The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 has been published by education non-profit organization Pratham. The latest report collected data from 596 districts by surveying 546,527 students from 354,944 homes. The survey shows the prevalence of learning deficit and the poverty of basic reading and arithmetic skills among students in Indian schools.

The highlights of ASER 2018 are:

The implications of the ASER 2018 are

• India’s demographic dividend depends on the learning level of students.
• The quality of education has a direct bearing on any economy.
• With some 240 million students or nearly 20% of the Indian population in school, their quality of learning or lack of it assumes significance for the competitiveness of the country.
• It has an impact on the quality of life, efficiency at the workplace, and labour productivity issues.
• The report suggests that India is creating yet another another generation that can hardly read and write – the only difference being that these children spent some years of their lives in schools.

The reasons for poor learning outcomes in the country are

• Infrastructure deficit:
  • Dilapidated structures, single-room schools, lack of drinking water facilities, separate toilets and other educational infrastructure is a grave problem.
• Corruption and leakages:
  • The transfer of funds from the central to state to local governments to school leads to involvement of many intermediaries.
  • The fund transfer is drastically reduced by the time it reaches the true beneficiaries.
  • High rates of corruption and leakages plague the system, undermine its legitimacy and harm the many thousands of honest headmasters and teachers.
• Quality of Teachers:
  • Lack of well trained, skilled and knowledgeable teachers which provide the foundation for a high quality education system.
  • Teacher shortages and poorly qualified teachers are both a cause and effect of poorly paid and managed teaching cadres.
• Non-Academic burden:
  • The teachers are overburdened with senseless reports and administrative workload. This eats into the time which is necessary for teaching.
  • A study by the National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA) revealed that teachers spend only around 19 percent of their time teaching while the rest is spent mostly on non-teaching administrative work.
• Poor salary:
  • Teachers are paid miserly salaries which affect their interest and dedication to work. They will look for other avenues like tuitions or coaching centers and coax the students to attend it.
  • This has dual effect, firstly the quality of teaching in schools drop and secondly, the poor students are forced to spend money despite constitutional provision of free education.
• Teacher Absenteeism:
  • Absence of teachers during school hours is rampant. The lack of accountability and poor governance structures add to the woes.
• Lack of Accountability:
  • School Management Committees are largely dysfunctional. Many exist solely on paper.
  • Parents are often not aware of their rights and if they are it is difficult for them to make their voice heard.
• High drop-out rates:
  • The drop-out rates in schools, especially girls, is very high.
  • Many factors like poverty, patriarchal mindset, lack of toilets in schools, distance to schools and cultural elements lead to children dropping out from education.
• School closure:
  • Many schools are closed to low student strength, lack of teachers and infrastructure. The competition posed by private schools is also a major challenge to government schools.

The situation of learning outcomes can be improved as follows

• Teachers must only teach:
• Employ young people, equip them with a tablet computer and let them be cluster administrators. One cluster of schools consists of around ten schools.
• The cluster administrators will overtake the administrative tasks and ensure that teachers and headmasters can focus on academic work.
• Better policies like transparent transfer mechanisms, which urgently need upscaling and strengthening. After adequate teacher positioning, school autonomy and teacher collaborations have demonstrated in many pilots to be the catalyst that transforms the education system.
• Teacher’s own collectives or networks built collaborations and institutional capacities of teachers.
• Digitization:
• Create a single-window system for infrastructure and mainstream fund-flows: In Bihar, only around 10 percent of the schools fulfils infrastructure norms. A study revealed that files for renovating schools often go on a two-year journey through various departments.
• The same can be applied for teacher salaries and school funds. These can be transferred directly from the State to the teachers and schools. There is no need to involve the District or Block in this process.
• Leveraging the audio-visual edutainment to make education more interesting and easier to understand for the children. This will improve the quality as well as reduce the drop-out rates.
• Implementing bio-metric attendance for teachers and students for every class can help reduce absenteeism.
• Empower School Management Committees by using mobile phones:
  • To develop a system that facilitates School Management Committee members by fostering democratic accountability.
  • Social audits should also be carried out for effective functioning.
• The Government must insist on fixing teachers’ accountability in public schools and learning outcome-based recognition for all schools, be it public or private schools.
• Better pre-service teacher training coupled with transparent and merit-based recruitments is a lasting solution for teacher quality.
• Improve the quality of teacher education by making teacher training mandatory. Example: National Council for Teacher Education Act amendment bill, Diksha portal to train teachers.
• Increase the public spending on education to 6% of GDP as recommended by many committees like the recent TSR Subramaniam committee.
• Teachers are rarely reprimanded for non-performance, while there are recommendations for removal of non-detention policy. The blame is squarely on the children, such an attitude must be wiped out.
• Teachers’ efficiency will improve with administrative incentives, better pay and a systematic change in the professional development of this cohort.
• Education policy in India is focused on inputs rather than learning outcomes; It has a strong elitist bias in favour of higher education as opposed to primary or secondary education. This needs a change by coming out with a new policy.

Conclusion:

        The latest ASER 2018 holds a mirror to a country that is aspiring to be a knowledge power. There is an urgent need to tackle some of the teething problems affecting the education in India. Innovative digital interventions to improving the teacher and education quality along with proper governance structure can help achieve the true objectives of the Right to Education as a fundamental right of every child.