Loss of a year in school is a lesser evil, say states & educationists

Enrolment started improving and learning outcomes started deteriorating only after RTE are nothing but myths, said Suman Bhattacharjee, director of research at the ASER

The Lok Sabha amended the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) of 2009 last week to partially roll back the no-detention policy in elementary schools in India. After passage in Rajya Sabha and President’s nod, school children could face detention from Class V and Class VIII if their learning outcomes are not at the commensurate level.

Under the 2009 Act, no child can be detained till completion of Class VIII. While some government officials said that bringing back detention is an easy fix for a complex disease that plagues the overall education ecosystem, some officials and experts suggested certain accountability was needed as a contributing effort to fix the system.

In terms of school infrastructure and quality of education, about a third of elementary schools (primary till Class V and upper primary till Class VIII) in India have more students per teacher than the norm, and 10 per cent or 900,000 teachers’ positions are still vacant.

In terms of learning outcomes, the latest National Achievement Survey of 2017 has shown that the proportion of children being able to successfully perform basic mathematical tasks reduces as one goes from Class III to Class VIII.

About 73 per cent of children in Class III can read and write numbers up to 999 using place value in Kerala, against 61 per cent in Jharkhand, and 51 per cent in Uttar Pradesh (UP). But at Class VIII, the proportion of children able to solve problems on daily life situations involving addition and subtraction of fractions is 48, 59, and 47 per cent, respectively.

Introducing regulations in the form of “performance indicators” back-to-the-school education system would be counter-productive unless a robust parallel mechanism to improve scholastic abilities of detained children exists in all schools, Aditya Nath Das, special secretary for school education in Andhra Pradesh, told Business Standard.

“Rules, regulations, performance appraisal…all these terms take a system closer to a bureaucratic system, which a system of education should not be like. This amendment would reintroduce the fear of failing among children, which was not needed,” he said.

Even in an educationally progressive state like Maharashtra, only 34 per cent of Class VIII students could do calculations needed daily. Maharashtra was one of the five states that had voted to retain the no-detention policy in the meetings of the Central Advisory Board of Education.

Yet, a senior official from the government of Maharashtra supported the amendment and said that loss of a year in early stages of schooling is a lesser evil in comparison to a loss of confidence due to inability to learn higher education after exit from school.

“We abruptly went from exams at all classes to no exams till Class VIII in 2009. After evidence that learning outcomes are worsening, we are now addressing by choosing the golden mean of introducing detention at two levels among eight (Class I to Class VIII),” he added.

Enrolment in schools had started improving much before the implementation of RTE and learning outcomes were low even before it came into force. The argument that learning outcomes started deteriorating after RTE is a myth, said Suman Bhattacharjea, director of research at the Annual Status of Education Reports centre.  

“Detention policy would bring back the scare and hamper the equity in access to elementary school education, since a substantial proportion of children in India are first generation learners,” she told Business Standard.

Experts from both private and the government sector were positive about the objective of the amendment, but not sure about the outcome.

Venkatesh Malur, president at Sampark Foundation, a philanthropic education initiative, said: “Though the amendment is a clear step to ensure learning outcomes in a better manner, whether it brings faster improvement remains to be seen.”

“Detention has both positive and negative aspects, but its efficacy would depend not at a centralised level, but at the school level. On the other hand, as developed economies like US have shown, intervention might not lead to improvement in outcomes, especially for the under-privileged classes,” Y Sreekanth, head of education survey division at National Council of Educational Research and Training, told Business Standard. “Regular monitoring and efforts at classroom level are key,” he added.