Against the backdrop of pervasive confusion about the character and role of private schools in the national development effort, this detailed unprecedented report demolishes widely disseminated myths of Left liberal academics and shallow media about private K-12 education – Dilip Thakore
The new National Education Policy 2020, presented to the nation by Union education minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ and his predecessor Prakash Javadekar on July 29, has received great acclamation from the Left-dominated India academy, and from the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor organisation of the BJP government at the Centre and in 12 states of the Indian Union. Four years in the making, NEP 2020 which comes after an interregnum of 34 years — the previous National Education Policy was presented to the nation in 1986 (reviewed in 1992) — has achieved this remarkable balancing act by reinforcing the neta-babu (politician bureaucrat/educrat) control and command architecture of post-independence India’s education system.
The academy dominated by communists and fellow travelling Left liberals have acclaimed NEP 2020 because it multiplies the number of government policy formulation and regulatory agencies to direct and closely supervise and monitor the country’s pre-primary to PhD education institutions, especially private schools and higher education institutions which are anathema to them.
The ideologues of the RSS have silently welcomed the new education policy because comprehensive government control of education clears the way for them to infiltrate the academy and rewrite Indian history proclaiming the glories of pre-Mughal Hindu kings, demonise Muslim rule over the subcontinent during 16-18th centuries, and in the fullness of time, revise the Constitution of India to establish a Hindu rashtra in which the country’s 200 million Muslims will become second class citizens, as Hindus are in neighbouring Pakistan. For this project to succeed, private education institutions have to be strictly monitored and controlled by the State
Trapped between politicians and ideologues of the Left and Right singing hosannas of NEP 2020, is India’s educated middle class, including the intelligentsia, liberal academics, the media and educated upper middle class, aka the establishment, which shapes and moulds public opinion. Bombarded by continuous socialist propaganda and private enterprise bashing by freeloading academics and leftist media, India’s expanding middle class is suffering a massive Stockholm syndrome, becoming enamoured with post-independence India’s neta-babu brotherhood which has bound it in irons and chains for over seven decades since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by an RSS acolyte in 1948. The outcome of this perverse romance is mass schizophrenia. Although the entire middle class overwhelmingly enrols its children in fees-levying private K-12 schools despite the option of sending them to free-of-charge government schools, it endorses debilitating government control and command over private schools to prevent “commercialisation of education”.
Against this backdrop of pervasive confusion about the character and role of private schools in the national development effort, the online release on July 22 of State of the Sector Report — Private Schools in India (hereafter PSIR 2020) — an unprecedented study commissioned and published by the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation (CSF, estb.2012) and Omidyar Network India (ONI, estb.2004), an affiliate of the US-based Omidyar Group (“a diverse collection of companies, organisations and initiatives supported by philanthropists Pam and Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay”) engaged in social impact investing in India, makes a compelling case for the defence of private education. Although it debuted too late to influence NEP 2020, this 153-page well-researched study demolishes the carefully curated and widely disseminated myths of Left-liberal academics and shallow media that India’s private schools are ‘elite’ institutions driven entirely by the profit motive and engaged in rampant “commercialisation of education”, a pejorative coined by the late Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer (1915-2014), a self-confessed communist judge of the Supreme Court.
PSIR 2020 provides startling facts about private school education which contradicts Left propaganda and ingrained presumptions of the academy and neta-babu brotherhood which has shaped education policy in post-independence India. Conducted over four months by researchers drawn from CSF and ONI, and based on the insights of a galaxy of eminent educationists (“stakeholders”), the report comprises six chapters that detail the growth and quality of learning in private schools; affordability and inclusion; regulation of private schools; global experiments in private schools governance; policy implications for learning in private schools, and scope for further research into private K-12 institutions. Moreover, two appendices detailing information sources and data-rich ‘state facts sheets’ provid ing hitherto officially supressed information about the number and growth of private schools, their demographic profiles, learning outcomes and regulatory frameworks of 36 states and Union territories of India are included in this unprecedented report, which is certain to fundamentally alter public perception of private K-12 education, and perhaps the landscape of Indian education.
The self-serving myths and propaganda of Left academics and bureaucrats — whose opposition to private initiatives in industry, business and education is less rooted in ideology as in pedestrian envy of risk-taking entrepreneurs and edupreneurs — that PSIR 2020 demolishes are as numerous as they are startling.
For one, the study reveals that far from being the choice of a thin sliver of the Indian elite, aggregate enrolment in unaided (“privately managed and entirely managed through private funds”) ‘recognised’, i.e, government licensed schools, has risen from 9.2 percent of school-going children in 1993 to 34.8 percent in 2017, and their number has risen to 350,000 countrywide. And if to the number of 87 million children in private unaided schools, one adds the 28 million in private aided schools (“privately managed but receive financial support from government”), the number of children in private K-12 education total 115 million. By no stretch of convoluted reasoning can this huge number — equivalent to 46 percent of India’s 250 million (2017-18) in school children — be classified as an elite minority
In 16 states of the Indian Union, more than half the children in K-12 education are in private schools, in Goa over 80 percent, and in urban India 75 percent. In terms of aggregate enrolment, India’s private school system is the third largest K-12 system in the world. Therefore to nurture and develop the world’s largest child population, private — and public — schools must succeed. Despite the huge contribution of private schools to national development, this sector is shockingly under-researched. For instance, far from being highly-priced education institutions for the elite, 70 percent of private schools in India levy tuition fees of less than Rs.1,000 per month and 45 percent less than Rs.500. Yet although 73 percent of parents countrywide would prefer to enrol their children in private schools, because they believe the quality of education they provide is better, learning outcomes in private schools are not significantly better. Therefore, improvement of the private school sector is, and will also remain, important for improving national learning outcomes. The inaugural PSIR 2020 suggests required correctives to improve learning outcomes in private schools and rationalisation of government rules and regulations to enable the parallel growth of India’s 450,000 private schools,” explains Ashish Dhawan, founder-chairman of CSF
Clearly, Dhawan’s advice on acknowledging the importance of private schools while framing the final NEP 2020 wasn’t heeded despite his impressive credentials and exemplary commitment to upgrading and improving the country’s low-performing K-12 education system. A Maths and business management alumnus of America’s blue-chip Yale and Harvard universities, Dhawan returned to India in 1998 and co-promoted Chrys Capital Pvt. Ltd, the country’s pioneer private equity investment firm.
In 2012 after a highly successful innings with Chrys Capital, he retired to promote the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation (CSF, endowment corpus: Rs.50 crore), a not-for-profit foundation established to promote foundational literacy and numeracy, introduce appropriate education technologies in school education and improve learning outcomes and accountability in K-12 education. Since then within the short span of eight years, CSF (annual budget Rs.60 crore) has signed up strategic and project partnerships with some of the world’s most respected philanthropic foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates, Larry Edison, Omidyar and Google foundations and earned national respect, particularly in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi which houses the Union human resource development (renamed education) ministry, and several state capitals for intelligent initiatives to improve teaching-learning standards in school education.
Roopa Kudva, managing director of ONI which has partnered with CSF to produce the unprecedented PSIR 2020, also believes that India’s private schools in which “millions of children from middle and low-income families — India’s next half billion — are enrolled”, need to be brought out of the shadows and given encouragement and support. “Nearly 40 percent of children studying in private unaided schools come from ‘aspiring’ or deprived segments (of society). However as the report shows, learning outcomes in private schools are not materially different from government schools. Therefore given the scale of the sector, improving learning achievements in private schools needs to become an essential part of the human capital agenda for India,” says Kudva, an IIM-Ahmedabad alumna and former managing director of CRISIL (Credit Rating Information Services of India Ltd), the country’s pioneer credit ratings agency which provides ratings, research, risk and advisory services to corporates and financial institutions.
Kudva’s call for government and public attention to private, especially affordable budget private schools (BPS), is overdue. Because despite almost half of India’s school going children having voted with their feet to learn in private schools, there’s barely a mention about them in NEP 2020. All the policy document has to say about private schools is that “the current regulatory system has not been able to curb commercial and economic exploitation of parents” by “many” private schools. Moreover, the new policy makes a mealy-mouthed distinction between “private philanthropic efforts for quality education”, i.e, not-for-profit, and for-profit schools and higher education institutions (HEIs). The policy document’s several references to “commercialisation” and “exploitation” by private education providers is indicative of deep prejudice ingrained in the establishment, unlikely to be corrected in the foreseeable future.
For instance, NEP 2020 makes no reference to legislation enacted by several state governments imposing ridiculously low fees and ceilings, and prescribing impossible infrastructure norms for private schools under s.19 of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Nor does it comment on the “partial backdoor nationalisation” of private schools under s.12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act under which private schools are obliged to allot 25 percent of capacity in classes I-VIII to poor children in their neighbourhood. To defray the expenses of such poor children, state and local governments are obliged under s.12 (2) to reimburse private schools the equivalent of per child expense incurred by government schools, or charged by schools thus admitting poor children, “whichever is lesser”. Moreover, in a brazenly iniquitous provision inserted into the RTE Act (s.18), government schools are exempt from adhering to infrastructure and other norms prescribed for private schools by s.19.
As if this overt discrimination against private schools isn’t enough, according to Kulbhushan Sharma, president of the Delhi-based National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA) which claims a membership of 60,000 mainly affordable budget private schools, arrears of reimbursements owing to private schools that have admitted poor children under s.12 (1) (c) have piled up to “lakhs of crores”, which if paid would come in very handy to BPS struggling to remain afloat following forced closure of all education institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic
Curiously, although NEP 2020 acknowledges that private schools have suffered continuous discrimination, admits that there is “far too much asymmetry between regulatory approaches to public and private schools” and professes an intent to create a level playing field in preschool to class XII education, there’s not a single line in the 65-page NEP 2020 on ways and means to help BPS whose number countrywide, according to the highly-respected Delhi-based think tank Centre for Civil Society (CCS, estb.1997), aggregates 400,000 with an enrolment of a huge cohort of 60 million children.
The clear intent of the educracy is to force the mass shutdown of BPS under s.19 of the RTE Act, which mandates heavy fines for private schools that fail to meet the stringent infrastructure and teacher-pupil ratio norms prescribed, from which government schools are conveniently exempted. On the contrary, your editors have consistently suggested government guaranteed soft loans for BPS to enable them to upgrade and implement the infrastructure norms prescribed by s.19 of the RTE Act.
The omission of any worthwhile reference to the country’s 450,000 private schools and 400,000 budget private schools is a blindspot of NEP 2020. Private schools should have been graciously co-opted to attain the lofty goals of the new policy. Far from being exploitative institutions from which parents need protection, 70 percent of private schools levy less than Rs.1,000 monthly tuition fees as indicated in PSIR 2020, and they satisfy the equity, access and inclusion objectives of NEP 2020. The country’s private schools are valuable education service providers that give voice and choice to parents, respond to the demand for English learning which is the pathway to high wages and livelihoods and also teach soft skills such as hygiene and personality development not taught in the great majority of government schools. NEP 2020 should have enabled private schools — especially BPS — by repealing ss.18 and 19 of the RTE Act,” says Bhuvana Anand, director of research at the Centre for Civil Society, who has intensively researched the contribution of private schools towards the national development effort.
According to Anand, an economics alumna of Mumbai and Tufts (USA) universities who acquired valuable work experience with Deloitte Consulting in the US, USAid in Afghanistan and in Sudan and Sri Lanka with the United Nations, a large number of BPS countrywide are on the verge of closure following issuance of kneejerk and confusing directives of state governments to parents to stop paying fees to private schools during the pandemic shutdown. Simultaneously they are forcing BPS managements to continue paying teacher and staff salaries.
“By definition, BPS are MSMEs (micro small and medium enterprises), but they have been disqualified from loan moratoriums and special credit under the Rs.20 lakh crore Covid-19 stimulus package of the prime minister. All this is proof of deep government prejudice against private education institutions,” adds Anand. Against this backdrop of pervasive bias within academia and government and love-hate relationship of the brainwashed middle class with private schools, the inestimable contribution of PSIR 2020 is that for the first time in the history of post-independence India, it has highlighted the vital importance of private K-12 schools towards national development. Although it’s an open secret that the top leadership of the establishment — bureaucracy, diplomatic corps, defence services and captains of industry and business — is drawn from the middle class overwhelmingly educated in English-medium private schools, it is politically incorrect to highlight this reality. In the lexicon of Bloomsbury Square (London)-inspired socialism embraced by the Congress party under the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, private industry, business and even more so education, became — and to this day remains — synonymous with profiteering, exploitation, elitism, snobbery and sundry deadly sins.
This prejudice against private enterprise was perpetuated by Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter who succeeded him as prime minister and her son Rajiv Gandhi who also served as prime minister and president of the Congress party which ruled India for over a half century after 1947. Unsurprisingly, free India’s supposedly independent judiciary, packed with ‘committed’ judges by Mrs. Gandhi in the mid-seventies, passed a spate of judgements excoriating “commercialisation of education” — especially higher professional education — as a result of which the fundamental right of citizens to promote and administer education institutions of their choice, conferred by Article 30 (1) of the Constitution, has been substantially eroded.
The ideological purity of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and Congress party would have been acceptable if coterminously, they had paid attention to developing the public (government) school system. Despite the high-powered Kothari Commission having strongly recommended way back in 1967 that government expenditure (Centre plus states) on education should urgently be raised to 6 percent of GDP, this target has never been attained for the past seven decades since independence, remaining stuck in the 3-3.5 percent groove to this day.
Moreover, the original sin of consistent under-funding of the country’s 1.2 million government schools has been compounded by other transgressions such as packing them with uncommitted, under-qualified teachers — normatively kith and kin of state level politicians and bureaucrats. Yet despite the estimated 5 million government school teachers being paid high emoluments 12-15 multiples of per capita national income, teacher absenteeism in government schools averages 25 percent per day, and children’s learning outcomes are rockbottom.
For over 15 years, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published by the highly-respected Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994) has been warning that the literacy and numeracy capability of government school children is going from bad to worse. The latest ASER 2018 testifies that 49.7 percent of class V children in rural government schools cannot adequately read and comprehend class II textbooks, and only 27.8 percent of class V children can solve a simple three digits division sum.
Nevertheless, although PSIR 2020 highlights the substantial and unsung contribution of private schools to post-independence — and post-liberalisation (1991) — India’s spluttering development effort by providing children better quality school education, the report admits that learning outcomes in the great majority of private schools are marginally rather than infinitely, superior. Citing ASER 2018, it admits that 35 percent of class V children in rural private schools cannot read a basic class II textbook paragraph (cf. 49 percent in government schools), and that 60 percent can’t manage simple division sums. Presumably, the purpose of highlighting this infirmity of private schools is a call for official and public attention to also improve learning outcomes in this important sector which schools half the country’s children.
With a continuously rising number of lower middle and working class households pulling children out of government schools because they believe teaching-learning standards and English language, even if not English medium, education provided by affordable private schools is considerably superior, it is important these great expectations are not belied. According to the authors of PSIR 2020, the quality of education in the majority of private schools — especially budget private schools — tends to be below par because the “learning outcomes are under-regulated in this sector, whereas entry and operations are heavily regulated”.
Learning outcomes in affordable budget private schools tend to be unmeasured because 60 percent of them are primaries-upper primaries whose children don’t write common board or public exams. Therefore, parents anxious to give their children better than government school education, tend to judge their quality according to infrastructure and externalities such as smart uniforms and claim of English-medium instruction, which is practised more in the breach than observance. Perhaps the sole initiative to assess the quality of academic and holistic education in affordable BPS is the EducationWorld India Budget Private Schools Rankings (EWIBPSR) introduced in February this year which rated and ranked BPS in 143 cities countrywide on 11 parameters of education excellence.
The subsequent EWIBPSR Awards Nite, at which the country’s best BPS were felicitated and celebrated in Mumbai on February 26 for the first time in the history of Indian education, attracted over 400 BPS promoters and principals, and has somewhat impacted the contribution of affordable private schools on the public consciousness. Curiously but not surprisingly, the EducationWorld India Budget Private Schools Rankings initiative is totally ignored by PSIR 2020.
The logical, common-sense response to rock-bottom learning outcomes, chronic teacher truancy and continuous flight of students from government to private schools would be for the Central and particularly state governments, to focus their attention on raising teaching-learning standards in public schools. But evidently common-sense is not so common, because disproportionate time of the educracy at the Centre and in the states is expended on monitoring, supervising and regulating private education. The extent to which private schools are over-regulated is detailed in PSIR 2020. “Private schooling is a highly regulated sector and processes to open (sic) a school vary from state to state, city to city, urban to rural areas and between affiliating boards — and can be extensive”, says PSIR 2020.
Citing a 2019 study of the Centre for Civil Society, the report states that to promote a private school in Delhi, 125 documents involving 155 “steps” have to move through the state government’s Directorate of Education, pass through the hands of 40 officials as they (documents) are scrutinised against a check list of 136 points. If this is the situation in the national capital in which access to the courts and media is relatively easy, one can imagine how difficult it is to promote private schools in other parts of the country.
Moreover even after determined edupreneurs surmount formidable entry barriers, licenced private schools continue to be subject to strict supervision under the heavy hand of government. According to another study conducted by the Centre for Civil Society — one of the country’s most respected think tanks — earlier this year, 450,000 private schools countrywide are governed by a dismaying array of laws, rules and regulations including the Societies Registration Act, 1860; Indian Trusts Act, 1882; Companies Act, 2013; the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009; State Education Acts/Rules; Fee Regulation Acts enacted in 13 states; multiple court judgements and rules and regulations prescribed by CBSE, CISCE, NIOS and 29 state exam boards.
However it’s pertinent to note that government suspicion and prejudice against private schools is not shared by the public. The country’s middle and elite classes have shunned government schools like the plague for the past half century and it’s not unusual for middle class parents to queue for long hours — and normatively move heaven and earth — to procure admission forms of reputed private schools in urban India. And in recent years, the lower middle and working classes have also discovered that the country’s 1.2 million public/government schools are a sham, established for the greater good of over-paid, unaccountable government school teachers, rather than of students.
Since liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991 — and particularly in the new millennium after EducationWorld was launched in 1999 with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda” — awareness of the transformative power of good education has fired the public imagination across the class spectrum, and there’s been a nationwide flight of children of aspirational households into private schools, and latterly private universities.
Undoubtedly, the continuous exodus from public into private schools has deeply embarrassed government, especially state and local governments (the 1,235 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 661 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas run by the Central government are better managed and administered because they are well-funded). But instead of hunkering down to the task of upgrading and improving public schools, government seems hell-bent on levelling down private schools. For instance, as stated earlier, s.12 (1) (c) of the landmark RTE Act, 2009 offloads part of the universally accepted and constitutionally mandated obligation of the State to provide free and compulsory primary education, upon private schools. By a convoluted 2-1 majority verdict in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India (2012), “partial backdoor nationalisation” of private schools was sanctified by the Supreme Court, although boarding and minority-promoted schools were exempted.
Although it’s more than apparent that the neta-babu brotherhood, and the establishment, has a deep animus against all private initiatives in education, they entertain a special hatred for budget private schools (BPS). For the obvious reason that BPS are the natural refuge of children quitting government schools across the country. And the exodus is fast becoming a flood.
Dr. Geeta Kingdon, professor at the Institute of Education, University College, London and Arvind Panagariya, professor of economics at Columbia University, USA (and founding chairman of NITI Aayog, Delhi), confirm this phenomenon. “India’s public (i.e, government) elementary schools are in deep crisis. Nationally, the number of these schools has remained almost unchanged between 2010-11 and 2017-18. But the number of students has declined from 126.2 million to 102.3 million — a reduction of 23.9 million students. The result: the average enrolment has fallen from 122 to just 99 pupils per school over the seven-year period,” wrote Kingdon and Panagariya in an op-ed essay in the Economic Times (June 7).
Curiously, Indian academics have maintained a deafening silence on the issues of pathetic learning outcomes and unaccountability of government schools emptying out across the country, and continuous harassment of private education providers. However, offshore academics of the diaspora monitoring the embarrassing status quo in Indian education tend to be more forthright.
In op-ed essay in the Economic Times (August 21), Dr. Neeraj Kaushal, professor of social policy at Columbia University and author of the highly acclaimed Blaming Immigrants, Nationalism & Economics of Global Movement (2018), severely chastises government and NEP 2020 for its “whiffs of contempt for unaided private schools” and the well-known charity Oxfam India in particular for contending that the new policy encourages privatisation of education. “Are private schools worthy of such scorn? Is anything wrong with privatisation? Let the facts speak for themselves. Over the past four decades from 1978-2017, the share of private unaided schools in overall enrolment increased from 3 percent to 35 percent. Enrolment in government schools, meanwhile fell from 74 percent to 52 percent. The Indian education sector has seen enormous privatisation because government schools failed to deliver,” she writes.
Such impatience and exasperation with successive governments at the Centre and in the states which continue to rubbish private schools and HEIs which have educated India’s most acclaimed scientists, engineers, authors and business professionals heading major multinational corporations around the world, and have nurtured the over 300 million-strong middle class, is becoming — even if belatedly — more vocal.
“The critically important role played by private schools in educating and developing the leaders of industry, education, healthcare and the professions, has never been acknowledged. Yet it’s undeniable that India’s private schools have developed the country’s entire educated middle class and the overwhelming majority of the builders of modern India. Private schools — particularly boarding schools — attract students from all parts of the country and promote national unity and harmony. They provide the high quality foundational education that leaders of Indian industry and latter day entrepreneurs need. On the other hand because of continuous neglect and poor administration, government schools at best produce shop floor and low-skilled workers,” says Sandeep Dutt, a reputed school coach and author of Good Schools of India, first published in 1998 and reprinted in 2008. An economics graduate of Delhi University, over the past four decades, Dutt has advised 176 mainly private, but also Army and Sainik schools countrywide, on ways and means to upgrade and improve institutional culture and holistic learning.
Quite clearly, it’s high time the country’s 450,000 private schools and 400,000 budget private schools which host half the country’s school going children get a square deal from the Central and state governments. It’s also high time that the judiciary, academy and fast-expanding middle class unambiguously acknowledge the critical role of private schools in national development. Scornful references to “commercialised private schools exploiting” parents and students — as painstakingly explained in PSIR 2020 — are unwarranted.
The plain truth is that private schools are institutions promoted by dedicated educationists driven by the spirit of enlightened self-interest, if not pure philanthropy. Moreover, as confirmed by the Supreme Court in the landmark T.M.A Pai Case (2002), every citizen has a fundamental right to promote a private school of her choice, legitimately pursue the vocation of education and derive a reasonable profit therefrom.
“Only thoughtful and structural reforms will give students in private schools their best chance at learning. And we cannot make substantial progress towards better learning for India’s children without facilitating this chance for the nearly 50 percent of them in private schools,” says PSIR 2020.
These are words of wisdom that the establishment and middle class which entertain great expectations of India transforming into a $5 trillion economy and a global super-power, would do well to heed, and ensure a level playing field for the country’s beleaguered private schools, sine qua non.
“Competition is the best protection against commercialisation”
Dilip Thakore interviewed Ashish Dhawan, founder-chairman of the Central Square Foundation, Delhi. Excerpts:
The voluminous State of the Sector Report on Private Schools in India (PSIR 2020) is an impressive and unprecedented research study. What was the motivation and objective of commissioning this study?
Nearly 50 percent of all children in India are enrolled in the country’s 4.5 lakh privately managed schools. We felt this sector doesn’t get attention proportionate to its scale. The report’s objective is to generate wider understanding of the contribution of private schools by synthesising data and research relating to this sector.
How satisfied are you with PSIR 2020? To what extent has the study attained its objectives?
While there is a great deal of research still to be done in this sector — including issues such as institutional constraints and regulatory systems for poor learning outcomes — the report covers the fundamentals of this important sector in primary-secondary education. It answers questions like how many private schools exist in India, who attends them, what drives the demand for them, what are their learning outcomes and how they can improve.
The report through media surround sound has been able to highlight the problems of private schools. However, the report will have achieved its objectives if it results in a policy environment that improves learning outcomes of all children in government and private schools.
Some academics have discerned an implicit criticism and rubbishing of the country’s 1.20 million government schools. What’s your comment?
The government operates at an enormous scale, and the National Education Policy 2020 has highlighted the government’s commitment to strengthen and improve learning outcomes in government schools.
However, this report is focused on improving learning outcomes in private schools — an important and independent pursuit from the need to improve the quality of the government school system. Given that parents have voted with their feet and nearly 50 percent of children are in private education, it’s not in the national interest to get mired in an ideological debate. Instead we should work to strengthen the system to improve learning outcomes of all children. While the report calls for common standards for evaluating learning outcomes in private and government schools — which NEP 2020 promises. It is necessary to acknowledge that governance systems required in government and private schools are different.
The National Education Policy 2020 scarcely acknowledges private schools except to say that parents need protection from commercialisation and exploitation by private schools. What’s your comment?
NEP 2020 has acknowledged that almost half the children in India are in private schools. It also admits that private schools should be granted greater autonomy through contextual and pragmatic regulations, acknowledges that the regulatory regime has often discouraged public-spirited private schools and that there is regulatory asymmetry between private and public schools.
We believe private schools need to be allowed to work towards improving learning outcomes of their students without getting stuck in a regulatory quagmire. Competition is the best protection from exploitation and commercialisation as we have seen in other sectors of the economy. Transparent and above-board competition has driven down prices and improved quality. NEP 2020 has clearly acknowledged the need to experiment with alternative models of education and has called for action to ease the promotion of new schools.
As a guiding document, it has given clear policy directions. We are hopeful that early next year, when we have specific rules there will be significantly greater autonomy for private schools to work towards better learning outcomes.
Some educationists believe that NEP 2020 mandates greater regulation and control of private schools than before. To what extent, if any, do you agree with this opinion?
On the contrary, NEP 2020 acknowledges there is overemphasis on non contextual input-based regulations relating to land and infrastructure.
It says that “the regulatory overemphasis on inputs, and the mechanistic nature of their specifications — physical and infrastructural — will be changed and requirements made more responsive to realities on the ground.” However, the new policy has missed the opportunity to legitimise for-profit schools governed by appropriate financial and taxation rules.
With the economy in the doldrums, how confident are you that the 6 percent of GDP expenditure commitment for public education of NEP 2020 will be fulfilled in the foreseeable future?
According to the Economic Survey 2019-2020, the Central and state governments spend 3.1 percent of GDP on public education including higher education. This doesn’t include private expenditure on education — by way of school fees of children in private schools and higher education institutions and private tuition fees paid by parents, which aggregates another 3 percent of GDP.
A commitment to increase public funding i.e, government expenditure on education, to 6 percent is made in NEP 2020. We believe that first current budgetary outlays should be effectively utilised to improve quality of education. But having said that, it is also necessary to attract credit and finance into private schools, and remove barriers to credit and finance inflow into all education initiatives.
