More than three decades of research on the effects of instruction and schooling on student achievement are creating a new science of education. Starting in 1998 McRel began synthesising this growing body of research through meta-analyses of research on student characteristics and teacher and school practices associated with school effectiveness. The results of The first two meta-analyses have provided practitioners with specific guidance on the curricular, instructional and school practices that when applied appropriately can result in increased student achievement.

Tim Waters, Robert J Marzano and Brian Mc Nulty

For more click here

The `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009′ (RTE Act) came into effect today, with much fanfare and an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In understanding the debates about this Act, a little background knowledge is required. Hence, in this self-contained 1500-word blog post, I start with a historical narrative, outline key features of the Act, describe its serious flaws, and suggest ways to address them.

Historical narrative

After independence, Article 45 under the newly framed Constitution stated that the state shall endeavor to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.

As is evident, even after 60 years, universal elementary education remains a distant dream. Despite high enrolment rates of approximately 95% as per the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2009), 52.8% of children studying in 5th grade lack the reading skills expected at 2nd grade. Free and compulsory elementary education was made a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution in December 2002, by the 86th Amendment. In translating this into action, the `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill’ was drafted in 2005. This was revised and became an Act in August 2009, but was not notified for roughly 7 months.

The reasons for delay in notification can be mostly attributed to unresolved financial negotiations between the National University of Education Planning and Administration, NUEPA, which has been responsible for estimating RTE funds and the Planning Commission and Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD). From an estimate of an additional Rs.3.2 trillion to Rs.4.4 trillion for the implementation of RTE Draft Bill 2005 over 6 years (Central Advisory Board of Education, CABE) the figure finally set by NUEPA now stands at a much reduced Rs.1.7 trillion over the coming 5 years. For a frame of reference, Rs.1 trillion is 1.8% of one year’s GDP.

Most education experts agree that this amount will be insufficient. Since education falls under the concurrent list of the Constitution, financial negotiations were also undertaken between Central and State authorities to agree on sharing of expenses. This has been agreed at 35:65 between States and Centre, though state governments continue to argue that their share should be lower.

Overview of the Act

The RTE Act is a detailed and comprehensive piece of legislation which includes provisions related to schools, teachers, curriculum, evaluation, access and specific division of duties and responsibilities of different stakeholders. Key features of the Act include:

1. Every child from 6 to 14 years of age has a right to free and compulsory education in a neighborhood school till completion of elementary education.
2. Private schools must take in a quarter of their class strength from `weaker sections and disadvantaged groups’, sponsored by the government.
3. All schools except private unaided schools are to be managed by School Management Committees with 75 per cent parents and guardians as members.
4. All schools except government schools are required to be recognized by meeting specified norms and standards within 3 years to avoid closure.

On the basis of this Act, the government has framed subordinate legislation called model rules as guidelines to states for the implementation of the Act.

A critique

The RTE Act has been criticised by a diverse array of voices, including some of the best economists. MHRD was perhaps keen to achieve this legislation in the first 100 days of the second term of the UPA, and chose to ignore many important difficulties of the Act. The most important difficulties are:

Inputs and Outcomes

The Act is excessively input-focused rather than outcomes-oriented. Even though better school facilities, books, uniforms and better qualified teachers are important, their significance in the Act has been overestimated in the light of inefficient, corrupt and unaccountable institutions of education provision.

School Recognition

The Act unfairly penalises private unrecognised schools for their payment of market wages for teachers rather than elevated civil service wages. It also penalises private schools for lacking the infrastructural facilities defined under a Schedule under the Act. These schools, which are extremely cost efficient, operate mostly in rural areas or urban slums, and provide essential educational services to the poor. Independent studies by Geeta Kingdon, James Tooley and ASER 2009 suggest that these schools provide similar if not better teaching services when compared to government schools, while spending a much smaller amount. However, the Act requires government action to shut down these schools over the coming three years. A better alternative would have been to find mechanisms through which public resources could have been infused into these schools. The exemption from these same recognition requirements for government schools is the case of double standards — with the public sector being exempted from the same `requirements’.

School Management Committees (SMCs)

By the Act, SMCs are to comprise of mostly parents, and are to be responsible for planning and managing the operations of government and aided schools. SMCs will help increase the accountability of government schools, but SMCs for government schools need to be given greater powers over evaluation of teacher competencies and students learning assessment. Members of SMCs are required to volunteer their time and effort. This is an onerous burden for hte poor. Payment of some compensation to members of SMCs could help increase the time and focus upon these. Turning to private but `aided’ schools, the new role of SMCs for private `aided’ schools will lead to a breakdown of the existing management structures.

Teachers

Teachers are the cornerstone of good quality education and need to be paid market-driven compensation. But the government has gone too far by requiring high teacher salaries averaging close to Rs.20,000 per month. These wages are clearly out of line, when compared with the market wage of a teacher, for most schools in most locations in the country. A better mechanism would have involved schools being allowed to design their own teacher salary packages and having autonomy to manage teachers. A major problem in India is the lack of incentive faced by teachers either in terms of carrot or stick. In the RTE Act, proper disciplinary channels for teachers have not been defined. Such disciplinary action is a must given that an average of 25 percent teachers are absent from schools at any given point and almost half of those who are present are not engaged in teaching activity. School Management Committees need to be given this power to allow speedy disciplinary action at the local level. Performance based pay scales need to be considered as a way to improve teaching.

25% reservation in private schools

The Act and the Rules require all private schools (whether aided or not) to reserve at least 25% of their seats for economically weaker and socially disadvantaged sections in the entry level class. These students will not pay tuition fees. Private schools will receive reimbursements from the government calculated on the basis of per-child expenditure in government schools. Greater clarity for successful implementation is needed on:

• How will `weaker and disadvantaged sections’ be defined and verified?
• How will the government select these students for entry level class?
• Would the admission lottery be conducted by neighbourhood or by entire village/town/city? How would the supply-demand gaps in each neighbourhood be addressed?
• What will be the mechanism for reimbursement to private schools?
• How will the government monitor the whole process? What type of external vigilance/social audit would be allowed/encouraged on the process?
• What would happen if some of these students need to change school in higher classes?

Moreover, the method for calculation of per-child reimbursement expenditure (which is to exclude capital cost estimates) will yield an inadequate resource flow to private schools. It will be tantamount to a tax on private schools. Private schools will endup charging more to the 75% of students – who are paying tuitions – to make space for the 25% of students they are forced to take. This will drive up tuition fees for private schools (while government schools continue to be taxpayer funded and essentially free).

Reimbursement calculations should include capital as well recurring costs incurred by the government.

By dictating the terms of payment, the government has reserved the right to fix its own price, which makes private unaided schools resent this imposition of a flat price. A graded system for reimbursement would work better, where schools are grouped — based on infrastructure, academic outcomes and other quality indicators — into different categories, which would then determine their reimbursement.

What is to be done?

The RTE Act has been passed; the Model Rules have been released; financial closure appears in hand. Does this mean the policy process is now impervious to change? Even today, much can be achieved through a sustained engagement with this problem.

Drafting of State Rules

Even though state rules are likely to be on the same lines as the model rules, these rules are still to be drafted by state level authorities keeping in mind contextual requirements. Advocacy on the flaws of the Central arrangements, and partnerships with state education departments, could yield improvements in atleast some States. Examples of critical changes which state governments should consider are: giving SMCs greater disciplinary power over teachers and responsibility of students’ learning assessment, greater autonomy for schools to decide teacher salaries and increased clarity in the implementation strategy for 25% reservations. If even a few States are able to break away from the flaws of the Central arrangements, this would yield demonstration effects of the benefits from better policies.

Assisting private unrecognized schools

Since unrecognized schools could face closure in view of prescribed recognition standards within three years, we could find ways to support such schools to improve their facilities by resource support and providing linkages with financial institutions. Moreover, by instituting proper rating mechanisms wherein schools can be rated on the basis of infrastructure, learning achievements and other quality indicators, constructive competition can ensue.

Ensure proper implementation

Despite the flaws in the RTE Act, it is equally important for us to simultaneously ensure its proper implementation. Besides bringing about design changes, we as responsible civil society members need to make the government accountable through social audits, filing right to information applications and demanding our children’s right to quality elementary education. Moreover, it is likely that once the Act is notified, a number of different groups affected by this Act will challenge it in court. It is, therefore, critically important for us to follow such cases and where feasible provide support which addresses their concerns without jeopardizing the implementation of the Act.

Awareness

Most well-meaning legislations fail to make significant changes without proper awareness and grassroot pressure. Schools need to be made aware of provisions of the 25% reservations, the role of SMCs and the requirements under the Schedule. This can be undertaken through mass awareness programs as well as ensuring proper understanding by stakeholders responsible for its implementation.

Ecosystem creation for greater private involvement

Finally, along with ensuring implementation of the RTE Act which stipulates focused reforms in government schools and regulation for private schools, we need to broaden our vision so as to create an ecosystem conducive to spontaneous private involvement. The current licensing and regulatory restrictions in the education sector discourage well-intentioned `edupreneurs’ from opening more schools. Starting a school in Delhi, for instance, is a mind-numbing, expensive and time-consuming task which requires clearances from four different departments totaling more than 30 licenses. The need for deregulation is obvious.

Please support our efforts towards ensuring Right to Education of Choice through some of the activities suggested above. Join our RTE Coalition.

Parth Shah, Ajay Shah’s Blog, 1 April 2010

Education rules are evolving. The Right to Education Act comes into force on April 1, and a Bill to create a National Commission for Higher Education and Research has been proposed. The Cabinet cleared the Foreign Universities Bill as well as three other proposals that create a National Education Tribunal, curb false advertising and capitation fees, and mandate accreditation for higher education.

The flurry of legislation is a start but cannot be the end. Next, focus must be on motivating quality education. The challenge is that the education system is a ‘coping organisation’: outputs (teaching) and outcomes (education) are essentially invisible for managers. One can visit a classroom to observe teaching. But most teacher-student interaction takes place without external monitors. On the visit day, we can test children for knowledge but not for what their teachers taught them—the test cannot distinguish between pre-existing knowledge and the additional wisdom the school imparts. Signs of a failing education system are obvious: teacher absenteeism, student truancy, illiteracy, innumeracy. Marks of a successful education system show up over time and across a broad set of indicators.

Education systems around the world have grappled with the challenges of large-scale management of the invisible factors. Three categories of solutions have emerged, each of which India could exploit effectively. The first option is to professionalise education but leave schools and teachers more or less alone afterwards. India is following this preventative approach for the most part—the rules on the books for accrediting schools exclude potential failures but do little to motivate success.

Efforts to professionalise individuals in education are sporadic and somewhat misplaced. They leave loopholes for primary education teachers (where market discipline for schools and teachers is the least) but impose strict gates for leadership in higher education (where the pool of customers is more mobile, giving schools an incentive to police themselves). The proposed National Council for Higher Education and Research, for example, would determine who is eligible to be a vice-chancellor of a university or institution of national importance. The system seems to be set up for discretion: it provides for minimum qualifications, but gives no recourse for people with these qualifications who are rejected.

Testing outcomes is a second option. Tests run the risk of creating artificial targets for learning unless they are constantly evaluated for their ability to assess skills needed for an increasingly complex global context, but they are a good option for primary education. We can all agree that literacy and numeracy are essential skills. Testing on a large scale with some collection of student data could create the statistical power to separate school effects from student abilities and assess school, if not teacher, performance.

India is explicitly not doing this, at least as a matter of public policy. The RTE Act doesn’t even leave the question open; it states, “No child shall be required to pass any Board examination till completion of elementary education.” NGOs such as Pratham and Educational Initiatives are picking up the slack, but this is not a substitute for the resources that the public sector can mobilise.

The third option is market discipline. Parents are often the people with the best ability and the strongest incentives to observe the quality of education that their children are getting. Letting them choose which schools to support, converts this knowledge into performance pressure . Employers can also motivate performance indirectly if their hiring affects parents’ and pupils perceptions of school quality. In principle, this is the best of the lot: parents adjust the ‘test’ they apply to keep up with the times and the range of ‘evaluators’ ensures that multiple dimensions of education are valued. Incentives are aligned—parents, unlike regulators, have a stake in the outcome. Parental duty aside, children are often retirement plans.

Market discipline offers the most ground for India to gain by providing control, along with a voice, and reducing the information asymmetries that prevent parents from being effective monitors. Voice is present, control is not. The RTE Act includes parents on School Management Committees, but gives them no authority to do more than recommend changes. Parental intention is there, ability is sometimes not: India has changed fast and parents are not always able to monitor their child’s progress in reading, writing and English, let alone higher education. Parental oversight is likely to be weakest at the schools whose teaching determines inter-generational upward mobility, the schools we would most want to perform. Small steps such as requiring non-binding primary school testing and mandating that the data be shown to parents, could help reduce this generational gap. The move to curb false advertising in higher education will help support oversight, but requiring credible reporting of placement details and alumni trajectories to all prospective students will help reduce the quality mystery.

Improving the invisible is always a tall order, but ignoring it is worse.

Jessica Seddon Wallack, The Financial Express, 27 March 2010

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE Act) will be notified on April 1. The Act attempts to address the historical problem of continuing illiteracy as well as the lack of educational opportunities that persist for sections of our population even sixty years after adoption of the Indian constitution. The socio-political, legal and financial aspects of the Act have been much debated and its final form much critiqued. As we draw nearer its implementation stage, it is clear that this Act will change the educational landscape of the country. However, the specific educational steps needed to meet its wide-ranging provisions remain far from clear.

Taking the perspective of a non-profit institution with a commitment to quality education for urban and rural children, we indicate some likely pitfalls in the implementation of the RTE Act. We then make some suggestions on the possible roles that private schools may play in order to support the quality-related and egalitarian provisions of the RTE Act.

Some pitfalls of the RTE Act

In its barest outline, the RTE Act has three goals: 1) bringing children of marginalized sections of our society into the ambit of school education, 2) ensuring that all schools and their teachers meet certain specified norms, and 3) ensuring that all children receive schooling of reasonable quality, free from any form of discrimination.

While these goals may seem laudable in themselves, we believe that simply using the Act as a legal instrument to initiate action against institutions and/or individuals that are perceived as responsible for failure to implement provisions of the Act, will not really address the issues of illiteracy and lack of educational opportunity. A coercive approach might at most bring in children who are out of school into the school system. However, it cannot actually address the core issue of the lack of meaningful learning in current forms of schooling across the country.

Our experience as an NGO that has actively participated in bridge-school programmes, intended to support and bring ‘drop-out’ children back into government schools, showed us that the issue is more of ‘push out’ rather than ‘drop out’. The children liked being part of this learning programme, since they were well looked after and the pedagogy was appropriately designed. However, most of the children who returned to mainstream government schools disappeared again after a few weeks or months. This was clearly due to the type of experience these children actually faced in regular schools, whose well-known features are: a) a lack of relevance of the curriculum to children’s experiences and needs b) rote-driven textbook-centred teaching c) lack of support as well as motivation among teachers to address the specific situation of diverse kinds of children. While these issues are well known and it is often acknowledged that a multi-dimensional approach is required to address them, the lines of solutions implied in the RTE Act are limited to: a) Requiring greater parent and local body representation in school managing committees b) Providing local authorities with the power and responsibility to ensure compliance of schools with specified norms c) Having many more trained teachers.

In our view, these measures would at best succeed in strengthening schooling that is ‘more of the same kind’. While parents and local bodies can ensure that teachers and students do attend school and are doing something in the classrooms, they cannot address the core problems of lack of motivation on the part of both teachers and children, or the perceptions that teaching is a chore and learning in school is a painful, ritualistic exercise. Children, from a very young age, are forced to sit for hours and made to listen to uninspiring textbook lessons from teachers, who in turn are often bored by carrying on with the same chore day after day. This situation prevails not only in a large numbers of government schools, but also in a wide spectrum of private schools that have sprung up in cities, towns and semi-urban areas all over the country.

Whereas the RTE Act emphasizes the need for child-friendly approaches, very little mention has been made of the need for having teacher-friendly and teacher-initiated processes in the school system. One cannot see how the former is possible without the latter. Our current system of academic administration remains heavily top-down and vertically organized, with very little scope for teacher participation or initiative.

The mechanism of monitoring relies heavily on inspections, assessments and punishments, with very little guidance, support and nurturing of teachers. We believe these are some of the major reasons for teachers becoming de-motivated and lacking interest in teaching. Therefore, even as more children are brought into the schooling system through the RTE Act, unless we bring in significant changes in our current approach to both children’s and teachers’ educational needs, its impact will remain limited. We will have more children going to school without the commensurate increase in either literacy or any other form of educational attainment.

It is here that NGOs and private schools with a good track record in education could be invited to play a role in catalysing shifts in government as well as private schools. We outline below some thoughts on the possible roles of private schools.

Role of Private Schools

At the outset, it needs to be recognized that the term ‘private schools’ is a ‘catch-all’ label that covers a wide variety of institutions. The range includes: a) International schools (with IB or Cambridge curriculum) b) Older established ‘public schools’ (many of them residential) c) Small and large urban schools with several branches d) Schools run by religious charitable trusts e) Private ‘ English-medium’ schools that have mushroomed in every part of the country f) Alternative schools that are based on holistic educational philosophies g) Innovative schools run by NGOs.

It would be counter-productive to make rules that deal with all these types of schools with a single brush-stroke. It would be more constructive to require their participation in a manner that is somewhat differentiated. We especially focus on the role that the last two categories of schools can play.

Private schools with a proven track record in providing sound education have the potential for playing a significant role in enabling shifts in the government education system towards a more child-friendly and teacher-friendly model. The essential components of such a model, to our minds, would include:

An age-appropriate curriculum with a significant amount of local content and exemplars that children, teachers and parents can relate to;

Organising the curriculum as a learning continuum that is mapped out in accordance with progressively organised learning goals in various curricular areas. This would enable a blurring of sharp dividing lines between successive grades, into which groups of students must be fitted; and who must all be taught the same content in tandem;

Preparation of teaching-learning materials for smaller, sequential curricular units, and participation of teachers in selecting and/or constructing appropriate teaching-learning materials. Teaching and learning could then be more flexible and the textbook be seen as a resource, rather than being treated as a ‘ one-size-fits all’ storehouse of knowledge; centrally constructed by ‘ experts’ for a whole state.

Assessment strategies that are built into the learning continuum as ‘assessment points’ and ‘milestones’, and which are both diagnostic and suggestive of remedial steps, doing away with the need for the stressful ritual of exams;

A shift in the teacher’s role as a facilitator of each students’ learning as the student navigates through the curricular route map at a pace commensurate with her abilities. This implies a shift in the relationship between teachers and students to one of cooperation and support, rather than coercion.

Whereas the forward-looking National Curriculum Framework 2005 had advocated many such shifts, their widespread acceptance has yet to take root. Some private schools and NGOs have had long years of experience in working on the development of viable and successful models of elementary education that build on the idea of a learning continuum. Well-designed teaching-learning materials, with built-in strategies for assessment, are available. These may be suitably adapted for use on a larger scale. State governments could fruitfully draw upon the knowledge base of this educational work, and devise effective strategies for scaling up such programmes, building capacity and shifting attitudes in the government sector in different regions of the country. This would enhance the quality of the learning in government schools and make the overall education system more receptive to the implementation of the RTE Act.

Supporting practical components in teacher training

A second possible role for educationally well-placed private schools lies in the area of support for teacher training. The task of preparing a large number of trained teachers in the next five years, as well as re-orienting and motivating existing teachers, as envisaged by the RTE Act, is indeed a huge one. Some of the solutions being considered are a) asking universities to start teacher-training programmes and conducting refresher programmes for existing teachers b) using distance learning models to conduct in-service as well as pre-service teacher training programmes.

Status quo of teachers

While these are important initiatives, they have some in-built limitations: they may be able to produce a larger number of trained teachers with some theoretical knowledge; but are not so amenable to providing a practical orientation to teachers. Effective teacher training needs sufficient exposure to school-based experiences. In fact, with some exceptions, most existing teacher training programmes in the country have very little experiential learning components. Graduates from these institutions are often not equipped to meet the requirements of a child-friendly learning environment.

It would thus be a desirable step to identify and support selected private schools, which have sound curricular and pedagogic practices, to set up facilities for conducting teacher enrichment programmes. Some private schools and NGOs are already moving in the direction of setting up in-house teacher training facilities. After a suitable ‘resource mapping’ of schools with such capabilities, the government could support them to develop basic training infrastructure and encourage them to upgrade their senior teachers as teacher educators. They may then be in a position to offer on-going refresher courses for teachers deputed by the government as well as other private institutions. Based on contact with actual students and classes, visiting teachers could be helped to gain a working understanding of educational principles along with contemporary methods of teaching. Linking schools to University-based teacher training programmes and government teacher training institutes such as the Regional Institutes of Education could also be mutually enriching. Such schemes have the potential of benefiting a significant number of schools and teachers in widening circles across each state.

Towards inclusion of the children of the poor

The RTE Act envisages making all kinds of private schools share the responsibility of educating poor children from the surrounding community. It currently requires participation of private schools by mandating free and compulsory admission of children of the poor from the ‘neighbourhood’ at Std. I level up to 25 percent of the class strength. In a society that has historically been stratified along caste and class lines, and in which gaps in every sphere have only widened, this is seen as a much-needed social corrective.

Some limitations and downsides of this thrust, however, need to be recognised. The fact remains that, in terms of numbers, the contribution of private schools to educating the poor will remain quite insignificant. At the same time, in its effort to regulate private schools and ensure their compliance, the government, acting through local authorities, might create conditions that lead to:

An increase in corruption with respect to enforcement of rules related to compliance with admissions of non-fee paying students;

A homogenising bureaucratic control that cuts at the root of innovative possibilities that a few schools have been able to sustain;

Difficulties for the survival of small schools that impart holistic, innovative education.

In itself, it seems highly desirable that children of different socio-economic classes are able to study and grow together. However, what cannot be denied is that several psycho-social and pedagogic issues would need to be addressed in order to integrate students from low-income families (who are often first or second-generation learners) with students from families that have a stronger educational as well as income background. Given the current exam-driven, competitive ethos of most private schools in India, children who lack academic support from their families are likely to remain low performing, and may suffer by comparison. Apart from this they would be faced with difficulties that stem from the contrast in social markers such as dress, possessions, parental profiles etc. All this could seriously affect the self-esteem of underprivileged students, and in the short run many schools may not be equipped or even inclined to respond to their specific needs.

To make this an educationally and sociologically worthwhile direction, school managements will need to work towards some basic shifts in their orientation and structuring of support for culturally diverse sets of children. Alongside this, a shift in sensibilities of teachers, other students and their parents will be needed, if underprivileged students are to have a worthwhile educational experience in private schools. Keeping these realities in mind, We propose the following intermediate step, which may be implemented at least for a few years: The government could expect well-endowed schools to either set up or adopt an additional ‘free school’ for the children of lower income families in the ‘neighbourhood’. The school should be required to share infrastructure and resources with the school it supports. A certain percentage of better performing children from this school may then be required to be absorbed into the original school. This will ensure that there is indeed an incentive to make the ‘free school’ sufficiently strong in its quality of education. After some specified number of years, such schools should be in a better position to directly absorb children from underprivileged families. This would be a more graded manner of ensuring that such private schools meet their social responsibility.

We conclude by maintaining that educationally well-placed private schools could play a variety of constructive roles in bringing into effect the provisions of the RTE Act. While educating children from low-income families in these schools may be one among these roles, this would benefit only a small number of them. On the other hand, participating in the training of teachers by a selected set of private schools will have a multiplier effect on other schools and teachers. Even more effective would be the scaling up of innovative models of schooling, accompanied by specialised capacity building, such that an increasing number of government schools develop a more sound platform for implementing the RTE Act in letter and spirit.

A.Kumaraswamy and Alok Mathur, The Hindu, 27 March 2010

On Saturday, President Obama delivered a radio address on education and he didn’t shrink from saying that American high school students are trailing international averages. He sketched out details of a bill his administration is now pushing to revise the No Child Left Behind Act. He proposes to preserve testing requirements but create a better measuring stick, require teachers be evaluated by performance (not credentials), and use carrots instead of sticks to encourage progress.

But nothing in the speech or his proposed legislation hints at the need for school choice and competition. Charter schools went unmentioned. One worries that his view of markets in education differs little from the one offered by Diane Ravitch on these pages on March 9 and in her new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” In that book, she offers a naïve and static view of markets. “It is in the nature of markets that some succeed, some are middling, and others fail,” she wrote.

Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are “creatively” destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards—speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.

Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction.

Ms. Ravitch and other critics of school choice reverse causation by blaming the sad state of public schools on events that occurred long after schools had stagnated. They point, for example, to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law (enacted in 2002), mayoral governance of schools recently instituted in some cities, and the creation of a small number (4,638) of charter schools that serve less than 3% of the U.S. school-age population.

To uncover what is wrong with American public schools one has to dig deeper than these recent developments in education. One needs to consider the impact of restrictive collective bargaining agreements that prevent rewarding good teachers and removing ineffective ones, intrusive court interventions, and useless teacher certification laws.

Charters were invented to address these problems. As compared to district schools, they have numerous advantages. They are funded by governments, but they operate independently. This means that charters must persuade parents to select them instead of a neighborhood district school. That has happened with such regularity that today there are 350,000 families on charter-school waiting lists, enough to fill over 1,000 additional charter schools.

According to a 2009 Education Next survey, the public approves of steady charter growth. Though a sizeable portion of Americans remain undecided, charter supporters outnumber opponents two to one. Among African Americans, those who favor charters outnumber opponents four to one. Even among public-school teachers, the percentage who favor charters is 37%, while the percentage who oppose them is 31%.

A school can have short-term popularity without being good, of course. Union leaders would have us believe that charter popularity is due to the “motivated” students who attend them, not the education they provide. But charters hold lotteries when applications exceed available seats. As a result—and also because they are usually located in urban areas—over half of all charter students are either African American or Hispanic. More than a third of charter school students are eligible for the federal free or reduced lunch program.

To identify the effects of a charter education, a wide variety of studies have been conducted. The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University’s Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University’s Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat. Winners and losers can be assumed to be equally motivated because they both tried to go to a charter school. Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Kane have found that lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools.

In another good study, the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively.

Instead of taking seriously these high quality studies, charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator, and its report makes inappropriate comparisons and pays insufficient attention to the fact that charters are serving an educationally deprived segment of the population. Others base their criticism of charters on a report from an ongoing study by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones. Though this report is superior to AFT’s study, its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation.

Credo’s work will be more informative when it presents findings for students in charters that have been up and running for several years. You can’t judge the long-term potential of schools that have not amassed a multi-year track record.

To identify the long-term benefits of school choice, Harvard’s Martin West and German economist Ludger Woessmann examined the impact of school choice on the performance of 15-year-old students in 29 industrialized countries. They discovered that the greater the competition between the public and private sector, the better all students do in math, science and reading. Their findings imply that expanding charters to include 50% of all students would eventually raise American students’ math scores to be competitive with the highest-scoring countries in the world.

What makes charters important today is less their current performance than their potential to innovate. Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, broadband and the open-source development of curricular materials (a la Wikipedia). Curriculum can be tailored to the level of accomplishment each student has reached, an enormous step forward.

If American education remains stagnant, such innovations will spread slowly, if at all. If the charter world continues to expand, the competition between them and district schools could prove to be transformative.

Paul E. Peterson, Wall Street Journal, 16 March 2010

In 1893, the king of Baroda, Maharaja Sayajirao III, implemented compulsory primary education in a small taluka in Amralli district. In this nine-village cluster, children from the ages of seven to 12 were educated. This tiny experiment was a roaring success and was extended to all 52 villages in the district. Eventually, compulsory primary education was extended to the entire state. This was India’s first recorded stab at compulsory education.

Today Union Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal is trying to replicate the Maharaja’s endeavour through the Right to Education (RTE) Bill. While the RTE Bill was passed in 2002, it is being notified only on April 1 this year. Sibal was also the chairman of the Drafting Committee when the Bill was being formulated during the then HRD Minister Arjun Singh’s time.

Miles to go

Ever since he took charge of the ministry, Sibal has been trying to engineer radical changes in the sector. “All these years, education was about politics and not reform. I give full credit to Sibal for pushing through reforms and not politicising education,” says Madhav Chavan, founder and CEO of the educational non-profit organisation Pratham.

The Bill has the potential to change the way education is viewed in India. Education will become a fundamental right for all children aged between six and 14. RTE will require Rs. 1,72,000 crore over the next five years. R. Govinda, vice-chancellor, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, who was also on the Drafting Committee says, “RTE will change the nature of discourse. Till now whatever we have done through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or other initiatives have been projects that require inputs for improving the school system. Now education has become the fundamental right so it becomes the entitlement of every child.” It is the government’s responsibility of getting children within the target group into schools. This will be legally enforceable and one can go to court against the government if denied education.

Initiatives such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan have successfully put a lot of children into school. Estimates suggest that in 2001, 5 crore out of 21 crore children were out of school. Today that figure stands at a considerably lower 30-40 lakh. “State governments have done a lot for education,” says Amit Kaushik, COO, Pratham. “The first step is access but now we need to move on to the next milestone: When you set up schools, what happens then?” he asks. Kaushik was a director in the HRD ministry before joining Pratham.

So far, it is not a very happy picture. Consider the following statistics from Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) report: Only 50.3 percent of standard V students in government schools were able to read Standard II level text. Only 36.1 percent students were able to correctly solve a basic division problem.

The RTE has put in place a series of measures that not only aim to attack the problem of access, but also lift quality. Accessible schools within walking distance must be established. RTE mandates 25 percent reservation for children from weaker sections in Class I of all private schools. On the quality front, RTE has defined strict norms on the student-teacher ratio. So for grades 1-5 the law mandates that the student-teacher ratio will not exceed 40 for schools with more than 200 students. For those with up to 60 students, there should be two teachers at least. For grades 6-8, there should be at least one teacher for every 35 students and here schools need to have separate teachers for science and mathematics, social studies and languages. The minimum number of working days and instructional hours for teachers has been specified.

The government school system will have to be accountable. Arun Kapur, director, Vasant Valley School, New Delhi says, “In India 91 percent to 93 percent of school-going children actually go to government schools. Even if 60 percent to 70 percent of these schools improve, there will be a sea change.”

Implementation will be tough. There is little focus on learning outcomes. In a bid to de-stress children, RTE has done away with examinations at the end of the year. “In the early stages, children are still growing and their cognitive development is taking place. They are not all growing at the same pace but they can all move ahead and come together at the same stage at a later level. Therefore, don’t punish them by failing,” says Govinda.

At the age of 14, children will be awarded a certificate of completion of elementary education. Kaushik says, “RTE is very input-focussed. It says very little on the outcomes of education–what a child will have achieved from 6-14.” While RTE does say that examinations will be replaced by something called Comprehensive and Continuous Evaluation, no one is quite sure of what form that would take. Govinda clarifies the point, “This is a misleading notion that exams are out. I haven’t come across a teacher who doesn’t evaluate a student. I haven’t come across a teacher who doesn’t bother whether students are learning or not.”

In 2009, the ICICI Foundation looked at the public school system in India, and compared it to some of the best performing systems globally with the help of consulting firm McKinsey. It came up with four initiatives that India can take up to improve its own system: Conduct standardised assessments at national level; set up school performance management system; strengthen in-classroom support for teachers; provide more training to headmasters. There is evidence from across the world that these initiatives work. Yet, the Bill does not offer much in this direction.

The US has National Assessment of Education Progress. The UK has national assessment tests and Australia has the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy. India has ASER, which has done a lot in raising awareness about the state of primary education. But, it’s a limited survey and does not cover all schools. A national standardised assessment would be a tool for Sibal to measure the returns on his initiatives.

While the RTE stresses on teacher to student ratio, the training and the support given to teachers are as important. Dileep Ranjekar, CEO of Azim Premji Foundation, says in countries such as Brazil and Columbia the government made significant investment in teacher training and support.

Another issue is that of non-formal schools. “Once the bill comes into effect from 1st April, the government will have to provide proper primary and upper primary schools,” says educationist Vimala Ramachandran of Educational Resource Unit. “Some states like Rajasthan had

a lot of Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) centres. These will either have to be phased out or upgraded to proper schools,” she says.

The same applies to teachers as well. Over the years, various states had deployed para-teachers, also known as barefoot teachers, shiksha karmis, gurujis and vidya sahayaks. These teachers are not well-qualified like formal teachers and are paid low salaries. For instance, in Rajasthan the minimum qualification for a para teacher can be as low as Class VIII (and Class V in case of women). In Jharkhand there are 79,000 para-teachers at the primary level while Chhattisgarh has 1,42,000 para-teachers. In states like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, para-teachers outnumber regular teachers.

State government schools already have 5 lakh teacher vacancies. When you look at the goal of a teacher-student ratio of 1:30, the shortage becomes even more severe — 11 lakh to12 lakh teachers will have to be hired in six months. Some states don’t even have teacher training facilities.

Testing times

Some are of the opinion that Sibal’s hands are tied because of the old guard in the ministry and various committees that he inherited from his predecessor. Sibal has to contend with various lobbies within his ministry, many of whom strongly oppose private players and public-private partnership. On the other extreme are those who say that government should stay out of schools and should only fund education. “There has to be a middle path. For RTE to be successful government cannot be the only player,” says Ramachandran. “You have to be open enough to invite other players into it — corporate foundations, for-profit private sector players, not-for profit players, education trusts.” In some states, the number of private schools is increasing at a much higher rate–such as Tamil Nadu, Panjab and Haryana–there can’t be one norm for the whole country.

Whose head will roll if implementation is poor? Says Govinda, “We are trying to do several things at one time, I don’t know whether everything will be monitored because it needs a huge amount of support system that keeps track of everything–in everything from RTE, to teacher training, school education,” But monitoring is necessary. “The other important aspect is to ensure that necessary financial resources are created at the state level — including commitment to per child expenses that arise as a result of various actions to be implemented under the Act,” says Dileep Ranjekar.

The biggest challenge for Sibal will be building consensus among political leadership. “The central government doesn’t run the education system — most of it is in states with state board schools and state universities. Centre has just a small number of institutions,” says Govinda. There are already points of disagreement here — financing for instance. The state governments want all the money to come from the Centre. Sibal has just had one meeting with the education ministers of the states. Some states are in a bad fiscal situation. While states like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar have low revenues, others like Chattisgarh are better off. “He needs to have a one-to-one dialogue with each state. He has a good intention but he doesn’t want to work the intention through — to do that he needs a good group of officers working with him,” says Ramachandran.

If successful, RTE will be the high point of Sibal’s stint as HRD minister. But he needs to act fast.

Neelima Mahajan-Bansal / Forbes India, IBN Live, 11 March 2010