There's need for a reward and recognition system for teachers

All the news in recent weeks on India’s education has been about the dismal performance of our school education.

First, the ‘Wipro – education initiatives study’ showed that we were even worse off in 2011 as compared to 2006. Government schools expectedly turned in a pathetic performance but the supposedly elite private schools were hardly better and their students did well only on questions that tested ‘rote memorisation’ and did not do well on questions that tested conceptual understanding and application. And then ‘ACER’ conducted the internationally accepted PISA test in Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and these showed that both states are right at the bottom among 70 odd nations. Before you castigate the two states, please commend the guts of their education bureaucrats who must have been pretty sure of the results and gone for it only to force everyone into action.
 
For this dismal scenario, explanations and reasons will be paraded, the noise will die down soon, and the shocking findings will be conveniently ignored. The other states will be suitably scared off and we can continue in our make believe world. I have good reason to say this.

Let me explain with another example. In 1996, Jean Dreze and his team conducted and presented the ‘Public report on basic education’ popularly called Probe. This report among its many findings reported that in India’s government schools, at any point of time, one will find 25 per cent of the teachers are absent from school and class.

Of the 75 per cent who are present, only 48 per cent will be found engaging the children in school work. That simply means that the government school works at less than 40 per cent efficiency. But 1996 is a long time back and we have done much since then, right? Think again.

In 2008, the same team conducted Probe II. And found that 12 years later, 25 per cent teachers continued to be absent and only 48 per cent of those present were teaching. Thus while Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan had put a school in every hamlet of India and more than 80 per cent of children were being provided mid-day meals to support attendance, teaching time remained blissfully where it was. It may be news to people outside the system but certainly not news to people who know the system. Recently, I found at a government in Dehradun, about the dozen teachers knitting and sunbathing in the winter sun, while the children idled inside classrooms.

Counter intuitive find
In 2004, Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharan from Harvard conducted a study on ‘teacher absence’ and their findings confirmed and corroborated the Probe findings. But, one point they made, and perhaps the most significant, did not get enough attention. It is time to pull that particular piece of research and place it in front of all of us.

The finding was that, when Kremer and Muralidharan wanted to find out satisfaction and dissatisfaction levels among teachers, they found that teachers who bunked school were far happier and satisfied as compared to the teachers who attended school and did their duties conscientiously. Does it sound counter intuitive? Not at all! The reason is that the ‘bunking teachers’ love our education system.  After all it pays them well, posts them in geographical regions of their choice, does not question them when they are on French leave and will also give them pay hikes as and when the Pay Commission announces their recommendations. The performing teachers are the ones who are hurt the most because they do not see their conscientiousness being recognised or rewarded while their truant colleagues of course go scot free.

If our education governance has to improve, we would have to try and rationalise the distribution of teachers across our schools to even out the lop-sided pupil-teacher ratios. Besides, if we have a system of reward and recognition, and a system of accountability, we will improve upon the 40 per cent efficiency of our schools. It is as important to reward the good teachers as it is to have a solid deterrent for the irresponsible ones.

The truant teachers will know they cannot get away while the many good teachers in the system who are sincere and genuine, will be duly recognised, thus inspiring other teachers to follow suit. Both these actions do not require finances, they require serious governance.

While the private schools must do serious soul searching on why their education is so shallow that students do well only by rote memory and have poor conceptual understanding, the government schools can make a beginning by ensuring that teachers attend school and teach when they are in school.

 A recent study involving over 700 government schools showed that if teachers and head teachers are punctual, present and teach in school and if the pupil-teacher ratio is kept to around 30:1 we have a good chance that the school will be doing its job well. This for me will be an acceptable start to a journey that I think will take many years.

(The writer is registrar of Azim Premji University, Bangalore)