The ruling aam aadmi party (AAP) piloted two education bills — the Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill 2015 and Delhi School Education Act and Rules 1973 (Amendment) Bill 2015 — through the Delhi state legislative assembly on December 3. Introduced by deputy chief and education minister Manish Sisodia as “revolutionary”, the proposed bills (now awaiting approval of the President who is advised by the Central government) invest the AAP government (which was voted to power with an overwhelming majority in the assembly election of February 2015) with the power to determine fees, teacher pay scales and admission processes of 1,800 private unaided schools in Delhi NCR (national capital region), excluding Gurgaon and Noida.

Under the Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill 2015, the state government will have the power to appoint a five-member committee — comprising a chartered accountant, retired civil engineer, an eminent educationist and additional-director of education, and headed by a retired high or district court judge — to inspect the accounts of all private unaided (financially independent) schools, direct refund of “excess fees” levied, adjudicate complaints and/or take suo motu action regarding violations of the provisions of Delhi School Education Act, 1973.

The committee is also empowered to address complaints made by parents of at least 20 students or one-fifth of the total strength of a school whichever is less, with regard to utilisation of fees/funds. Violators could get a jail term of upto seven years or a fine of upto Rs.5 lakh or both.

The amendment to the 43-year-old Delhi School Education Act, 1973 (DSE Act) bans all capitation fees or forced donations and prescribes admissions by lottery in all including entry level classes (s. 16A). Under s. (10) (1) (a) it also abolishes teacher pay parity between private and government schools prescribed by the DSE Act since “many budget schools which charge very low fees cannot pay their teachers at (sic) par with the government pay commissions”. “The salary and allowances payable to, and the terms and conditions of service of employees of recognised private schools shall be such as may be prescribed by the government,” says Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. 

Unsurprisingly, the bills have enraged private school promoters, principals and teachers (denied pay parity with overpaid government school teachers). According to them, the two bills fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s full-bench judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India (2002) in which the court upheld the fundamental right of all citizens to promote education institutions under Article 19 (1) (g) of the Constitution and earn reasonable profit. 

“It looks like the authorities concerned do not understand the way a school operates nor have they studied the rules laid down by the apex court of the country in related matters. The poor condition of government-managed schools is not a secret and now, just to serve its political agenda of appeasing subsidy-seeking parents, the AAP government wants to inflict the same fate on private schools. Instead, the state government should take care of its own schools. We will be left with no choice but to go to court if the bills are enacted into laws by the Centre,” warns S.K. Bhattacharya, president, Action Committee for Unaided Recognised Private Schools, an umbrella organisation (estb.1997) of six associations of private schools in Delhi which has also written a strong protest letter dated November 22 to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

These populist AAP government interventions in K-12 education, clearly designed to shore up its urban middle-class support base, show up Delhi’s subsidies addicted middle class parents who demand world-class school education but are unwilling to pay for it, in poor light. They seem to have learned no lessons from the pathetic plight of children in government schools ruined by government controls and persistent interference. 

Swati Roy (Delhi)

SSA monitoring confusion

The highly-publicised new millennium initiative of successive governments at the Centre to universalise primary education in the country through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, ‘Education for All’) programme, introduced in 2001 by the BJP-led NDA government (1999-2004) and subsequently adopted by the Congress-led UPA government (2004-14) and later incorporated into the historic Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, hasn’t resulted in significant improvement of the public primary school education system.

On the contrary, attempts to improve and enhance the SSA programme have introduced incoherence and may have dispossessed public primary education of some good-old monitoring practices. The programme has been vertically split between state government education departments looking after establishment matters and administrative work such as teacher salaries and transfers etc, and the Central government which monitors academics, infrastructure provision, teacher training and quality of mid-day meals. This duality has weakened the accountability of the public primary education system, according to a recent study Are Government Schools Monitored Effectively? commissioned by Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), and released in Delhi on December 17.

The research study led by Kiran Batty, senior fellow at CPR, who earlier served with the National Commission on Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), as RTE national coordinator and also with UNICEF as an education specialist, was conducted in 166 rural schools in Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha and urban schools in Delhi and Bangalore. Moreover in addition to 166 principals, 98 district education officers, district coordinators, block education officers and cluster resource personnel were quizzed by field researchers. “Institutional arrangements are marked by incoherence in structures and processes, lack of ownership of roles and responsibilities, lack of an enabling environment and missing accountabilities,” state the authors of the study.

According to Batty, government primary schools are flooded with paperwork with some principals having to complete 19 forms. “Principals and teachers are sick and tired of filling up repetitive forms and documents, and qualitative data is lost in the process. We have noticed divergence in DISE data and the information provided by schools with regard to toilets, drinking water and infrastructure facilities. This means that too much paperwork is hindering the collection of qualitative data,” says Batty.

Surprisingly, a comprehensive quality management assessment tool (QMT) devised by the National Council for Educational Research & Training (NCERT) is not being used at all. “Yes, QMT not only exists but it is being revised by NCERT from time to time and is the best review process for capturing information about a school,” says Dr. Kiran Devendra, a former professor of elementary education with NCERT.

The CPR report says that responsibility is passed downwards and higher officials don’t seem to be fully aware of their role in the system. In the process according to Radhika Saraf, a co-author of the report, great fear has been generated by forms and documentation in government primary schools, particularly in Delhi.

According to Vyjayanthi Sankar, founder-director of the Centre for Science of Student Learning, who subsequently addressed a Centre for Civil Society’s National Education Conference on December 19, “government school heads are like middle managers versus their counterparts in private schools, who work as CEOs. There is need to grade public primaries on various performance parameters including autonomy.” 

While rationalisation of monitoring formats is the clear-cut takeaway from the CPR study, there is a need, as Batty says, for widening the scope for conversation around accountability in the government school education system to iron out the incoherence and infuse “belongingness” into the system. This according to the CPR study, is the explanation behind learning outcomes continuing to decline despite increasing investment of time, money and effort in the country’s 1.20 million government primary schools.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)