Over the past four months 120 C fore field personnel interviewed 11,660 parents, principals, teachers and senior school students in 27 cities countrywide and persuaded them to rate schools in their region on a ten-point scale across 14 parameters of education excellence. Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen report Over the past seven years since the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) were introduced to an unsuspecting public, they have generated great excitement and interest within the K-12 education community. Although Central and state government ministers and bureaucrats seem unaware, strong winds of change are blowing within the country’s estimated 80,000 (320,000 according to the Union HRD ministry which enumerates pre-primary, primary, upper primary, secondary and higher secondary schools as separate units) private schools which dominate the EW annual league tables. However, its pertinent to note that your editors arent biased against government schools. Its just that almost the entire sample of 11,660 respondents — comprising middle class SEC A (socio-economic category A) fees-paying parents, principals, educationists and class X-XII students who have rated the countrys Top 1,000 best-known schools in their regions — are private school alumni and send their children to private schools. Uniquely, Indias entire 60 million upwardly mobile middle class households prefer to enroll their children in private schools, a telling commentary on the quality of education dispensed in the countrys 1.20 million government schools. Nevertheless, to encourage government and even private budget schools which have mushroomed countrywide as the alternative of poor households to dysfunctional government schools, this year field representatives of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore) which has conducted all but one EW India School Rankings surveys, also interviewed a limited sample of 1,168 parents in SEC C, D and E categories to rate government and budget private schools on 14 and 12 parameters of primary-secondary education excellence. Therefore for the first time EWISR 2015 features league tables of private budget schools. The objective of this inclusion is to encourage excellence in all sectors of education for the benefit of children from households in every income group. Moreover, in consonance with our commitment to continuous tightening up and improving the utility and credibility of the annual EWISR league tables, this year the respondents sample database comprising parents, principals, teachers and senior school students constituted by C fore has ballooned to 11,660 countrywide. Over the past four months, 120 C fore field personnel in 27 cities, viz, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Lucknow, Indore, Jamshedpur, Darjeeling, and Dehradun, among others, interviewed the sample respondents, persuading them to rate schools in their region on a 10-point scale across 14 parameters — academic reputation, co-curricular education, teacher welfare and development, competence of faculty (20 points), co-curricular activities, sports education, individual attention to students, life skills and conflict management education, infrastructure provision, leadership/ management quality, special needs education, internationalism etc. To ensure reasonable familiarity, schools in each zone (east, west, north and south) were assessed and rated by sample respondents residing…
