Amarendra Das wrote a post on
declining quality of education in government schools. Its a great article. I
mostly agree with him. Coincidentally, 10 months ago, i was analysing state
government FINANCE ACCOUNTS data at NIPFP. I was surprised to see Odisha
government is running a NEGATIVE FISCAL DEFICIT since FY 2005-06 continuously! Then
in March/April we got shocking news that teachers on strike in front of the Odisha
VIDHAN SABHA for a higher salary were beaten up and one died. It led me to ask
why the hell Odisha government is not filling up its teacher vacancies when it
is taxing more than it spends. So, i initiated a discussion with Pratap
Mohanty, Jajati Parida, Sivananda Nayak in Delhi about using fiscal surplus to
fill up the vacant posts and stopping the practice of hiring Para-teachers.
Well, we could not reach a decision. I am glad that he also argues in that
line. I believe this argument has to be effectively pushed up so that the
teachers are aware of this and hence, they can better debate with the state
government.
Well, coming back to the
issue i found his central thesis is that there is acute shortage of teachers in
Odisha and hence, it affects quality of education. Since, the state government does
not fill the sanctioned teacher posts, the ultimate blame goes to the state government.
Yes, you are mostly right. However, he
did not talk about quality of teachers and how it affects teaching and quality
of education. Don’t you think teachers have fair responsibility in the quality degradation
in our government schools? Having undergone B.Ed training I will try to figure
out as to where the problem lies. Nonetheless, your points still remain valid.
Shortage of teachers
imposes three problems:
(1) Per-capita
student attention reduces.
(2) Per-capita
teacher responsibility rises:
(a)
Other government responsibilities: Mid-day meal schemes, survey of BPL
households, Census, Voter card, PDS, and things like that. Fewer teachers mean
more responsibility on these teachers.
(b)
Subject substitution rises: That is, a
history teacher will be forced to teach math and a math teacher will be asked
to teach language subject as if teaching language is the easiest thing in this
world! We know this is actually bad.
Why? Neither do they have expertise on other subjects nor do they have
that much enthusiasm and nor interest to teach other subjects. In the end, the
students suffer.
My take is on this issue is the following.
1.
We
need to properly teach students at teacher training schools (i.e., B.Ed, and
C.T. colleges). For example, students are asked to take two optional subjects
in their B.Ed training. (Honestly, i don’t know why. My guess is that these two
subjects they will be teaching throughout their career). In my B.Ed course i
opted for Geography and English. See none of these subjects are my core
subjects. I have studied economics and Pol. Science. How will i teach geography
and English? Well, if i devote special attention to it, if i arouse interest in
it and if i am given well training at the training school, then i can teach
these subjects with ease and more importantly, make it interesting. But the
risk is that i know that once i become a sarkari teacher, nobody can throw
away from my job irrespective of my performance as a teacher. If this is true,
what guarantee is there that i will learn geography and English properly and
teach students well?
This takes me to ask this question: are the instructors at
training schools well equipped to teach different school subjects like
geography, English, and so on? I don’t know. My personal experience suggests that
we have not-so-good instructors. Yes, there are good instructors to teach core
subjects in Education training like philosophy, psychology, and evaluation; and
measurement and so on. Hence, i think we need to hire instructors at training
schools who have done at least MA and NET in school subjects. That is, one must
have at least MA and NET in geography to be a geography instructor at training
schools.
The other important thing is that we need to change the
current policy of B.Ed and CT selection process. In our time the selection is
based on upon the career marks. The current process is entrance tests. My own
view is this: if a training school has 100 seats, it must select students from
all school subjects like science, math, English, language, geography and
history. So, a history student with a formal training will definitely teach history
better in school.
2.
My
second point is that our teachers need to change the way they teach, and their
approach to teaching and curriculum need an overhaul change. Teachers need to
be accountable and we need an outcome oriented education system.
3.
One
standard argument given is that teachers get low salary; hence, they don’t have
adequate incentive to teach properly. And this makes them to look for other
income earning avenues. Yes, this argument is fairly true. A higher salary
would attract best students.
But if that argument is true,
will we find government schools having all sanctioned teachers and getting
full-scale salary to perform better than schools NOT having all sanctioned teachers and para-teachers? We can test
this hypothesis. But my question is don’t they know before joining the teaching
job that they would receive a meagre salary? Why do they have to invoke this
low salary when asked about their sub-par teaching performance? To me this
makes no sense.
4.
Sometimes government appoints primary teachers
before election (to use as a vote bank) and (Political) party people having
dubious education is given appointment. Once they join as teacher, they are
sent to training schools. In this case, how can we expect quality education?
5.
And lastly, it is a sad development that we
now observe both fiscal surplus and para-teachers exist at the same time. There is no valid reason for the
Odisha government to hire para-teachers when it is running surplus budget.
In conclusion i would say both Odisha governments and
school teachers need do a lot more thing. Odisha government needs to fill up
vacancy posts and for teachers, they need to change the way they teach, the way
they are trained and the approach to teaching need an overhaul change. Teachers
need to be accountable and we need an outcome oriented education.
