Mr Sibal, let me now confess to one thing: I am an admirer of yours.Unlike your predecessors who left the educational fabric in tatters, you have shown the willingness to listen and speak out boldly.You have embraced the very essence of education — of learning through dialogue; of listening to those who are acknowledged experts in education, but not necessarily being blinded by their (occasional) self-serving recommendations.
Here are some ideas of what needs to be done urgently. The most important part is to bring good teachers back into the teaching profession.It is time that the government steps back from prescribing a pay structure — these often work very well for those just joining the teaching profession.In a few years they find that annual increments are fixed.Thus the teacher who is inept gets the same salary increase as the one who inspires students.That is corrosive.
Recommendation 1: Allow for open market competition allowing teachers to negotiate their salaries the way they do in the private sector.Obviously, the government cannot be expected to reimburse the higher salary bills a good school pays.Therefore, the government should allow schools to opt out of the grant-in-aid straitjacket. This means that the school will have to finance its own expenses.
Recommendation 2: Allow schools to charge higher fees to meet the cost of salaries and other costs. But won’t that lead to managements profiteering from education?Logically, yes. But will that be any different from managements of charitable hospitals profiteering from medical insurance?The trick would be to monitor the end result.The finance ministry could stipulate that managements charging higher fees would be subject to tax scrutiny, unless 90 per cent of such students successfully appear for a centrally administered examination in English, Maths and Science every two years.If more than 10 per cent of the students fail, the managements risk losing control of the school itself.
Instead, the defaulting school is handed over to the management which has successfully trained its students to study well.The fear of loss of control will compel managements to focus on getting better teachers, creating the right teaching environment and ensuring that students and teachers actually work together.This will allow for better student-teacher ratios and better mentoring, hence better teaching and learning.
Recommendation 3: Higher fees are directly linked to student performance.Failure to achieve the latter through quantifiable pre-determined means will result in managements being replaced by managements of schools who have performed well. There will be fears that this will make education a privilege for the rich, who can then go to schools where their parents can afford higher fees?Yes and no. The next recommendation has the answer.
Recommendation 4:Allow for cross-subsidisation of fees. If such a practice is allowed with a proviso requiring 30 per cent of the students to pay lower fees, but selected from among the brightest students in the area through a common aptitude test, you will have bright students being subsidised by richer ones.If a student is poor and does not have the aptitude for academic studies, he should be persuaded to join a vocational centre instead.
This is not dissimilar to charitable hospitals.The only difference is that we allow hospitals to charge high fees from rich patients because it is a matter of life and death.Education too is a matter of life and death, but spread over 20 years where the extent of the disease is seldom paid heed to.
Finally, we reach the biggest bottleneck — not enough good schools to cope with the demands of a young population. Possibly, three times the current number of schools are needed — if a healthy student-teacher ratio is to be maintained.Quite understandably, the government does not have the money to fund all of them. Schools must be self-financed. Since education is a state subject, creating a financial superstructure would be the only logical way to introduce a national policy. To avail of the financial benefits, school managements should meet certain norms.The state would still decide which management should be approved, but financial incentives and attendant conditions are introduced by the Centre. Should school managements falter, all fiscal benefits could be withdrawn. If the norms are transparent and the evaluation public and uniform, we could revolutionise education. It will ensure that only the best students clear Class X, reducing the pressure on colleges of having to cope with those not interested in academic pursuits.It would also reduce the risk of colleges becoming political breeding grounds.
Recommendation 5: Create a fiscal policy with attendant conditions to encourage huge investments in new schools.
(This concludes the open letter to Kapil Sibal)
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