From Schooling Access to Student Outcomes in India

 Indian has made impressive strides in expanding access to basic education,particularly in increasing enrollment of girls and members of the disadvantaged communities.In 2001, the Government of India launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhyan (SSA or education for all) to achieve universal primary education. In 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education (RTE) Act, guaranteeing free and compulsory education for all children between ages 6-11. The RTE sets minimum school infrastructure standards (e.g., building, library, toilets, and kitchen), pupil-teacher ratios, and teacher hours, in all of which there has been notable progress.

 Under SSA, the enrolment of children from SC and Muslim communities has increased substantially.

Student Achievement in India is low (WB Report, 2014). On a test of reading comprehension administered to grade 5 students across the country, only 46% of students were correctly able to identify the cause of an event. Only a third of students could compute the difference between two decimal numbers. (NCERT 2011). Another recent survey found that about 43% of grade 8 students could not solve a simple division problem. Even recognition of two-digit numbers, supposed to be taught in grade 2, tends to be achieved only by grade 4 or 5 (ASER-India 2011).

Challenge: While India has largely been successful in its goal to expand educational opportunities to all, the promise to provide quality education is yet an unfinished agenda. The quality of learning outcomes depends on how the technical inputs are used, how (and how regularly) classroom instruction is transacted, and whether learning outcomes are continually monitored to improve efficiency and modify processes. The overarching system of governance and accountability in the educational sector is also key; additional technical inputs can improve learning outcomes on a sustained basis only if educational authorities, schools, and teachers are accountable—and responsive— to student needs. For instance, no amount of textbooks and teaching materials will improve learning outcomes if teachers are frequently absent or disengaged.

FROM ACCESS TO LEARNING: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES AHEAD

Education attainment will remain an incomplete goal if not substantiated with learning of basic knowledge and skills. Improving learning outcomes should therefore be a key priority of education policy in India.

Given the constraints of limited resources and competing interests, Education planners face a choice between focusing on either improved access or learning gains. Expanding access gives a more positive feedback as it feeds the political mandate through declarations of achievements and the consumers desire to enjoy more tangible benefits. However, the goal of achieving growth and alleviating poverty will not be achieved unless the student gains the skills required for contributing to that growth. This requires:

• Explicit planning for and high political commitment to improved learning outcomes. This requires strong leadership and political skill in building the consensus needed to overcome resistance and inertia.

• Realistic pace of expansion. Big bang approaches to expansion can overwhelm education systems. India has expanded gradually, using targeted incentives to support groups for whom expenses represent serious constraints.

• Improvement in education system efficiency. This increases the availability of resources within any given budget envelope

• More accountability through monitoring systems to analyse results of schemes. School Committees can oversee and report the use of funds and quality improvement.

2. Effective School and classroom inputs

3. Children inside the school and are still excluded

 Experiences of children inside school, attending classes and getting promoted in the educational ladder, do not necessarily translate into equal participation in the education process on their part. This can be seen in two ways: children attend school but are still not learning (as the Annual Status of Education Research, ASER reports have been indicating). Another meaning is the exclusion of knowledge, perspectives and worldviews and misrepresentation or sometimes distortion of experiences of children and their families in the curriculum, syllabus and most importantly textbooks studies in classrooms. 

Children from poor families or disadvantaged communities mostly feel disassociated with what they are taught in school. Their real lives and experiences are not reflected in the texts they read. The objective behind the adoption of a common curriculum for the Nation was to promote National social cohesiveness. However, different regions and communities have unique history and life experience.

Possible Interventions:

 Since education is a concurrent subject, the States and local communities can add subjects that is closer to their heritage. Eg. Students from India’s periphery states (e.g. North East) generally complain about the exclusion of their struggle during the National Movement in the History Textbooks provided by NCERT. This may  leave them feeling excluded from the education system. Need to make school experience relevant and more representative.

4. Learning Gap

Learning gaps exist at the point of entry into the school system and grow over time. The biggest deficiency with our school education system is its one-size-fits-all approach. Classroom instruction is designed to cover a prescribed syllabus in a single-track mode to all students in a class, overlooking the wide variations in learning levels among students. Thus, those students who are lagging behind the prescribed syllabus are left stranded with no recourse. The learning gap widens with each year. These students become increasingly passive spectators and disinterested in class and finally drop-out thus threaten the goal of equity in education. Disparities in learning outcomes are especially pronounced depending on urban-rural residence and geographic location. Typically achievement in urban areas is typically higher than in rural areas, with the divide being wider in reading and languages than in mathematics.

Possible Interventions:

• Remedial Courses
• universalisation of Early Childhood Educatiion centres. ECE learning provides a powerful head start for students in the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills critical in influencing later day outcomes.
• Use of digital technology to improve effective teaching and learning

5. Improving Teaching Quality

•   Clear and transparent standards from the time of recruitment on through deployment and transfers.
•    Pre-service and in-service training 
• Uniform Pay Structure vs Performance- based pay- requires more study

6. Leveraging the contribution of the private sector, both for-profit and NGO-run schools, is crucial for meeting the double challenge of improved access and quality in the face of capacity and resource constraints. Easing barriers to entry, and carefully designing PPPs.

7.  Decentralisation : Strengthening and promoting community participation via school committees by providing them school-related information to the community. The role and scope of SMCs needs to be increased to improve education quality.

8. Enhanced assessment systems are necessary to monitor progress in learning outcomes and improvements in schooling quality over time. Without knowing how students are performing, it is difficult to tell which policies are working or when new ones are needed. There is an urgent need for an enabling environment for assessment, to align assessment activities with other aspects of the education system, to improve the technical quality of the instruments being employed, and to use assessment results in making education policy decisions to improve quality.