Surprise test

Just as education NGO Pratham8217;s annual survey stressed the link between public spending on education and tangible outcomes, government schoolteachers in Lucknow got a surprise test recently, when their own students were asked to grade their performance. The state8217;s divisional commissioner, who initiated these surveys, wants to peg teachers8217; compensation or punishment to their students8217; responses across a range of questions 8212; how regularly they teach, whether they force students to look for private alternatives, whether they encourage cheating, etc. It is necessary to replicate this experiment in the UP classroom 8212; while acknowledging its limits.

There is ample evidence that measures of accountability and performance incentives for government teachers would enormously improve delivery. In 2003, a joint study of Harvard University and the World Bank found that on average, one in every four government schoolteachers is absent from work, and the same number were present but not teaching. Since salaries account for over 90 per cent of the non-plan budget in education, nearly half the resources allocated to education are potentially wasted. But if teachers8217; salaries were linked to performance, things would certainly be different. The study found that bonus payments for better results, or employing teachers from the community on a contractual basis have also dramatically improved standards.

But while a considered redesign of the public schooling system is urgently needed, it cannot mean that the state can shrug off final responsibility for children8217;s education. The intervention in Lucknow is one way of testing user satisfaction with public schooling. It cannot become a stand-in for ongoing, thorough evaluation by the authorities. The teachers8217; association is predictably up in arms, claiming that this could become a tool to settle personal scores. A more likely danger is that the assessments could be used against students. A government school in UP is inflected by all kinds of class, caste and gender tensions. Children at the secondary school level, 11 to 15-year-olds from a range of backgrounds, cannot be held responsible for speaking truth to power.