One of the highlights of my recent trip to Marseille and Aix for conferences
was the meeting with Vaclav Klaus. I like many have been a long time admirer of his work and ideas and particularly the way he managed the transition. I’ve to write more about this EU and climate change skeptic views.
Vipin has written an interesting piece on the global financial crisis, read and comment vipin-on-crisis
Tags: Global crisis
India launches world’s largest school voucher program
The RTE Bill has ignored many essential components of quality education, as has been pointed out by many commentators—lack of focus on learning achievement instead of just inputs, treating schools for the poor (government schools) unequally with the schools of the rich (private schools) in terms of infrastructure requirements and recognition process, and not empowering the School Management Committee to manage school finances and functionaries, to cite just three.
One idea in the Bill that would have the most positive impact is the national school voucher program for students of weaker section and disadvantaged group. This would be the world’s largest school voucher program! The government would pay for 25% of students in all unaided private schools.
There are about 10 million students in class 1 in private schools. About 2.5 million children will get government voucher to attend class 1 in the first year of the program (25 % of 10 million). Each year another 2.5 million children will be added as the first batch moves to class 2. By class 12, there will be 30 million children attending private schools with government support.
This is just the number of students who will receive direct support from the government. The Bill requires schools that are already aided by the government to take students of weaker section in proportion to the amount of government aid divided by the annual recurring expenses of the school. Depending on how these calculations are done, it could add several more million students to the indirect voucher program.
This would indeed be the biggest voucher program in the world. Though the government does not refer to the 25% reservation in private schools as a form of school voucher, but in reality that is exactly what it is. Poor and disadvantaged children will be able to attend private schools and their expenses would be paid by the government. That is what a voucher does.
With the RTE Bill, the government has launched one of the boldest education schemes in the world. To implement it properly and effectively is going to be an equally Herculean challenge. Private schools are most likely to challenge the reservation in the courts. If that fails, they would challenge the amount that the government would pay them for education of the 25% of government sponsored children. The poor and disadvantaged parents would face cultural, social and economic pressures in having their children study with those of the upper classes. These adjustments would have to be properly facilitated. There would be tremendous pressure on local governments to select politically connected for the reserved seats. One cannot rule out a very high possibility of influence peddling and outright corruption as a large number of children would compete for these coveted seats in private schools. They are many such issues to consider, plan for and tackle effectively in making this single part of the Bill workable.
Tags: RTE Bill, school voucher
This is part of the Economic Times Debate on RTE Bill on July 24:
The Right to Education (RTE) Bill is schizophrenic in addressing the issue of equality. The reservation of 25% seats for weaker sections in all private schools improves equity of access and offers a choice of school to poor parents. It is basically a voucher scheme where the government would pay for the educational expenses of 25% students in private schools. On the other hand, the infrastructure requirements including a playground would make all budget private schools illegal.
This would take away the little choice that poor parents have today and deny them English medium education. One fails to understand the logic of closing down budget private schools by the force of law. If all government schools would become great in three years, as stipulated in the Bill, these fee-charging schools would close down by the force of economics. Actually, the existence and scale of these schools would be an objective barometer to judge how well the Bill has fulfilled its promise. Forcibly closing down these schools just shows a lack of confidence in the capacity to keep its promise.
The voucher scheme, now in the Bill, has many opponents. But one issue on which everyone is united is the assurance of quality. The Bill only talks about inputs and has nothing to offer on learning outcomes. It guarantees the right to schooling but not the right to education; it promises graduation but no learning. In the haste of the 100-day agenda, the foundation of the new education system is being undermined. The government would do well to revisit the issue of quality before tabling the Bill in the Lok Sabha. As many commentators have pointed out, it is still possible to address this critical issue by modifying just three clauses, namely, 8, 9, and 29.
The School Management Committee with 50% women members could lead to more effective local governance. For that, the committee must have the necessary powers — to manage school funds as well as all functionaries. The passage of the Bill in Rajya Sabha clearly shows the commitment of the government, but it surely needs to be remade. The nation deserves nothing less.
Tags: RTE Bill, School Choice. Vouchers
The Economic Times wrote this editorial on July 27 and they also published my comment on the Right to Education Bill on July 24. It great to see the endorsement of the CCS position by ET! See where you find the parallels!
“The right to education is meaningless if it merely means the right of children to join a government school where little teaching takes place, and emerge functionally illiterate. Unfortunately the Right to Education Bill just passed by the Rajya Sabha focuses only on access to government schools, not the outcome after such access.
Innumerable surveys show teachers bunk school with impunity, that many do not teach even while at school, and that children with several years of schooling cannot do simple sums or write simple paragraphs. This approach — talking virtuously about outlays and inputs while ignoring outcomes — has long been the bane of Indian development.
Instead of abandoning it, the approach is being extended to the Right to Education. The Bill must be amended before being tabled in the Lok Sabha, to ensure the right to minimum quality. This can be done by amending sections 8, 9 and 29, as has been pointed out by many analysts. HRD minister Kapil Sibal has talked about ratings for private colleges. Surely government and private schools need rating too, and the worst should be closed down whether in the private or public sector.
Millions of poor slumdwellers today send their kids to unrecognised private schools. These are not of high quality, but parents deem them better than free government schools. The Bill wants to fix minimum norms for private sector education, which will mean abolishing the thousands of private schools that are plugging the huge gap left by government schools.
Official norms require schools to have playgrounds, which are exorbitantly expensive in urban areas, and cannot be provided by local low-budget private schools. Trying to criminalise such schools while ignoring the crime of non-education in government schools is farcical. The Bill has no provisions to ensure teacher accountability to students, or discipline. Much better would be a new bill that permits state authorities to issue vouchers to students to attend schools of their choice. Such freedom of choice would be a true right to education. The right to join a useless government school is no right at all. “
The Natonal Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI) is holding a two-day workshop on vendor issues in Delhi on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 28 and 29 at the All INdia Women Conference, Bhagwan Das Road in central Delhi. nasvi-program
What a disappointment the Budget 2009 has been! Many CCS interns and team members set together to watch but there was nothing really to discuss at the end, just disappointment. I wrote a comment for Business Standard focusing mostly on education, however the printed version has left some lines/para out:
Despite the bold talk about innovations in governance and service delivery system, this Budget takes hardly a step in ‘walking the talk.’ In the areas of education and health particularly, this failure to think outside box is simply disastrous for a young country. A wealth of new ideas like vouchers for education, health, and food security have been discussed, some of which have already been piloted either by the government or by think tanks.
Just as in social safety net areas, the Budget increased allocations for the existing or already announced schemes. For higher education, the outlays increased by Rs. 2,000 crore over the Interim Budget. It thoughtfully added an interest subsidy for loans and expanded the range of courses for which loans could be availed, including vocational studies. The minority education allocations increased from Rs 1000 crore last year to Rs 1740 crore. It gives pre- and post-matric scholarships and a new National Fellowship. The biggest challenge for the scholarship schemes has been that the government has failed to meet even its own previous targets. The National Means-Cum-Merit Scholarship of the previous year had allocations for one lakh students but only 33,000 have received it this year. There is an urgent need to budget for awareness programs and enrollment drives within these schemes.
There may be a silver lining in this non-innovative Budget: The Finance Ministry makes just broad money allocations but leaves the new ideas and the details to the line ministries! That one governance reform is indeed well achieved by this Budget! If Mr Mukherjee stays on this course for the term, he may have revolutionized, albeit rather unintentionally, the allocation of tasks across ministries. That would indeed be the great achievement of the FM.
Tags: Union Budget 2009
Some of the ideas that CCS has been advocating for education in the Budget 2009:
- Reward states that put schools under local control: The seventy-third and seventy-fourth Constitutional Amendments require Panchayati Raj and Local Administrative Bodies, the third-tier of administration in villages and urban areas, to manage local schools. However, much of the administrative controls over schools still rest with state governments. Give generous financial incentives to states that devolve school education functions, finances, and functionaries to local governments or attach part of the SSA contribution to the effective devolution.
- Bring the focus on quality of education through a new National Institute of Learning Assessment: There needs to be a regular assessment of learning achievements of students across the country. An autonomous organization (‘National Institute of Learning Assessment’) could be established (corpus of Rs 100 crore) with the sole purpose of continuous determination of learning levels of students, beginning with government and government recognized schools but later including all schools in the country. It can also coordinate India’s participation in similar international assessment efforts.
- Mission Mode for Minority and SC/ST Girls: In the 25 most Educationally Backward Districts of the country (as per the Education Development Index), implement a conditional cash transfer scheme for all minority and SC/ ST girls to pursuer education after 8th standard. A generous scholarship of Rs 12,000 per annum for classes 9 and 10 and of Rs 15,000 for classes 11 and 12 would enable them to access, if necessary, boarding schools outside the village and provide strong monetary incentive to parents to keep them in school.
- Expand all existing scholarship schemes by five times: Several pre-metric, post-metric and post-graduation scholarships are already set up under different ministries (education, social welfare, minority affairs), expand them at least by five times! This expansion must be accompanied by a separate budget for generating awareness about these schemes across the country. The recent National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship scheme had allowance for 100,000 scholarships but only 33,000 students benefited in 2008-09. Give separate funding of about 10% of the scheme budget for ‘awareness campaigns’ and ‘enrollment drives.’
- Grant education an ‘industry status’: The Minister may start by granting ‘industry status’ to vocational training, non-formal/non-school education like e-learning, and higher education. This would bring in massive capital, technology and more importantly high quality management to a large part of our education landscape.
- Innovations in Rastriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA): The success of the new Abhiyan lies in out-of-the-box thinking and innovations than what has been done under the SSA. One reform that can revolutionalise the whole of post-elementary education is to select the top 25 urban centers in the country and convert state funding to government as well as government-aided schools to a per-student funding. Then allow the students graduating from class 8 from these schools to choose the school they want to attend and let the funding follow the student. This choice and competition would dramatically improve the performance of teachers and the quality of school management.
Tags: Union Budget
In his new book, A Better India: A Better World, Mr Muthy outlines his reform ideas in the chapter ‘A Framework for Reforms in Higher Education in India.’ Despite the title, the chapter deals with school education too since the students in colleges would come from schools. I just copy part of a para (p 146) but that offers a great insight into Mr Murthy’s thinking on the issue.
“In a poor country like India, i believe that higher education, as well as primary and secondary education in urban areas, must be left to the private sector. The government must focus its attention and limited resources on building a mature platform for effective primary and secondary education in rural areas. Any subsidy in urban primary or secondary education must go only to poor children, and all subsidies should be provided directly to schools by the voucher mechanism devised by the well-known economist Milton Friedman. Every child worthy of admission to a college must receive either a scholarship from the college or a loan from a financing institution…”
Radical ideas indeed!
This comment on a NYT article is inspiring! Thanks to Priyanka I am sharing it with you.
Its challenges are immense, more so probably than anywhere else, particularly in development and fending off terrorism — but considering these challenges and its neighbors, it is even more astounding that the most diverse nation on Earth, with hundreds of languages, all religions and cultures, is not only surviving, but thriving.
The nation where Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were born, which is the second largest Muslim nation on Earth; where Christianity has existed for 2000 years; where the oldest Jewish synagogues and Jewish communities have resided since the Romans burnt their 2nd temple; where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile reside; where the Zorostrians from Persia have thrived since being thrown out of their ancient homeland; where Armenians and Syrians and many others have to come live; where the Paris-based OECD said was the largest economy on Earth 1500 of the last 2000 years, including the 2nd largest only 200 years ago; where 3 Muslim Presidents have been elected, where a Sikh is Prime Minister and the head of the ruling party a Catholic Italian woman, where the President is also a women, succeeding a Muslim President who as a rocket scientist was a hero in the nation; where a booming economy is lifting 40 million out of poverty each year and is expected to have the majority of its population in the middle class, already equal to the entire US population, by 2025; where its optimism and vibrancy is manifested in its movies, arts, economic growth, and voting, despite all the incredible challenges and hardships; where all the great powers are vying for influence, as it itself finds its place in the world.
Where all of this is happening, is India, and as greater than 1/10 of humanity gets ready to vote, it is an inspiration to all the World.
— V Mitchell, New York, NY
Tags: Elections
