The tremendous enthusiasm generated within the primary-secondary schools community by the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) and the excitement generated by them to get on to the several scoreboards rating and ranking the country’s Top 1,000 schools in various categories — as also of K-12 institutions to advertise themselves in this landmark issue of the year — is proof that the virtue of institutional pride, the prerequisite of continuous improvement, is building up within the country’s schools. This was the original intent of the annual EWISR which is now the most eagerly awaited publication of the year. Given that there are 1.50 million schools and 320,000 private schools countrywide, featuring in the national Top 1,000 scoreboard is an achievement per se.
However, the interest and zeal provoked by the annual EWISR also invests your editors with the heavy responsibility of ensuring this annual survey and evaluation of the country’s top-ranked schools is conducted in as fair, objective and transparent a manner as possible. Therefore right from the start, we have been conducting EWISR in partnership with the highly-respected Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting and Research (C fore) which has been using the well-established practice of constituting a sample database of informed parents, educators, teachers — and this year for the first time senior school students — and interviewing them to rate schools on 14 parameters of education excellence (teachers competence, infrastructure, academic reputation, sports and co-curricular education, internationalism etc). Ten years on, it’s surprising this tried and tested institutional rankings methodology used by the world’s most respected institutional ranking agencies including the London-based QS and Times Higher Education, is still questioned by some educators and principals. Their suggestion that audit teams visit each institution and inspect it is ridiculously expensive and is one reason why the National Assessment and Accreditation Council hasn’t got off the ground.
Please also note that apart from national rankings, the annual EWISR also include state, city and cross-category parameter rankings. Therefore, institutional mining of the EWISR is likely to provide interesting data for all schools included in the Top 1,000.
A final word: the schools constituting the Top 1,000 are valuable institutions with some nurtured and developed for centuries. As such, they are institutions of national importance. Therefore, it’s in the national interest that their academic and administrative autonomy is respected. Of late, the Central and state governments — especially the latter — have exhibited a foolish tendency to recklessly interfere with their autonomy and fundamental freedoms. This temptation should be resisted — and opposed.