What Arjun should focus on

However, enrollment could be driven purely by the attraction of the midday meal. A programme that gives free meals to children is a noble one, but enrolment is clearly not enough. Reports about many government schools reveal a distressing picture. Sometimes, while teachers end up cooking these meals, there is very little evidence of any quality teaching going on. In some schools, things have come to such a pass that students are handed over weekly rations. Such realities can create a gap between enrolment and attendance. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by Pratham shows that in Bihar only 52 per cent of the enrolled students were found to be attending schools. In Rajasthan, UP, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh, this figure was between 60 to 70 per cent.

A series of third party studies reveal a grim picture of how much children actually learn, raising doubts about the effectiveness of the SSA beyond mere enrollment. The ASER study, for example, shows that 44 per cent of children in public schools in Std II to V cannot read simple paragraphs. Nearly 54 per cent children cannot do two-digit subtraction problems. Among older children, 40 per cent in public schools in Std VI to VIII are unable to handle simple division problems.

This evidence should raise fresh concerns about the extent to which the SSA is successful in providing education. A few weeks ago there were full page ads in the national dailies about the success of SSA in terms of enrollment, number of schools, teachers, and so on. Let us not forget that these aspects (including enrolment) are inputs into the process of education, they are not outcomes. No evidence was provided about whether more children were now able to read, write or do maths as a result of programmes like the SSA. It is misleading to imply that something is doing well just because it uses up more inputs. A steel company does not boast about its performance by announcing it used more power and iron ore.

Yet, in the case of SSA, the ministry of human resources cites the fact that it spends more in order to indicate that it is running a successful programme. There was no mention about the results of the intervention. Is SSA only meant to herd poor children into school buildings by offering them food so that claims about enrollment figures can be made? Why has no assessment of SSA been made in terms of the education it has provided? Why are there no standardised tests run in schools that are receiving money from the government? Why is no one saying what the SSA has achieved in terms of what learning? Who is afraid of what an assessment of SSA will reveal?

Another startling fact that the government chooses to keep quiet about is the extent to which children are moving away from public schools. After all, the SSA is only focussed on government schools and is jocularly termed ‘Sarkari Shiksha Abhiyan’.

New evidence has surfaced in a recent paper titled,‘Private schools serving the poor’, by James Tooley and Pauline Dixon of the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. The study involved 20 researchers combing 20 sq km of slums in North Shahdara (East Delhi). They report that only 71 out of the 265 schools they found were government schools. There were 19 private “aided” schools, 102 private “recognised” schools and 73 private “unrecognised” schools. However, SSA only concerns itself with the 71 public schools.

Why are people rejecting government schools? Part of the problem might be a greater responsiveness to what parents want. Only 2 out of the 71 public schools were English-medium, and 57 were exclusively Hindi. But parents want their children to learn English. Among private schools, only 55 out of 194 schools were exclusively Hindi. Tooley & Dixon ran standardised tests on 3,495 children, thus obtaining data for 24 children per school on average. In Mathematics, the average score in public schools was 24.5 out of 100. Children in private schools averaged above 40. In languages, the average score in public schools was 14 (English) and 27 (Hindi). The score in private schools was about 50.

This situation is full of irony. The government is pumping Rs 10,000 crore into government schools through the SSA programme. But to a significant extent parents are voting with their feet, preferring to pay their own money, and sending their children to private schools where they perform markedly better. The fees paid by parents range from Rs 150 to Rs 600 per month.

In the states of Uttaranchal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan, more than 45 per cent of urban children are now in private schools. This indicates an astonishing scale of de-facto privatisation of elementary education. In these states, the role of private schools exceeds the level of utilisation of private schools found in what is officially the “fully privatised” education system of Chile.

Maybe, students would be better off if the government restricted itself to a system for producing and delivering free meals to children. The money on SSA would be better spent if the government paid parents Rs 300 per month, and allowed them to choose a school for their children.

ila.patnaik@expressindia.com