With the National Education Policy set to be announced at the end of the month, we are suggesting a simple and straightforward three points plan to ensure that the Right to Education will be finally delivered.
1. Time-bound infrastructure provision: Within 90 days after a school has asked for infrastructure to be provided that is included in the mandatory norms and standards of the Right to Education Act, it has to be provided.
A failure to do so will lead to an automatic penalty of the person or government causing the delay. This is the same time frame that applied for the Madya Pradesh Education Guarantee Scheme: if a community did not have a school but a minimum number of children, the State had to provide a school within 90 days. This led to a fast increase in the number of schools. The icing on the cake: communities are empowered and they can be sure that their demand will be heard.
2. An IT-based teacher posting system: Future teachers can create a list of preferences for schools/localities where they want to be posted.
An algorithm will find the best matches and assign them to a post. Vacancy and over-assigning posts will be avoided, corruption will be wiped out and transparency will be introduced. The Central Office for the Allocation of Study Places in Germany can serve as an example for such a system. Further, a mixture of educational, caste and gender can be fine-tuned within the algorithm.
3. Tracking expenditure through real-time management information systems: Money can be followed down to the school level, open to the public and School Management Committees.
This suggestion was given by Avani Kapur and Anit N. Mukherjee in Right to Education in India, edited by Praveen Jha and P. Geetha Rani, published by Routledge. Bonus: Delays and irregularities can be recognized by Artificial Intelligence.
Additionally, headmasters should be freed from overburdening clerical work. Time and again, we have observed tension between parents and headmasters if scholarships and other funds for students are delayed. Money should not be handled inside schools. Headmasters are not clerks, but academic supervisors and supporters.
If such a straightforward management is in place, we can talk about how to improve learning. Here, too, we have plenty of ideas based on world-class research and evidence. For instance, long-term school mentoring to support professional development of teachers is an ingredient for improving learning levels as this article of the Harvard Graduate School of Education also suggests.
None of our suggestions requires the privatisation of education. On the contrary, privatisation increases inequity and segregation. To monitor, regulate and overview lakhs of private schools, to ensure a minimum of transparency and equity, a strong government, enlightened political leadership and an effective administration that is immune to corruption is the minimum requirement to prevent anything short of a complete nightmare.
The skyrocketing fees and the high share of schools without a license show that we are not in such a position.
Privatisation as such solves none of the issues faced by the Indian education system. International evidence and the Indian experience both remind us that the education of our children should not involve private capital. It should not be a tradable commodity, but a public good.
Article 21A of our Constitution reads: “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.”
Let’s bring this fundamental right to life. Public education can be modern, efficient and of high quality. We just have to put our effort into it instead of wasting time and money with experiments of privatisation.