Solutions to Change

LESSONS IN IDENTIFYING EFFECTIVE TEACHERS Parul Sharma Government schools in India are host to a problem that afflicts public schools in several parts of the world today: poor teaching standards and consequent low academic performance coupled with high drop out rates. These trends in public schools stand in stark contrast to trends in private schools. Thus, going by the simplest indicator of academic performance, in 2004 the pass percentage of students in Delhi’s government schools in the Secondary Examination was 50% while that for private schools was 80%. Teachers constitute the single largest group of educated and professionally qualified workers in India. Regular teachers are government employees with assured lifetime tenure, pension, medical and other welfare benefits. They are governed by strict entry and qualification norms (one to twelve years of general education and minimum two years of diploma or degree in education). Low teaching standards and accompanying problems prevail...

OBC Reservations: An IIT Faculty Member's View Prof. M. Balakrishnan, IIT Delhi Nearly six decades after independence, this country is planning to announce that majority of its population is backward and does not have equal opportunity to pursue education and employment. Along with this, it is going to open up a Pandora's Box by various caste groups to be classified as "backward". What an interesting way to begin the 21st century when finally India was beginning to emerge as a serious player in the new knowledge economy! The major carrot that is being doled out is the seats in the elite medical, engineering and management Institutes. What bothers me is no one is interested in even consulting the people who have built these Institutions and brought them to this stature. I have strong views on efficacy of reservations in general but here I would confine myself to the issues concerning IITs. At least here with my three decade long association, I can claim to know som...

The Delhi High Court has banned private schools from holding interviews to their nursery classes. But in an attempt to laud this decision that saves parents the stress of admissions, we ought not to overlook the larger picture. There is a dearth of schools in this country. According to most private schools, the fairest attempt to cap the multitude of applicants is to test their merit, talent, intelligence, presence of mind, etc. One may argue that judging young children on the basis of these skills is probably not as just as it seems. After all, the economic and social conditions of the family do play an important role in moulding those qualities at a young age. While banning interviews may equalize access to good education for all children in the interim, it does not stand as a long term solution to the problem. The problem, here, is the lack of good schools. The solution to that problem would be to assuage the mound of laws and rules restraining new schools to be set up. The Delhi go...

A Ticket to a Better Education: Philippines Education Voucher Scheme Philippines public schools have been riddled with high teacher-pupil ratios and poor infrastructure facilities. In spite of having the advantage of an English speaking population and an enviable literacy rate of about 93 per cent, they have been slower in building their knowledge economy status as compared to their Asian counterparts. This is largely attributed to the depreciating quality of public school education in Philippines. In the recent years to address the demand for good quality education, the supply of private education has increased. While public school education is free, private elementary and high school education in the Philippines can cost anywhere between 2000 to 5000 pesos per year. A large number of Filipino children who cannot afford better quality private education continue to slump with free public education. To bridge this disparity in the quality of education between the haves and the have-nots...

Now, Delhi Govt clears way for more schools Neha Singh New Delhi, May 4: TO tackle the huge demand for admissions, the Delhi government has paved the way for setting up more schools. In a significant move, the Education Department has lifted the cap on the number of ‘‘essentiality certificates’’ that are granted to each district. As per the rules, any application for starting a new school must be accompanied by an ‘‘essentiality certificate’’, granted after surveying the needs of the district. So far, there was a fixed cap on the number of these certificates issued per district, varying according to the population. But the new rule means that anyone who wants to start a new school can do so, regardless of the number of existing schools in the district. Of course, the proposed school will have to meet the other basic criteria — budget, teaching staff, structured transportation and registration with the land agency concerned. There are approximately 12 lakh children out of schools in De...

Floating school: Education delivered at home Tejeswi Pratima Saturday, March 11, 2006 (Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh): Educationists in Andhra Pradesh hit upon the idea of a floating school to draw children who would otherwise be helping parents at work.A perennial problem in rural India is of parents refusing to send their children to school. So a team of enterprising educationists in Andhra Pradesh took the school to where the children are. Every morning at nine, a special boat comes to pick up fishermen's children who otherwise remain busy helping their parents. Now they spend the day the boat school near Kakinada, in Andhra Pradesh's East Godavari district. "I used to go for fishing with my parents. Now I want to study," said Sita, a student.Home deliveryThe fishing community here was reluctant to send their children to school and preferred that they helped them at work. So the administration under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme decided to take the school to th...

Education still a distant dream for street children Express News Service Kolkata, April 19: In a recent survey by some NGOs in Kolkata it has ben revealed that education amongst the homeless, or rather the street children, is on the back burner. Even though elementary education for children in India is a fundamental right, it is noticed that many of the homeless or street children are being continuously deprived of this right. Says Shabir Ahmed of Calcutta Samaritans, an NGO that works in projects concerning the pavement dwellers, “Elementary education is a fundamental right and it is guaranteed in the Constitution of India. But reports show that many street children or homeless children are not receiving the basic education.” Generally the parents shy away from sending their wards to the local schools but Ahmed emphasises that it is not the reason for such high percentage of street children not receiving elementary education. There are two primary reasons for the discrepancy. “The ma...