The Right to Quality Education: RTE Must Score Big On Outcomes 

The provision of education in India is like Swiss cheese, riddled with holes in design and implementation. The country’s abysmal learning outcomes can be gathered from the latest ‘Annual Status of Education Report’ (ASER) of 2016 that reveals that only 21.1 per cent of Class V children in government schools and 37.9 per cent of children of the same class in private schools were able to do simple division. Moreover, the proportion of Class V children who have been able to do division has declined from 36.2 per cent in 2010 to 26 per cent in 2016.

The country has taken the initiative to create institutional mechanisms for proper delivery of education such as the 86th Constitutional Amendment in 2002 by which Article 21-A was included to provide children aged between 6 and 14 the right to a free and compulsory education. It was on this basis that the Right to Education (RTE) Act was enacted in 2009.

A free and compulsory education, however, means nothing if it doesn’t embody the tenets of basic quality, and assessing the quality is where the real debate begins.

The recent audit of the RTE Act and its functioning conducted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), reveals severe irregularities in fund utilisation, ground surveys, school recognition, provisions for children with disabilities and an overwhelming lack of transparency over the years.

The problem of education reform is massive, and there could be many reasons for the country’s sustained struggle to give an education of ‘quality’ to all.

Our dismal learning outcomes could be because of the vast number of overlapping institutions involved in delivering services, which makes it hard to track responsibility. This is coupled with funding structures that are not responsive to the needs of schools at the ground level, and problems in design that allow for low teacher effort and low school accountability. But the greatest contributing factor to poor quality in education is that the term ‘quality’ in the RTE Act and state rules is ill defined. The Act displays a stark focus on hard and soft infrastructural inputs, with no reference to a concrete pathway to learning outcomes.

The biggest issue with India’s education system is that learning outcomes are far from satisfactory, and policy perspectives on quality still remain removed from properly defined outcomes, especially within the RTE. While many would rightly argue that quality ought not be restricted to ‘objective’ outcomes at the cost of a freer and open pursuit of knowledge, the Indian context is plagued by the absence of basic grade level competencies, which should serve as a pre-requisite to better forms of inquiry.

While the ideal value to achieve, for every school, should be the creation of a quest for knowledge that empowers students to be citizens in a deliberative democracy, realistically, the nation would want to focus on the creation of a basic skill set that allows students to understand, articulate and calculate by having achieved basic grade level competencies.

The RTE Act makes no mention of the specific constituents of learning outcomes but asks state governments to cater to this cause in section 8 (g) of the Act wherein:

The appropriate government has to ensure good quality elementary education conforming to the standards and norms specified in the Schedule; ensure timely prescribing of curriculum and courses of study for elementary education

It is the responsibility of the state or union government (in case of union territories) to realise clause 8(g) , but standards and norms in section 18 of the Act itself, make no mention of the definition of learning outcomes.

A closer scrutiny of state RTE rules reveals that only the states of Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have relatively concrete definitions of quality in education and mention learning outcomes. Punjab, Tripura and Nagaland make no mention of quality assessments in schools at all.

Currently, definitions of school quality often translate to ‘school report cards’ that assign specific ‘RTE’ grades to schools. This, however, is based on data from the Unified District Information for Education System (U-DISE) that collects information for pre-defined inputs within the RTE Act, removed from learning outcomes. These grades, thus, aren’t reflective of schooling quality at all.

An analysis of state RTE rules reveals the following:

What can we do about this?

Besides a much-needed kickstart on defining key learning outcomes in legislation, we need to revamp funding mechanisms to align them to these new definitions of school quality.

The current situation is marred by difficulty because there is no existing trove of holistic ‘learning outcome’ data released by the government itself. The national achievement surveys are relevant only to government schools and do not reflect progress on all grade levels, nor are they conducted on an annual basis to track improvements. The government either needs to give greater legitimacy to the findings of independent and rigorous assessments of learning such as the Annual Status of Education Report, or begin to create its own trove of data.

The 2016 policy on transparency in data dissemination recently published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) provides no timeline for its implementation. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) website responsible for the dissemination of summary reports, final reports and studies was down from October to December 2016.

Increasing pressure in the national and international domain has slowly pushed the government to take action over ‘quality’ in schools. NITI Aayog’s three-year action agenda for 2017-2020 mentions the need for a spotlight on quality outcomes in learning. Pilot programmes have been initiated by the governments of Maharashtra, Bihar and Delhi to re-align their focus on quality as well. While these are incremental steps in the right direction, the spirit of these reforms need to translate into a national actionable agenda to address the problem, starting with a concrete definition of basic learning outcomes and school quality in the RTE and state RTE rules.

Quality education is possibly the only sustainable path towards the enrichment of a true deliberative democracy. An environment that provides the children of any country with the preconditions necessary to seasoned thought, informed decision-making and choice would only be possible if governments take it upon themselves to engage in real service to their citizens by strengthening education for all.