Ideas
Indian schoolchildren prepare for their CBSE senior school certificate examinations before entering an examination hall in New Delhi (Raveendran/AFP/GettyImages)
Information and statistics are a key component in promoting "school choice". And relevant information in that regard is made public in several developed countries, as it puts facts and data in the hands of parents and students, thereby creating a sense of competition and accountability among schools.
The Learning Point has mined the data of class 12 exam results for over 9,100 Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools and 985 Indian School Certificate (ISC) schools. The average and median scores have been computed using English plus the best four subjects.
The first two tables rank CBSE and ISC schools by their average score, and they also display the class median. The average and median are popularly used indicators of school quality.
The next two tables list the CBSE and ISC schools by the absolute number of students scoring marks above 90 per cent.
The rationale for these two tables is to recognise and felicitate those schools which are grooming grounds for a large number of future achievers and leaders. Large schools, which though do manage to maintain standards, are often not able to replicate the class average or median which smaller schools with a more selective intake manage to attain. But for a large country like India, it is these that are an example of scalable models.
The data also reveals the failure of the government school system as not a single school from among the Kendriya Vidyalayas or the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) is present in this list.
Information liberalisation can do a great deal of good to the Indian schooling system where basic statistics of this nature are released officially, every year.
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