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Following the proclaimed success of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘education for all’) primary education programme introduced in 1999, the government of India has recently set its sights on rapidly expanding — indeed universalising — secondary education under its Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) programme. Given the nation’s massive population of 480 million children below age 18, this objective is hugely ambitious and needs rapid expansion of the government and private school system countrywide.
However, instead of a facilitative and enabling regulatory system, private secondary school promoters and managements continue to be confronted with formidable policy obstacles including obtaining recognition and ‘no objection certificates’ (NOCs) from state governments, and securing affiliation with one or more of India’s 34 school-leaving examination boards.
Admittedly, the norms and conditions governing recognition, NOC and affiliation are well-meant and were formulated to ensure minimum standards in school education. But unfortunately subsequent and independent legislation has made it almost impossible for school mana-gements to qualify for recognition and NOCs. For instance in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state (200 million) — a precondition of government recognition of a newly promoted private school is that it must pay teachers government-presc-ribed salaries. However, the state government’s rules formulated under the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, also mandate that private schools cannot increase tuition fees by more than 10 percent in three years. Against this, the dearness allowance of government employees (including teachers) rises by more than 12-14 percent annually. Therefore these contradictory rules render private schools financially unviable ab initio.
Secondly, the most fundamental problem with the norms and conditions stipulated by the RTE Act is that they are based on a flawed idea of what constitutes quality in education. Most of the norms and conditions stipulated by s. 19 of the Act relate to inputs into schooling such as insistence on teachers with pre-service teacher training; maximum prescribed pupil-teacher ratios (e.g. 30:1); owned rather than rented buildings with playground; and payment of government-prescribed salaries to teachers.
Internationally available — and scanty Indian — research indicates there’s no correlation between the prescribed inputs and student achievement or learning outcomes. Therefore the RTE Act compels schools to invest in resources and inputs that have no demonstrated relationship with schooling quality.
Against this backdrop it would be socially beneficial to review the mandatory requirement that all teachers should have pre-service teacher training degrees/diplomas. Most exam boards insist that only schools in which all teachers have already completed B.Ed degrees will be granted affiliation. It’s not enough for a school to show that its teachers are currently enrolled in B.Ed programmes to be completed within two years. Consequently, the promotion of new and expansion of existing schools is constrained by this requirement.
Surely, the critical qualification required of a teacher should be her competence to teach her subject in terms of wide subject knowledge. Moreover in English-medium schools, it is an irreducible requirement that teachers are able to speak and write English. But neither of these two basic requirements is obligatory under current government policy. A B.Ed degree in any language is the sole qualification required.
It is baffling why neither the Union HRD ministry nor state education ministries are aware that the pre-service teacher training qualification requirement virtually rules out multiplication of secondary schools in states such as Bihar, which suffer severe shortages of B.Ed graduates. This insistence that schools employ only trained teachers confers over-riding importance to the training criterion above other qualifications which many schools consider more important for dispensation of quality education — subject knowledge and (in English-medium schools) English proficiency.
In some states (UP, Rajasthan) there has been rapid, unchecked mushrooming of unregulated private teacher training colleges which award B.Ed degrees to barely literate graduates. Little wonder the performance of duly qualified teachers in the new TET (teacher eligibility test) introduced in 2011, has been so poor, with pass percentages a mere 0.3 to 6 percent in states countrywide. That B.Ed postgrads are so ill-equipped to teach is conclusive proof that the degree is no indicator of teacher quality. In any event, international and domestic research shows no positive relationship between teacher training and student achievement.
Given the pathetic condition of the country’s 12,689 private and 1,178 government teacher training colleges, and the rock-bottom quality of training programmes that most of them offer, attainment of the official goal of equipping teachers with pre-service training qualifications is unlikely to serve any purpose.
(Dr. Geeta Kingdon is chair of education economics and international development at the Institute of Education, University of London)