Monday, April 23, 2012

Implementing the RTE: Practical Solutions


Since the government passed the Right to Education Act (RTE), the nation has been feverishly debating the tenets. Now that the Supreme Court has validated the act, the reality has finally set in. This act is law and thus, has to be implemented.

In the last few days may educators and pundits have written about the RTE, from both positive and negative points of view. As expected, Left leaning commentators like Mihir Sharma have lauded the act, while others like Meeta Sengupta have been more critical (see here, and here). Basically in a simplified fashion, the points for and against the act are these:

For
  • India is an elitist country and quality education has been restricted to a few. The RTE democratises education.
  • Schools that have taken government aid or land at subsidised rates have a duty to abide by government rules and policies. In any case the government already mandates many rules for private schools.
  • Education needs to be more democratic to give real life lessons to kids. In foreign countries, every one studies together regardless of social background.
  • It is the duty of private citizens to provide for their less fortunate brethren in terms of education, in terms of increased fees.


Against
  • This is forced social engineering. You cannot put different societies into a room together and force them to get along. There will be grave adjustment issues.
  • The government should not have a say in what private schools do or who they admit, especially since they are not helping in any way.
  • The law is illogical and un-implementable. There are too many unanswered questions and the government has taken no step in trying to even provide a practical approach to addressing them.
  • The government is outsourcing, free of cost, its duties of educating society, while not caring about abysmal standards of its own schools.
  • The school fees of children in private schools will increase, as they will have to subsidize 25% extra children and the school will obviously pass the burden on to them. This will cause a huge burden to middle-class families who struggle to send their children to private schools.


Personally, while I understand the social concern, and support the concept of egalitarian education, I find the the law to be more theoretical than practical. I feel it's badly thought out, badly framed, and has little connection to the real world it will impact. There are little or no guidelines for implementation, and based on the Education Minister's remarks it would seem that the law will be implemented, in most cases, on a wing and a prayer. Supporters of the law could call me biased and there's a case to be made for that, since I send my daughter to a private English medium school, automatically catapulting me to the ranks of the “elite”. However, my attempt is, independent of personal preferences, to see how best it can be implemented. The law is passed and the die has been cast. I am more focused on the addressing the real-world problems that implementation will undoubtedly throw up. 



Implementation

It has to be implemented, we all know that now. The question is - what is the most effective (I was admonished for using the word "painless") in a previous draft) method in which it can be implemented to the best benefit of everyone it affects? What are the practical ramifications of the law? Most importantly, what practical measures can a school take to ensure compliance with the least amount of disruption? I think there are three main angles that need to be considered by schools while implementing the RTE. These pertain to Social, Educational, and Financial disparities between the children.

1. Educational Disparity

Adjustment issues can be mitigated by initially creating a separate section for underprivileged children. Now please note, I am not advocating segregation. What the separate section will do is provide a path to gradually assimilating them to a new culture and way of schooling they might not have been used to in the past. This will work like a remedial education class, with the objective that after a fixed time period, say a year at most, all the children will be integrated into mixed classrooms.

The temporary separate academic activities for the underprivileged kids, would ensure that the teachers can concentrate on coaching them to knowledge and skill levels equivalent to an ‘elite’ child before they can study together. This will ensure that the poor kids do not feel inferior or insecure at the beginning, and also that the class is not interrupted while the teacher has to repeatedly explain linguistic concepts to some kids, where the others are proficient already.

2. Social Disparity

Along with education, the school will also have to ensure that there is a path towards a future where the social disparities between the children do not impact their growth and education negatively. This is easier said than done because class biases are frequently ingrained in children from an early age on both sides of the social tracks. However, children are also very adaptable and far more willing to abandon their biases when presented with the correct opportunities and education – both by teachers and parents. One way of doing this effectively is through sporting activities.

It is my belief that even as the academics is disaggregated at the beginning via different classrooms, the games/sports time SHOULD be spent together, giving the kids from different social and financial level/strata an opportunity to interact while at their most equal, carefree, and happiest.  And it has been observed, and you might agree, that children bond best while playing together without being influenced by social encumbrances. Other non-academic areas of integration would include cultural activities – music, singing, poetry, and dramatics – where all kids can participate at equal levels. This non-academic interaction will foster a healthy respect for each other’s abilities and talents outside of the pressure of academic comparisons and performance.


This phased integration will help in ensuring that the “culture shock” is reduced and dispersed over a period of a a few months (maybe a year at most) and the children can ease into studying, and interacting with each other on an equal basis.

3. Financial Disparity

One of the elephants in the room that “elite” parents fear but don’t talk about, except in the safe confines of their living rooms, is the fear of their kids being targeted because of their financial status. This targeting, they fear, can take the form of snatched away food from tiffin boxes, or stolen watches, compass boxes, pens etc. This fear, however unfounded, makes them hesitate to put their kids in mixed settings.

While this fear might rarely realized in practical life, there still is the  possibility that a "poor" child will be enticed at the sight of a shiny new compass box that his parents would not be able to afford him/her, especially given the predilection of rich parents nowadays to gift expensive baubles to the apples of their eyes to prove their love on a continuing basis.

The only effective way to address this bias is for the school to decree that the students not carry any item to school that be above a certain monetary value. The school can, for example, mandate a couple of brands of reasonably priced compass boxes that everyone should purchase. The same goes for notebooks, calculators etc. Kids have no need of wearing watches in junior school, in any case. Cellphones and PlayStations should be banned outright. Many schools have actually implemented this rule already, with fair success. Now this will have to be done not just as a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have.


Conclusion

I feel these measures would ensure that the act can be implemented with the least amount of disruption in the educational lives of our children. It is not going to be easy, and there will be many barriers to the successful implementation of the RTE, but since implementation is imminent, the best way to do it is in a planned, calm, and practical manner. To do this we have to both confront and address our experiences, biases, and conditioning and take measures to mitigate as many possible problems as we can think of.

Finally, I sincerely believe that the school boards like (ICSE, CBSE, the state and international boards will have to get into the act to ensure that their curriculum is amended to address the new requirements. Innovations like multi-track curricula, incorporation of regional language education into the main curriculum, and flexible scientific testing will be needed to allow all children to perform at a certain level. It is only when the curricula are flexible enough to adapt itself to changing realities that the act will really be successful in implementation. 

3 comments:

TheWalker said...

I think that a good 'side effect' of the RTE will be that the future generations will learn to co-exist. One of the reasons why people like us who've studied in the public school system are able to be better managers is that by default, we have been exposed to diversity in all walks of life during our school years.

One essential life-skill absent these days is empathy... IMHO, that is because our children are brought up in a sheltered environment, and they interact with children who are not very different from them, at least economically.

The provisions of the RTE will enable them to accept and appreciate diversity as an essential part of life, and to me, that by itself will be the greatest win.

Unknown said...

There are oing to be challenges beyond the implementation of RTE. As you rightly mentioned, our government is bent on outsourcing all its responsibilities, including education. Instead of rationalising funding at all levels and improving the existing classrooms and teaching methods, it hopes to piggy-back on to the infrastrucure established by the public schools.

The question is whether public schools alone will be in a position to extend the education to the masses. I do not think so.

A much better approach would have been to reduce the defence budget and allocate more funds to government funded institutions. Train teachers in government schools so that they deliver effective lessons.

The sociological ramifications of children from various strata of society interacting in artificial systems would make for brilliant academic studies but nothing more.

Dada, would you be able to do a further analysis of all aspects of this law?

Shan said...

George and Surender: I agree the law will promote diversity, and it should. However, when framing a law, it is the responsibility of the government to provide the means of implementing it. What the government has simply done is to extend the reservations policy that is has in the government jobs area to schools. However, the differences are stark. The government pays salaries for its institutions, but now it wants private entities to pony up huge amounts of money for its own social engineering endeavours. If you were running a small school in your home town and suddenly the government said you have to do with only 75% of the money you get so far because 25% of children study free, what would you do? The options are a) pass on the fee increases to the paying parents, many of whom might be economically stretched themselves, or b) reduce standards and costs for the entire school so that you meet the lowest common denominator standards. Do you know what Sibal's solution is? He says the schools can look for corporate and private donations and CSR activities to meet the shortfall! Which corporate philanthropist would a school in Guntur approach for donation? And more importantly why would they suddenly help a school out on their own? Sibal has, therefore effectively washed his hands off the implementation, basking in the glory his "progressive" scheme has provided him, along with enthusiastic support from liberal left activists. I will not be surprised if the next step is to levy a tax in corporate entities to help schools meet the RTE requirements. Basically we are regressing to the Socialistic days when making money or being a private profit making entity was seen inherently as a sin, and therefore culpable and punishable by government decree.