Grading classrooms

Government schools in India are plagued with many and diverse problems. Almost as many and varied are the projects that have been launched and proposals that have been floated to solve those problems. Few of those succeed. Why, then, would the Pune Municipal Corporation8217;s newly announced plan to link teachers8217; pay to their performance, as judged by parents8217; councils, be any different? Well, for one thing, many previous schemes have floundered precisely because teachers were uncooperative or intransigent in the face of reforms, even those meant to make their work easier. Operation Blackboard, an ambitious scheme to provide teaching aids to thousands of primary schools did not perform as well as expected precisely because it did not take into account their unwillingness to adapt their methods to those aids. Ideas ranging from providing additional teaching help to cameras to record teacher attendance have stumbled at the same hurdle, which might not be a problem in this case.

The committees in each school will have parents as well as representatives from NGOs that specialise in the education sector. It is important that these committees be insulated as far as possible from political manipulation, and be focused exclusively on performance. Experience with such local control of school performance elsewhere in the world varies widely with those factors, and it is to be hoped that the Pune Municipal Corporation resists the temptation to gain political influence through manipulating the composition of these committees. Their purpose must be merely to serve as an instrument in bringing teachers8217; incentives more closely in line with desired results, not in providing another avenue for politicking.

If teachers8217; incentives are correctly altered, there is considerable room for hope that this scheme will be successful, and perhaps can be utilised elsewhere. An ambitious experiment conducted in Andhra Pradesh over 500 government schools demonstrated fairly conclusively that merit-based bonuses significantly improve educational outcomes and reduce dropout rates. Strangely, the same study demonstrated that a large improvement was noticed even in those schools where teachers were monitored regularly, without being paid bonuses. Either way, this is an idea with considerably more promise than its predecessors.