Quality of Education in Government Schools: Thinking Beyond Government

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.