Tag Archives: India

India

Posted on September 4, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Poor PISA score: Govt blames ‘disconnect ‘ with India

Anubhuti  Vishnoi,  Indian Express online (September 3, 2012)

Indian students participated in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the first time in 2009. 16,000 students from 400 schools across the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu took this test. Though Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are among the best performing states in India, the PISA scores of their students were dismally low, leading to much discussion in India. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), however, is arguing that these scores are not a reflection of the country’s schooling but of the disconnect between the test questions and India’s socio-cultural specificities, especially that of rural India. The Ministry will write to the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development to address this disconnect.

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India

Posted on September 2, 2012 by | Leave a comment

AP for reforms to make RTE effective

The Hindu online (September 2, 2012)

The Right to Education Act (2009) makes education free and compulsory for children between 6 and 14 years. It also mandates government schools to provide free education to all children and that these schools be managed by School Management Committees (SMC). Viewing the disconnect between the local government schools and the people in that community as an impediment to the effective implementation of RTE, the Andra Pradesh School Education Department has recommended a series of reforms. These include making it compulsory for SMC members’ children to attend the concerned school in their locality, having teachers teach in other schools in the area to meet teacher shortage, and providing after-school remedial classes for students.

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India

Posted on May 20, 2012 by | Leave a comment
‘No detention’ policy works
Thomas, L.  The Hindu (18 May 2012)

The “no detention policy” in the Right to Education (RTE) Act “is one clause [of the act] that a majority of the teachers resent. It states that until class VIII, no child can be held back or expelled from school.”  Teachers believe the policy creates a “lackadaisical” mindset in their students, for the students have developed, in the teachers’ opinion, an attitude of “why study when there’s no fear of failing?”  RTE was enacted because of India’s extraordinarily high drop-out right, but “blindly following the ‘no detention policy’ will not help. Schools must offer bridge course for slow learners, but there is little focus on that. Classes with large student strength also make it difficult for teachers to offer extra care and attention to slow learners.”  Still, teachers find the “no detention” policy problematic, as some students are having difficulties passing examinations.

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India

Posted on April 27, 2012 by | Leave a comment
Who picks up the tab?
Kumar, P.  Deccan Herald (22 April 2012)

Recently, opponents to the Right to Education (RTE) Act challenged the constitutionality of the law in the Supreme Court of India.  RTE makes education a fundamental right of every child between the ages of 6 and 14 and specifies minimum norms in elementary schools. It requires all private schools to reserve 25% of seats to children from poor families, which is to be reimbursed by the state as part of the public-private partnership plan. Several private schools campaigned against this ruling and appealed in court.  On April 12, the Supreme Court of India released its judgment upholding RTE.  Although much of the media attention has focused on the 25% threshold for children from poor families, other sources focus on the inadequate education that public-private partnership schools provide their students.

The following video from News X, a video-based India news source, summarizes the Supreme Court ruling:

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India

Posted on April 6, 2012 by | Leave a comment
PPP Indian Style
Sengupta, M. The Times of India (4 April 2012)

The nation of India has recently faced the realization that the scale of educational change is too big for the government to fund.  As a result, the private sector has to assume an important role in increasing educational access.  “The government finally announced the much awaited plan to allow private sector investment in secondary schools via the PPP route — with a few caveats, rules and deposits of course. This is a major shift in policy, though we see that the opportunity has not been extended to primary education yet.”  This policy is in line with what has been happening at the pre-school level, as an article from The Hindu highlights.  In addition to these newspaper articles, a study in Economics of Education Review by Amita Chudgara and Elizabeth Quinb “call[s] into question the claim that [the] private school effect may be unequivocally positive and highlights the potential heterogeneity in private school performance in the Indian context.”

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India

Posted on March 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment
Focus on RTE
Shrangi, V. The Times of India (7 March 2012)

This article reports on the drafting of the twelfth five-year plan, part of which focuses on the Right to Education Act (RTE) of 2009 (more on RTE here). Seeking to accomplish the goals of Education for All (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan), which was launched in 2001, neighborhood schools are to be established with a student-to-teacher ratio of 30:1 by 2013. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2011, “the two major obstacles have been availability of teachers and setting up of neighbourhood schools. Presently, there is a shortage of nearly five lakh teachers while about three lakh teachers, teaching at the elementary level, are untrained.”

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