I am returning back to writing on my blog after a long time and that too with something as serious and complex as "learning achievement levels of kids in government schools." The topic has become a toast for the nation's intelligentsia and strangely eludes an easy solution. As part of my program intervention in government schools in Odisha we did a learning achievement baseline study and the results are interesting. I thought it will be interesting to share the challenges and the key insights thrown up by this study. This study was conducted with more than 5000 students in 87 government upper primary schools spread across six districts of Odisha.
Challenges and Key Insights
A bottom heavy structure with a large number of students in the lower
performing brackets is the main challenge. Almost all of them are back
benchers, having very low self-esteem and in need of remediation. Classroom
observations show that teachers also are reinforcing the status quo by
focussing on the front benchers only. Just training and sensitizing them will
not work. Teachers need to be coached and mentored at the school level and
constantly sensitized to the fact that they should not be neglecting the back
benchers. Equity is the need of the hour and it should be ensured that not only
the quality of instruction improves but it also reaches each and every single
child.
While the best performing school systems in the world manage to stay at
the top by following a beginning of the
pipe approach by carefully selecting, meticulously training and grooming
the candidates for the job of a teacher, we on the contrary follow an end of the pipe approach by trying to
remedy a situation whereby a large chunk of people who do not have any aptitude
for teaching, end up as contractual teachers. Entering the teaching profession
is an option of the last resort. This has sadly made teaching a low status
profession in India, where teaching figures somewhere down the list, as a
career option for the young generation. This has created a vicious cycle in
that the low status of the profession sends a market signal which attracts poor
quality candidates or candidates who take to teaching as a profession of the
last resort. Add to this the poor quality of teaching in the teacher training
institutes where the trainees do not get much of a practical exposure to
teaching at the school level. In addition to that there are a large number of
untrained teachers also at the school level.
