As for training, no matter how much we are trained, all of us learn a lot on the job. But we don’t learn alone. Unfortunately, teachers don’t have recourse to such learning. You need to build a cadre of people who are going to help the teachers. And we have such people in many states, called ‘cluster coordinators’ [each cluster has 10-20 schools in a block] or block resource people or, in general, whoever is above the level of the teacher. Wherever Pratham works with state governments or district administrations, we say that we first want to work with those people. Because those are the people who can really help the teachers.
I think the top thing the country has to do is turn these cluster coordinators--whose job is to check inputs such as buildings, textbooks, teacher recruitment, scholarships--into academic people. That is not a hard thing to do because the education system has one huge asset: children. As soon as you make some progress with the children, you get instant gratification from them. But you can only get that if the goals are doable, not if you have to teach them something so tough that kids fail to comprehend.
Another important thing is to have goals that are achievable and acknowledging that, for whatever reason, a lot of kids are well below grade level. And if you don’t have fundamental skills, you can’t move forward. So, first, spend the time in a school year to help kids come up to this level. Then you can train the teacher.
You speak about building cardres of support staff for teachers. But what can be done about teacher shortages (as we reported here and here)?
Those cadres already exist in the system. And, yes, we have teacher shortages. Obviously you need teachers, but it’s not like if you don’t have enough teachers, nothing can happen. But it’s also because we have gone to one extreme of universalisation that demands there be a school in every small pocket. I remember a large village in Rajasthan that has five government and private schools each. Each government school has 70-80 kids and two-three teachers, and everybody complains about shortage.
I think sensible consolidation of schools to maximise teacher availability can be done where possible. So, yes, teachers need to be hired but there are lots of other ways.
Contract teachers have a bad name and I’m not commenting on their working conditions; they should get paid adequately. But in the studies that we have done on these teachers, their performance is nothing worse than regular teachers. Sometimes--maybe because they are younger--they perform better than regular ones. So, we need to reorganise the resources available today to achieve our goals.
In Bihar once, when we were working with a district to do ‘teaching at the right level’, what they did was that within clusters [10-20 schools in a block], if there was a shortage, they would move a teacher from one school to another.
Yes, for going up to the highest grade level and teaching children everything that’s in the curriculum, we may need more specialised training. But at the level of which ASER is talking, it can be done [even without waiting for more teacher training].
We have a hierarchy of government schools: Navodaya and Kendriya Vidyalayas. Do you think that adds to the problem? Do we need a common-school system?
Common-school system is an idea that has been talked about a lot. If you look at some rural areas, what exists is effectively a common-school system. Especially in parts of eastern India, where there aren’t enough private schools.
Those are like common schools in two ways. One is that all the kids go to the same school. And then, in the village, all children go to the same set of tutors. So, it’s common both formally and informally.
You cannot impose a common-school system when everything else is differentiated. Where kids go to school is a function of how society is organised. You need to have a common health system, a common public transport system. Common-school system is an appealing idea but implementing it is difficult. The hindrances are coming from society.
Also, if the government school is good, chances are everybody wants to send their children to that school. There will always be aspirational reasons why people want to differentiate themselves. As long as choices are available, people will take them. But wherever government schools have begun to perform well, the drift into private schools has slowed down.
Besides, the school education market for much of India is a grey market, because this distinction between government and private is faulty. There is a big unorganised, undocumented tuition space where all these actors are present. If you analyse that, you will see Indian families have a foot in both spaces--formal and informal. And you have this at different affordability levels. Typically, this private-government division is posed as a false binary.
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