National Achievement Survey: The school education crisis

When speaking of education, it is our definition of the scope of education that divides us. Some define education as a set of skills that lead to employment; that is, education as vocational in its primary function. Others consider education as a means of ensuring equal opportunity and social mobility; that is, education as a social force to democratise human development as its primary purpose.

The results of the National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2021, released recently by the Government of India, should be a matter of concern to all those engaged in knowledge-generation and school education in India. If knowledge is the heart of education and education lays the foundation for future generations, we need to reflect on the precipitous decline in both. The NAS report is a reflection of the crisis of knowledge, as much as it is of the crisis within our school system.

The NAS assesses the health of the school education system in the country through a comprehensive evaluation survey of the learning competencies of India’s children in classes 3, 5, 8 and 10 in a cycle of three years. The NAS 2021 was conducted in November 2021 on a pan-India basis and covered government schools, government-aided schools, and private unaided schools. The subjects assessed included Language, Mathematics and Environment Science for classes 3 and 5; Language, Mathematics, Science, and Social Science for class 8; and Language, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, and English for class 10. About 34 lakh students from 1.18 lakh schools in 720 districts from both rural and urban India participated in NAS 2021, making it a representative survey.

The first concern in the results is the progressive decline in the average performance of students at the national level (in scaled scores out of 500) as they progress from Class 3 to Class 10. This decline is particularly sharp in Mathematics and Science. The average score in Math drops from 306 in Class 3 to 220 in Class 10. In Science, the drop is even sharper, from 307 to 206. While the national achievement score was itself low, in as many as 16 states of India, the average achievement score of the state was significantly below the overall national achievement score. The average performance of schools in rural areas remained significantly below those in the urban areas in most states. The average performance of girls remained better than that of boys in almost all subjects across the classes, both nationally and at state level.

Of greater concern is the pattern of out-of-school children as they approach high school. According to the survey report, the national average percentage of students for class 3 was 59%, which declined by 10 percentage points to 49% in class 5. It further declined to 42% in class 8 and then 37.8% in class 10. The secondary school transition rate crisis is one that is serious and needs mainstream policy attention. Even in the southern states, the secondary school dropout percentage is worrisome: Karnataka (16.84), Andhra Pradesh (14.8), Telangana (12.3); and other states like West Bengal (13.6), Rajasthan (12.3), and Uttar Pradesh (14.4) fare no better.

Those who continue to high school have to study in a manner that their ability to think originally is systematically curtailed, with rote learning dominating the prevailing pedagogical practices. Dropout is inextricably intertwined with the quality of learning outcomes. The disruption caused by Covid-19 in the education system aggravated the dropout rates and deepened the learning crisis in India. The impact of the pandemic-induced lockdowns also exacerbated pre-existing educational disparities among the vulnerable and disadvantaged students across India.

Why are learning outcomes so poor? The commodification of examination scores has created an ecosystem that purports to help students maximise their scores with minimum effort. In most schools in India, learning is aimed at recall and rote learning, with little evidence of any higher-order skills. This has resulted in widespread mediocrity within the Indian school education system, with students judged on their ability to memorise mechanically rather than their ability to think critically. This renders the system of assessment hopelessly inadequate: the fundamental academic goals of education should involve retention (memory and recall) of the subject matter; and more importantly, transfer which involves the application and use of the learning in the real world.

Another problem of the commodified education system is the psychology that drives it: a part of the education ecosystem in India is now prisoner to a set of artificial necessities marketed by entities that stand to gain: private coaching centres and edu-tech companies. Schools in India frequently shift the blame for non-performance onto the students while conveniently forgetting their own responsibility in such underperformance of their own pupils. Besides, in a socio-economically diverse country like India, each student comes to school with her own life story and therefore school education needs to become humane and student-focused, where effective learning can take place and every child is valued as an important member of the school community.

The New Education Policy provides the framework for how this can be done. States can use evidence-based action research to help reduce secondary school dropout rates, enhance the quality of learning outcomes, and improve Science and Math teaching. A few successful interventions could include: prioritising spending on upgrading teaching skills; shifting the focus of spending from primary to secondary schools; incentivising and mobilising the community to better manage their own schools; use of the Village Education Register (VER) as a tool to reduce the number of dropout children; and, digitising the VER data and integrating it with the Student Achievement Tracking System Database (SATS) to create an early warning system to identify at-risk students.

Schools must focus on a perspective on education that places its purpose firmly in the sphere of epistemology: of human ways of knowing and learning, fostering critical thinking, and helping our children rediscover the joys of the curiosity of the mind.

(The writer is Director, Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru)