Two recent studies, one on the better public perception of private schools and another highlighting the incompetence of government school teachers in Uttar Pradesh, have once again beamed a harsh spotlight on the pathetic quality of education dispensed in 169,000 government and aided schools in the country’s most populous (215 million) state.

In the first study commissioned by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), 761 parents/guardians of children (459 from urban and 302 from rural households) voted private schools way ahead of government schools on several parameters ranging from cleanliness of toilets and availability of drinking water to provision of teaching-learning resources and adherence to time tables.

The second study conducted by the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), administered a 90-minute multiple-choices test to teachers in 74 government schools in Lucknow, the administrative capital of UP. Surprisingly, 70 percent of the 296 teachers tested scored less than 50 percent in Hindi, the national lingua franca and dominant language of Uttar Pradesh. Paradoxically, a lesser 62 failed (less than 50 percent) the English language learning and comprehension test.

State education officials are curiously nonchalant about the damning outcomes of these studies. “According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), while in 2006, 30 percent of UP’s children were enrolled in private primaries, by 2014 this number had crossed 50 percent. We have always known that private schools are better regarded. The study confirms this belief. More alarmingly, it reveals the extent of public disenchantment with government schools,” admits S.B. Singh, director of SCERT, Uttar Pradesh.

The SCERT study also reveals that private schools have a definite edge over government schools as English is the medium of classroom instruction, whereas in the latter English is merely a subject. Of the guardians interviewed, 81 percent were of the opinion that English-medium education is critical for the success of their children.

Academics in Lucknow ascribe the poor communication and pedagogical skills of teachers to the proliferation of substandard teacher training institutes in the state which offer training to 168,000 pre-service teachers every year, and the failure of successive state governments to invest in in-service training programmes. The failure of teacher training institutes (80 percent of them privately promoted) coupled with the unbridled growth of low-cost private budget schools (of which there is no official count) as also the state government’s reluctance to make investments in in-service training, are formidable hurdles to raising educational standards

According to S.K. Singh, a Lucknow-based academic, though private budget schools “often, though not always”, perform better in terms of measured learning outcomes, it’s because teachers in government schools are confronted with very unfavourable conditions. “Classes are larger, student needs more diverse and most children are first generation learners from impoverished households,” says Singh.

Although instances of government schools out-performing private schools are not unknown — the Central government’s 850 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 598 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas are noteworthy examples — the plain truth is that per child expenditure in these schools is almost Rs.1 lakh per year with separate and generous provision (Rs. 3,278.47 crore and Rs.1,905 crore respectively) made for them in the Union Budget 2016-17. Against this, the provision made in the UP state government Budget 2016-17 for primary-secondary education — Rs.24,565 crore for 169,000 schools — is pathetically inadequate.

The prime solution persistently advocated by EducationWorld and endorsed by the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee’s report on the National Policy on Education 2016 (see p. 18) is to raise government spending to 6 percent of GDP “without further loss of time”.

Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)