Learning of Indian children is not improving

In 2010 India started to implement a legal right to education – since then the ‘RTE Act’ has become a focus for efforts by education campaigners to improve a creaking schools system. At its heart is a right for all 6–14 year olds to free and compulsory schooling, but it also details a wide variety of requirements from pupil-teacher ratios to minimum standards of infrastructure. On paper it represents an ambitious agenda. Last week a major convention in Delhi gathered India’s energetic civil society, activists and academics to mark RTE’s third anniversary and assess progress. This was a particularly opportune moment to take stock as many of the Act’s provisions are, in theory, meant to be in place as of this month. So how does the reality match up to the ambition?

Frustration and pessimism, but also hope

The overall progress so far has not been good. There has been improvement. But it is a mark of India’s enormity that over 30,000 new primary schools in addition to 1,300,000 existing schools did little to sway the overall negative verdict. Frustration and pessimism were the order of the day. Section after section of the Act was discussed passionately and the stasis bemoaned. New teachers have been assessed for the first time through a Teacher Eligibility Test – in some states as few as 2 % have passed. Just 1000 days before the end-date of the Millennium Development Goals, there is disagreement about just how many Indian kids remain out of school (estimates range from 2.7 to 24 million, the latter a UNICEF estimate so high they are triple checking it). Older pupils wanting to get back into school are, in theory, eligible for catch up lessons. But few seem to think these exist on any scale.

There is also evidence that levels of learning have either stagnated or worsened in India in recent years. Pioneering organizations like ASER (which means ‘impact’ in Hindi) have pretty robust data which shows that in the last two years standards have declined (pdf). Some contest this evidence, but no-one disputes the fact that standards are low and not improving. Bad schools hurt the poorest and most marginalized most and ensuring all children are learning is critical to a fairer and more prosperous society. (One possible candidate for the decline in learning is the RTE’s abolition of exams in India, reducing incentives for improvement).

In one of the Act’s higher profile measures, private schools are meant to be offering 25% of their places to the poorest children, but mildly put, implementation seems ‘patchy.’ It either simply hasn’t been introduced is bogged down in the technical complexities of setting reimbursement rates or private schools are ignoring or circumventing. Many of the Act’s other elements remain mere aspirations. My colleague, Sanjeev Rai, set out new analysis of the (lack of) progress in the Hindustan Times the day before the conference. So, what’s the overall assessment? The lowest grade? Perhaps a bit more given the national and local public debates that the Act will catalyze. Who can now ignore the low levels of teacher capacity and training given the rates of failure for the Teacher Eligibility Test? It’s a huge credit to Indian civil society that there was still a lot of hope for the future at the forum in Delhi last week.

But what overall conclusions could we draw?

RTE Conference, New Delhi

Making rights meaningful: enforcement

One question is what the point of a right is if it is unenforceable? India has a whole slew of rights now which go beyond civil and political rights (sometimes described as ‘negative’ right) and set out more ‘positive’ rights to social and economic minimums, for example to food and – with RTE – to education. But this approach to achieving tangible change in children’s life chances faces a number of challenges.

The first issue is whether citizens can actually enforce these rights. There was much discussion at last week’s forum about both ‘redress’ mechanisms at the local level and also, at the state and national level, handing the judiciary a more active role in enforcing the Act’s provisions. While there is an existing enforcement mechanism (via Commissions for Protection of Child Rights), few had much confidence in it. Indeed, while in 2011/12, in Andhra Pradesh nearly 800 complaints were made, the number dropped to just 39 last year. These mechanisms could be beefed up. And using the courts through litigation or some form of strengthened judicial oversight is now more of an option: as of April this year much of the RET provisions should legally be in place.

Making rights more meaningful: winning the political debate

But in some ways the issue is more profound. There is a whole library of books that discuss the nature of rights but one particularly contentious area is how to generate meaningful and durable social and economic rights (of which education is an example). It costs money (often a lot of it) and is very political: it means taking resources from one group of the population and giving it to another.

This means that winning the political arguments about the importance of education for India’s future remains critical. Despite the fact that parents value schooling so highly (often spending what little extra cash they earn on a private school) attendees at last week’s conference didn’t think that education was a ‘vote winner’ in India. As a result campaigner’s calls for 6% of GDP to be allocated to education largely seem to be falling on death ears. Current funding is only approximately 3.5% and on some measures has even fallen in recent years.

There may be opportunities to change this. Rahul Gandhi, who many think will be the Indian Congress Party’s candidate for Prime Minister for the 2014 elections, (and who happens to be the great grandson of Indian first leader after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru) made a speech with the makings of a big argument about India’s future last week. It will, he said, be the energy and ideas of Indians that will take the country forward, and he slammed the current exclusion of millions from educational opportunity.

Engaging with this kind of political debate about India’s future may well be as critical to securing a fairer education system, as the introduction of the RTE Act. A combination of the two could be very powerful indeed.