India’s 900,000 government schools are infected by a virus which afflicts publicly-funded schools in several parts of the world: poor teaching standards and poor learning outcomes resulting in high dropout percentages. This is in sharp contrast to trends in privately promoted and managed schools. Judging by the simple indicator of academic performance, in 2004 the pass percentage of students in Delhi’s government schools in the CBSE class X board examinations was 50 percent, while the record of private schools was 80 percent.

The majority of teachers are government employees with assured lifetime tenure, pension, medical and other welfare benefits. They are governed by strict qualification norms (12 years of general education and minimum two years of diploma or degree in education). But poor teaching standards are the norm despite stringent certification requirements and relatively handsome pay and welfare benefits. In contrast, private schools outperform government schools even though their teachers, on average earn one-fifth the pay of government teachers and are not required to have formal teaching certification.

In this context a recent study commissioned by the World Bank and conducted by several Harvard University economists — Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries â€” offers interesting insights into this phenomenon. Based on a survey of 3,700 schools across 20 Indian states, the study indicates that government school teachers are among the least motivated workers in India. Over 25 percent of government teachers are absent on a given working day. The study attributes chronic teacher truancy to poor “daily incentives to work”, especially poor monitoring and sanction mechanisms in government schools.

These prevailing ground realities prove that teacher performance is not linked to pay or traditional certification requirements, but to efficient accountability systems. The National Policy on Education, 1986 clearly recommended drawing up norms of accountability with incentives for good performance and disincentives for non-performance for government school teachers. Evidently this recommendation was ignored, because in the prevailing system all government school teachers move from one pay scale to the next after nine, 18 and 27 years of “satisfactory service”. What often passes off as supervision by inspectors is mere collection of data on enrollment and promotion of students.

Against this background, several propositions contained in an American paper entitled Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job prepared under the aegis of the Hamilton Project are instructive. The fundamental premise of the paper is that a teacher’s performance during the first two years on the job is a better predictor of long term effectiveness than formal teaching qualifications at the point of entry into the profession. Therefore policymakers’ traditional approach of improving the quality of teachers by raising certification requirements is flawed.

The paper recommends that teachers who receive poor evaluations during their first two years on the job shouldn’t be offered permanent positions (tenure) without obtaining approval from district school authorities. Further, it proposes that teachers who receive good appraisals and who work in schools where at least 75 percent of students are from low income families be given bonus pay. The paper recommends that government must budget for setting up systems for measuring the classroom effectiveness of teachers.

Government school reform therefore requires a two-pronged approach. First, it’s necessary that barriers to entry into the teaching profession are removed by overhauling traditional certification requirements and making recruitment contingent on classroom performance skills. Second, it requires instituting systems for ensuring that teachers who are ineffective on the job lose their chance of permanent employment or promotion, while those who are effective receive bonuses as incentives.

Significantly governments in the US and India have erred in adhering to conventional systems of teacher certification, recruitment and promotion. America’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act aims to improve the performance of American public schools by increasing the standards of accountability in schools and giving parents more flexibility in choosing the schools of their children. It stipulates that “highly qualified teachers” be recruited for government schools. Likewise, the Indian government’s flagship programme for universalising elementary education, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, provides funds for improving the quality of ongoing in-service teacher training, but does not propose any changes to the existing system of teacher recruitment and promotion.

The Hamilton Project offers valuable and viable lessons in education reform not only for the US, but for India as well. To secure a future for India’s government schools, its proposals merit close study by education policymakers. 

(Parul Sharma is a research assistant with the Centre for Civil Society, Delhi)