Don’t withhold Std IX kids to up Board results: Education dept

Ramchandra Jadhav, deputy director of education, said that the secondary education officer of Zilla Parishad has been instructed to review all the state-board affiliated schools, based on the previous data collected from the last few years on students enrolled in Std IX and Std X, which would give an indication of this trend.

“The instructions have come from the principal secretary to ensure that the trend of withholding large number of students in Std IX by schools to achieve a good pass percentage in Std X be stopped. An inquiry will be conducted by secondary education officer to keep a tab on schools where such numbers are high or are suspected to indulge in such practices or where parents complain to us,” said Jadhav.

Nand Kumar, principal secretary of education, said, “Till now, we had been keeping a watch on schools but now the issue needs to be understood and resolved. Hence, we have instructed the officers to hold meetings with school principals and ensure that the message is conveyed to them. Also, teachers will be counselled when necessary,” he said.

The statewide discussions have been prompted by the recent Unified District Information System for Education (U-DISE) for the year 2014-15 report in which a sharp spike in failures in Std IX exams was noticed confirming speculations that failures in Std IX are encouraged by schools to better their own ranking in the Board exams.

The U-Dise data showed that while there were only 1,310 underperformers in Std VIII, the number of students who failed in Std IX stood at 20,154 students, nearly 16 times more failures in Std IX in comparison to Std VIII. Many schools had then blamed it on the no-failure policy up to Std VIII, which they said made students and parents lax about studies and evaluations.

The move has been lauded by parents but they say they hope the state is serious about its implementation. “It is true that parents always have a fear when their children go to Std IX because what we see is that students scoring less than 45-50 per cent are deliberately held back. Very few schools give students a second chance. When my son got promoted to Std X, two of his friends were detained in Std IX. But the school conducted re-exam after a fortnight and these students scored above 50 per cent. It means students had the capacity but hadn’t taken studies seriously. It is the responsibility of schools as well to ensure weak students come forward,” said Anant Sawant, whose son and nephew study in Std X and Std IX respectively at Paranjpe Vidya Mandir.

Meanwhile, though Jadhav said that though the mandate is to bring the number of failures down in Std IX but there is no compulsion to pass each and every student. “The point is not to force schools to pass every student, even if they don’t have the basic competency for the next class. But this move is to fix responsibility on schools to ensure the child achieves that basic competency. The school must conduct regular assessments through which they can know which student is weak, so extra hours and efforts must be taken for such students and they should not be sidelined. Schools will also have to maintain records and show proof of what efforts they took for the child to ensure they achieved the skills,” he said.