IT appears that most children of primary school age across the country are where they belong: in school. But keeping them there has not been easy, and ensuring that they learn even less so. Meanwhile new data on the trends in schooling indicate that the private sector is the provider of choice at the margin, for rich and poor alike. This, if true, is startling, and has important implications for both social policy and regulation of education.

Unfortunately, governments seem ill-equipped to think beyond traditional stereotypes and unable to reorganize and regulate the sector in ways that take account of emerging realities. Stifling over-regulation and callous neglect coexist in education and together have created ripe grounds for profiteering. Since cynicism about the state is unhelpful as a response, policymakers and thinkers alike need to sustain both the debate and the pressure for change, despite indications that governments are often tone-deaf to signals from the ground.

Can the private sector be trusted to go beyond narrow economic goals in educational provision? This question has dominated many debates in recent years and divided educators and social scientists in the country. Many fear that a profit-driven private sector will worsen quality and equity. This article examines some of the trends in educational provision in the last few years and raises questions about the terms of the debate. I also present a particular view of the private sector that argues that the choices already being made by rich and poor alike have important implications for policy and research. Equally, that the way to regulate the private sector is not through stifling the supply, but through a focus on learning outcomes and by reforming and strengthening the public sector. Equity depends on it.

 

A glance at the data gathered by the District Information System for Education (DISE) and published by NUEPA has an interesting story to tell. Admittedly, the errors and inefficiencies of data gathering advise caution in interpreting the results. There are serious inconsistencies and gaps that prevent us from making anything but tentative hypotheses about gross trends. Be that as it may, the DISE data on enrolment reveal interesting patterns for the last six years. (Table 1)

The total enrolment, all India, in primary schools for the six-year period from 2004-05 to 2009-10 rose by 15.11 million students, an increase of 13% over the period. Private schools accounted for 14.54 million (96%) of this increase. The increase in enrolment in government schools is insignificant. The Net Enrolment Ratio (NER) for primary education in the country, the students of the official primary school age as a percentage of the total students in that age range, increased from 84.53% in 2005-06 to 98.59% in 2008-09.

 

With over 98% of children of primary school age already in school, is the problem of increasing access and enrolment at the primary level largely solved? The stagnation or even decrease in total enrolment after 2008-09 indicates that this is likely. Of course, there are a significant number of children from extremely poor and marginal groups still out of school. Providing access to these communities is likely to require a different strategy from the one followed so far. Poor retention and poor record of completion of eighth or tenth grade requirements is a different story altogether.

There is no escape from the conclusion that at the margin a broad movement towards private schools across the country in primary education is taking place. This shift is likely to be uneven across states. Take the interesting case of Tamil Nadu, which has one of the highest education development indices among all the states. Total primary enrolment has plateaued at just over six million students. The enrolment in government schools has dropped by 0.82 million (24%) in the six-year period whereas private school enrolment has increased by almost the same number.

 

It appears that parents and their wards are deserting the public school system in droves. And this trend is more marked in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala with strong and relatively well-administered government school systems and a history of strong economic growth in the last decade. The fact that this is a voluntary movement, uninfluenced by any dramatic drop in the quality of government schools in the last decade, makes it even more remarkable. If anything, government schools have received good investment in infrastructure in the last decade through large centrally funded programmes like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). In addition, the percentage of students in private schools is likely to be under-reported in DISE data as it does not include unrecognized schools. Almost all unrecognized schools are likely to be privately run.

I would like to suggest that this trend reflects a tectonic shift in citizens’ choices and is likely to accelerate in the coming years, unless arrested by regulatory or political intervention. Ironically, the Right to Education Act is likely to exacerbate it. More on this later. The change is all the more puzzling because of its unforced nature. While state governments have struggled to increase financial outlays in education, the central government has taken up the slack. So deterioration in public investment in education is unlikely to be a key factor.

Clearly, large-scale private educational provision is a train that has left the station and is speeding. As mentioned above, the trend is likely to be uneven across the country, but the fact that states with better socioeconomic development and educational access head the list is significant. What could be the reasons for this trend? A hypothesis that suggests itself is that there is a culturally and economically influenced perception that public schools are unlikely to meet the goals that motivate families to send their children to school. There is anecdotal evidence that preference for English language education is a major influence on school choice in many states, even in rural areas. Since a larger proportion of children from better-off families are likely to be in private schools, families with incomes buoyed by economic growth could be choosing private schools. It is also likely that parental choice is being influenced by perceptions of the quality of government schools. Clearly, this area needs urgent empirical research attention.

 

 

What we see is not privatization, but expanding private provision of education. The distinction is important. Privatization, strictly speaking, is the deliberate transfer of resources and areas that were hitherto served by public provision to the private sector. The private sector in both situations then proceeds to offer the service, schooling in this case, through the mechanisms of the market. What are the implications of this for equity in a country where a large number of citizens, themselves uneducated, barely literate or seriously disadvantaged, need to be eased away from poverty and social deprivation?

 

The principle that governs the provision of key social services in India is that the state has a responsibility to provide those services, particularly to the poor, for free or with subsidies. This is true for food, energy, education and healthcare and was true in the past for transport and communication. Education and healthcare are not merely private goods, but have positive externalities that impact society as a whole. Education also improves equality of opportunity, and the Constitution requires the state to provide or arrange to provide free and compulsory education to all children at least till the age of fourteen.

Two aspects of private provision of education vitiate principles of equity. First the poor, if forced to pay for education, would have to set apart a much larger fraction of their income for this purpose than the well-to-do. This can have a perverse impact on the quality of life and impair their capacity to access other crucial goods, healthcare or nutrition, for instance.

Second, the relationship between schools and the families they serve is prone to serious asymmetries of power and information. In theory, the market allows consumers to access competing opportunities. This is rarely true in education. Poor families in particular may not have the knowledge (is my son being taught Mathematics well?) or bargaining power (ability to change providers, for instance) to enforce quality. Schooling takes many years and the realization that one has been short-changed often comes too late.

Most countries address these challenges in two ways. They attempt to make public provision robust in both access and quality. They also regulate educational standards and provisioning.

It is the key argument of this essay that we have failed in both good quality public educational provision and in creating and sustaining an effective regulatory process. The next sections expand and extend these ideas. In that process, I will also comment on the controversial Right to Education legislation and explain why I think it is deeply flawed and even counterproductive in many ways.

 

Quality is a difficult normative concept and we should not underestimate the challenge of defining and describing it. What is identified as good quality in education depends on the aims and purposes that we attribute to education. Often students, parents, educators and policymakers have divergent perceptions of the aims of education and the result is a less than optimal school system. I do not have the space to fully engage with this debate here. I will instead focus on three aspects of quality and offer a few hypotheses to explain the failure of the public education system to deliver.

First, our school systems should meet certain minimum standards of learning outcomes. This seems deceptively simple and obvious. However, it has been well established that the public education system is abysmally poor in this respect. And the private sector is not much better either. As the influential ASER report for 2010 notes, ‘Learning levels continue to remain stagnant, with nearly half the children in grade V unable to read a simple text; even worse, this figure seems to have declined, from 58% reported by ASER 2007 to 53% in the case of ASER 2010. ...This drop in learning levels is not confined to government schools and may be observed equally across government and private schools’ (p. 25, online version).¹

Needless to say, the trend of increasing private provision is a double blow to the poor who can least afford to squander resources with very little real gains. What then explains the shift? I suspect that the apparent symbols of quality, like the presence of teachers in the classroom, and some of the visible symbols (uniforms, examinations and such) are what the families depend on to make their evaluation.

Second, students and parents must experience schooling as truly empowering. This implies that learning outcomes should result in enhanced opportunities. One way to achieve this is to link certification in schools with either guaranteed passage to higher education or to livelihood. Another approach is through curricular and assessment reform. India still lags painfully in implementing a school curriculum that builds understanding and minimizes failure. Our archaic examination system needs overhaul, root and branch.

 

Finally, the role of organizational reform cannot be exaggerated. Our public systems are very poorly organized and managed. We persist with a colonial structure in education that concentrates power in government offices in distant towns. Armies of teachers labour with little autonomy over the curriculum or over policy. The quality of the teacher has been seriously compromised through political interference in recruitment, profiteering in teacher education and poor accountability. We need to decentralize the organization and control of school systems. There is no reason why every district should not have independent administrative authority over its schools. Needless to say, the bureaucratic and political resistance to this idea is likely to be immense.

The public education system, if it enhances quality through improvements in the dimensions above, can have a corrective influence on private schools. In short, improvements in quality in the public sector will force the private sector to reform. In a situation where private provisioning is here to stay, public schools have to set the standard for quality that the private sector has to compete with.

 

If the above section did not argue for an outright restriction of private activity in education, that was deliberate. I believe that attempts at restriction of private provision have had perverse consequences. They have, in addition, failed. Pressures of demand and the capture of regulatory bodies by vested interests have converted private education into a de facto business activity. A lucrative one at that. Further attempts at restriction of private provision are unlikely to succeed. What is important is a three-pronged strategy for intelligent regulation. First, create effective alternatives in the public sector, as earlier outlined. Second, we need to eliminate the opportunity for extraordinary profits in running schools by eliminating restrictions on private supply and by encouraging honest philanthropic private provision. The fact that Indian law does not allow for-profit schools has not stopped the private sector from profiteering, creating an oxymoronic ‘dishonest philanthropy’!

The third aspect of effective regulation is a well thought-out reform of curricula and assessment systems. Centrally planned curricular frameworks can complement locally developed and context sensitive material. High stakes testing that is rampant is least effective as a learning tool. A comprehensive reform of assessment will be a crucial part of any regulatory apparatus and must apply to both the public and private schools.

Finally, educational regulation and policy are often the captives of narrow linguistic and cultural special interests. This inevitably works to the disadvantage of public schools. Independent regulatory bodies that minimize idiosyncratic restrictions on schooling are the need of the hour. For example, attempts at imposing education in the ‘mother-tongue’ by many states have been defeated, either by bribery or through legal challenges. A huge waste of resources indeed.

I believe that the private sector has come to play a key role in educational provision in the country. Its role is no longer negotiable or marginal. While some may decry this state of affairs, an opportunity exists to incorporate the private sector as a key ally in education. At the same time a vibrant public sector can set the standards. As I have pointed out elsewhere,² the public sector has huge advantages of funding and infrastructure. If, in spite of these advantages, students vote with their feet, our public schools and policymakers have only themselves to blame.

 

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE), has been described, depending on one’s point of view, as a much needed socio-legal initiative that corrects long existing wrongs or as an exercise in state power to limit civil society initiatives and socio-economic liberties. At the risk of being labelled before being read, I would like to confess that the RTE, to my mind, while a welcome intervention in the education debate in the country, is also a lost opportunity. It is fundamentally flawed, perhaps beyond repair. However, as I argue, its flaws arise not from a simple lack of legal imagination but from more fundamental limitations of our social and political discourse and conceptions of state power and the legal system in India.

 

The RTE has two regulatory dimensions. The requirements on private schools to admit a quarter of their students from local disadvantaged groups is directed at improving access. The stipulations on teacher qualifications, student-teacher ratios and the like seem targeted at quality factors. I consider attempts to convert social goods into justiciable rights misguided beyond a point, both on philosophical and pragmatic grounds. Philosophically, the replacement of political debate and action with legal manoeuvring is worrisome and has dubious democratic credentials. The dangers of multiplying the list of rights that are justiciable are many. For one, the list of candidates for legal enshrinement is potentially endless – education, healthcare, food, clean air, water (a certain number of litres per day, perhaps), and so on. At a pragmatic level, I find the confidence that the judicial system can ensure access to and quality of education, and also of the multiple rights waiting to be enacted, rather misplaced.

As the initial sections of this essay pointed out, in a situation where enrolment is close to universal, the forced expansion of private provision to the disadvantaged (that is what the RTE provision on admissions amounts to) is going to further weaken the public school system. In addition, the failure of government to reform the public schools is, in effect, being condoned.

The RTE is a fiscal fudge.³ It has shifted the costs of meeting the mandate of Article 21-A to the private sector without the state taking any real fiscal responsibility. The second omission is a failure to convincingly acknowledge that the onus of Article 21-A lies also in reforming the state run education system. How is the fiscal burden of meeting the cost of universal education to be met? It requires both increased resources and the better use of resources already allocated. The need to commit a larger share of national income to education (through greater state spending – by higher taxation perhaps) is a long pending debate. Organizational reform of the state education system, as I argue above, is so important a link in the chain that any attempt at piecemeal resolution may well defeat the entire enterprise.

 

I have argued that the reform and reorganization of state school systems must be a key element of ensuring equity in education. Independent regulatory approaches that ensure academic quality and implement better assessment systems are an equally urgent need. In a situation that borders on near total enrolment, and a gradual but accelerating preference for private schooling by the rich and the poor alike, regulatory responses have to focus on constructive support to both the private and the public sector.

Rank profiteering has vitiated the private sector. We need to bring honest philanthropic intent back into private initiatives. This calls for intelligent and supportive regulation. The RTE has erred on the side of restrictive overreach; instead, the regulatory provisions in it that focus on quality must take precedence over attempts at improving access. A failure to act immediately towards these goals is likely to trap our school systems in a morass of mediocrity and weaken the public school systems further.

 

* The opinions expressed in this article are the personal views of the author.

Footnotes:

1. www.asercentre.org

2. Venu Narayan, ‘The Private and the Public in School Education’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLV(6), 6 February 2010.

3. Pankaj S. Jain and Ravindra H. Dholakia, ‘Feasibility of Implementation of Right to Education Act’, Economic and Political Weekly XLIV(25), 20 June 2009.