The recent initiative of the government of India to reform school education has witnessed some bold measures launched by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. One such initiative is the continuous and comprehensive evaluation system (CCE), introduced in the countrys 10,000-plus schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). While the ministry seems to have prepared the ground in terms of training teachers/head teachers and installing an external supervisory system of educationists, parents and other stakeholders to provide the necessary support to schools and teachers to implement CCE, there are some missing links in understanding the spirit and essence of the system. Already notes of discord are emerging from CBSE schools even before CCE has struck root.The objective behind CCE is continuous holistic development of school-going children. Therefore the new system needs to be implemented in such a way that there is conscious and deliberate effort by teachers to aid the process. This requires that curricular and co-curricular education is given sufficient emphasis to stimulate cognitive development as well as emotional and social skills, and the aesthetic and kinesthetic intelligences of children. Under the previ-ous competitive examin-ations system, the pressure to excel academically led to the neglect of non-schol-astic intelligences — social, emotional, cultural, and aesthetic — often with disastrous outcomes for parents and students.
Within most school managements there is inadequate awareness that the reform process has to have a multi-pronged approach involving multiple stakeholders for effective implementation which is often challenging and complicated. Moreover with rapid expansion of the school education system, additional complexities in terms of scale and magnitude of activities planned by the state also need to be factored in. Many of the reform initiatives launched by the government also demand documentation of the process, development of an information base to provide feedback and introduction of corrective measures. The data collected from monitoring and supervision of various interventions provides advance warning about outcomes and consequences. This helps to fix accountability of the various actors involved in the reform process, and also ensures that they appreciate the purpose and spirit of the reform measures.
The implementation of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) — Indias flagship elementary education programme — is a case study testifying to the magnitude and scale of documentation required to implement various reform initiatives for improving quality of school education. Teachers and field functionaries bemoan that day in and day out they are asked to fill numerous forms and submit them to multiple authorities, eventually forcing them either to dilute or abandon their regular teaching duties. Unsurprisingly, they have begun to challenge their involvement in documentation and non-teaching activities which has resulted in less time for teaching-learning thereby contributing to the deterioration of learning outcomes in government schools, even as private school teachers are engaged full-time in teaching, enabling them to record consistently better learning outcomes.
Likewise the well-intentioned cce initiative seems to have encountered implementation problems. In this case too, teachers are expected to fill up multiple forms, maintain performance records of every student and subject themselves to frequent inspection and monitoring by CBSE inspectors. More important, subjecting students to frequent evaluation of all sorts increases — rather than reduces — testing pressure, while at the same time stressing the teachers who are obliged to design tests and assessment formats. As a result, even under the CCE system, evaluation becomes a major stand-alone activity, relegating core teaching and learning activities to the backburner.
It is important for CBSE and school managements to absorb that the prime objective of CCE is to de-stress the school system and eliminate unhealthy competition among students. Its purpose is to enable students to develop balanced personalities through the development of social and emotional skills conterminously with academic competence. Particular care needs to be taken that this reform measure itself does not metamorphose into another stressor for students and teachers. Therefore the focus should be on acquisition of these skills through a relaxed process of classroom osmosis and informal pedagogies integrated into the teaching of curricular subjects.
With CCE having replaced the traditional terminal examination system in less than 10 percent of the countrys CBSE and state board affiliated schools, it is important for the teachers community to bear in mind that the formal rigid evaluation tradition of testing and assessment needs to be liberalised to make a success of CCE. Above all, as this overdue new initiative in primary-secondary schools takes root, its important for the teachers community to understand that CCE is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

(M.D. Usha Devi is head of Centre for HRD, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore)