After prolonged hesitation, on September 15 the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations (MSCE) declared that it “proposes” to conduct a statewide Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), as mandated by s.23 (1) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, in November. Maharashtra (pop.112 million) is among the last states to implement TET (conducted nationwide in 2011).
Conducting TET is the prerequisite of raising teaching-learning standards because Maharashtra lacks an independent testing framework to judge the quality of the 20,000 teachers absorbed annually in its government and aided schools, or to assess the capability of the 700,000 already teaching in govern-ment and aided schools. In June, the state government had given in-principle approval, making TET clearance a precondition of recruitment into public and private schools. The proposal — still pending Cabinet approval — was strongly resisted for the past two years by powerful teachers’ unions supported by several heavyweight politicians who run schools and colleges in the state, under the cover of trusts and societies.
Back in 2010 shortly after the RTE Act became operational, the Delhi-based National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) decreed a TET with a minimum score of 60 percent as qualification for teachers in elementary education (class I-VIII). Previously teachers needed to clear the untesting B.Ed (for teaching classes V-XII) and diploma in education (D.Ed) or diploma in teacher education D.Ted (for teaching classes I-VII). Currently 362 teacher training colleges offer the one-year B.Ed programme and 1,082 offer the two-year D.Ed programme in situ or by way of correspondence courses.
“B.Ed is perhaps the only post-graduate study programme which accepts 45 percent in graduation. All other postgrad programmes mandate 55 percent. The B.Ed syllabus and curri-culums are age-old, of a mere one year’s duration, and the exam is easy to clear. Therefore the more rigorous TET which tests subject knowledge along with pedagogy is welcome. However it’s important to also improve the quality of teacher training colleges and continually assess teachers,” says Dr. Raman-deep Sachdeva, an alumna of Punjab University and Institute for Technology and Management (ITM), Mumbai and currently principal (B.Ed) of the SL Women’s College of Education, Mum-bai, affiliated with SNDT University.
Teacher training colleges offering the two-year D.Ed programme are not exemplars of quality education either, with NCTE having indiscriminately issued licences to D.Ed teacher training institutes. “As against a demand of 15,000 teachers annually, Maharashtra has a capacity of 75,000. Several D.Ed institutes had to be shut down due to lack of applicants. We expect 50 percent of D.Ed colleges (500-600) to shut down in the coming months,” says N.K. Jarag, director of the Maharashtra State Council of Education Research & Training (MSCERT).
Teachers’ resistance to TET designed to establish a national benchmark of teacher quality in the recruitment proc-ess and to evaluate serving teachers within two years, is hardly surprising. Pass percentages in TET conducted across states vary between 1-10 percent. Moreover, last year in the Central TET (conducted by CBSE), 99 percent of teachers who wrote the exam failed.
In 2012, the Justice Verma Commission was appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the causes of the poor quality of education dispensed by teacher training colleges in the state. Shockingly only 44 of 291 D.Ed colleges, approved by NCTE during the past four years, were found adhering to norms prescribed by the council. In its report, the commission observed: “... the bulk of candidates who take the TET do not qualify to be recruited despite having a professional degree in teaching. This reflects two things: one, the poor quality of pre-service education progr-ammes and two, poor subject knowledge of candidates refl-ecting the poor quality of general education. It could be argued that the need for conducting TET may not have arisen if a fairly rigorous system of making admission to teacher education courses had been followed... It may therefore be important to strategise the use of TET to augment teacher quality with serious attempts at teacher education reforms.”
Against this backdrop it is imperative that the parents community insists that TET, which is the consequence of unchecked corruption and sliding standards in teacher education, is held as per schedule in November. The future of Maharashtra’s 20 million children depends on it.
Sunayana Nair (Mumbai)