RTE is not causing schools to close - APF Report

A new report from Azim Premji Foundation (APF) argues that India's Right to Education Act (RTE) "does not in any way by design seek closure of private schools, so long as [the Act's] norms are met. As revealed in this report, it doesn’t seem to result in closure of private schools in practice either, at least in districts of the 7 States and 1 UT where the Foundation operates." (p. 8)

As the report, "Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and Private School Closure in India" (11 pages; PDFs here and here) notes, this is not the dominant narrative about the effect of RTE on private schools. Predictably, the report has raised something of a storm. "Many schools, mostly those under state board syllabus, have voluntarily closed down unable to bear the rigid RTE rules. The study is blind to ground realities," said the Secretary of the Associated Managements of English Medium Schools in Karnataka. A newspaper reports him saying that, "over 200 economy schools in Karnataka have closed due to the RTE". In contrast, the APF report finds that in the 69 districts that it surveyed:

only five schools closed down out of a total 34,756 private schools. Of these five schools, four schools were closed in Karnataka (all four in Yadgir district) and only one school was closed in Bageshwar district in Uttarakhand. It could not be ascertained whether non-compliance of RTE alone was the reason for these school closures. Also, whether the schools that were closed, were ‘recognized private’ or ‘unrecognized private’ schools is not stated. ‘Unrecognized private’ schools in any case do not have the license to function. (p.3) 

Punjab is one of the states which the APF report does not survey. A 2014 report by Centre for Civil Society (CCS), informs us that, "The education department of Punjab released a list of 1170 private schools closed down for the year 2013-14. While approaching the school owners of private schools, it came into limelight that some of the schools have been shut down under the RTE before the prescribed deadline [April 2014]." The CCS report (7 pages, PDF here) then goes on to investigate in two districts of Punjab the impact of these closures on the various stakeholders.

Thus the picture may be varied across the country and needs more investigation.

Early childhood report overlooks language

The Law Commission of India has just published a good report called "Early Childhood Development and Legal Entitlements" (PDF). In a brief 73 pages it offers a useful overview of the concept and importance of early childhood care; the international conventions, treaties and declarations on the subject; the (Indian) constitutional context; and the various national policies and schemes dealing with health and nutrition, as well as care and education. The report concludes with a list of recommendations to strengthen the "statutory backing" for the various provisions already in existence.

The recommendations include making mandatory free preschool education (rather than optional as it currently is under the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RtE)). But the report is silent on what this might mean for children of Indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities (ILM -- incidentally, ilm is the Urdu word for knowledge and learning). As things stand, when a ILM child enters primary school, hardly anywhere in the country does she receive education in the mother tongue. The report's silence on the issue of medium of instruction indicates that for ILM children preschool education too will be in a non-mother tongue.

This flies in the face of the report's declaration that, "There should be a reference to quality of education in the Rules. Education for children under six must mean quality education and care to prepare them for elementary school and anything less than that should not be called education" (p. 61). Brave words! Similarly, the report also enjoins the state to provide training of preschool teachers "to ensure quality standards and a proper implementation of the best methods of promoting play and learning" (p 72). Let us hope that these admonitions to provide quality education through play and learning translate into a mother-tongue-medium education for our children.

Social Scientist issue on education in India

The current issue of Social Scientist (Sep-Dec 2010; vol. 38, no. 9-12) has some excellent articles on the current state and future of school and higher education in India. Together, these essays constitute a powerful critique of the recent and forthcoming education "reforms" in the country.

As Prabhat Patnaik argues in the Editorial: "education is being transformed into a commodity, like automobiles or washing machines, that will be produced by capitalists for profit and bought by those who can afford it."

If these analyses (see Contents below) are accurate - the arguments are certainly cogent and forceful - then we as a society are headed for some very bad times indeed.

On the subject of language, Anil Sadgopal (whom we've met before in this blog), in his thorough-going critique of the Right to Education Act (RTE), considers "The question of mother-tongue and multi-linguality":

"The knee-jerk policy response assumes that learning of 'good' English is best achieved through English medium schools, starting from nursery or kindergarten stage upwards to higher education.... This policy discourse also ignores the global research that reinforces the powerful pedagogic role played by the mother tongue as part of the multi-linguality (this may include English too) of the majority of the children in plural societies like ours in acquiring subject knowledge as well as learning languages other than one's mother tongue....

"The consequence of this misconception and lack of a sound policy is the widespread phenomenon of a rapid attrition of the capacity to articulate one's thoughts or ideas. The vast majority of the Indian children grow up in the prevailing multi-layered school system without acquiring the capacity to learn and articulate in either the state language or English and, in the process, losing the capacity to do so in one's mother tongue as well."

As I've blogged earlier, RTE includes the following opt-out: "medium of instructions [sic!] shall, as far as practicable, be in child's mother tongue".



Contents

1. Editorial Prabhat Patnaik
2. "Towards Democratization of Education in India" Amiya Kumar Bagchi
3. "Right to Education vs. Right to Education Act" Anil Sadgopal
4. "Education and the Politics of Capital" Ravi Kumar
5. "Policy Crisis in Higher Education: Reform or Deform?" B G Tilak
6. "UPA's Agenda of Academic 'Reforms'" Vijender Sharma
7. "Advantage In-bound Trade in Higher Education, or Advantage Human Capital in Out-bound Trade" Binod Khadria
8. "Governance of Indian Higher Education: An Alternate Proposal" Dinesh Abrol
9. "Commentary: Science Education" S. Chatterjee
10. "Obituary: Tapas Majumdar" Prabhat Patnaik