to overrule bureaucratic objections impeding rational, evidence-based policy formulation.
(Dr. Geeta Kingdon is chair of education economics and international development at the Institute of Education, University of London)