Kerala's lessons

The State's public education system faces the threat of dilution from several quarters.

in Thiruvananthapuram

WHEN a national law is finally in place to ensure that not a single child is out of school, there is a growing concern in Kerala, which already has a well-established, though languishing, public education system, about the United Democratic Front (UDF) government's moves to sanction a large number of private, unaided schools.

The decision to issue no objection certificates (NOCs) to over 600 private schools offering the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) or ICSE (Indian Certificate Secondary Education) stream in an already over-crowded education sector has rekindled interest about the changes in the school system in Kerala, which, going by recent demographic trends, faces the prospect of a decline in the number of school-going children.

For nearly two decades now, Kerala has been engaged in an exciting but controversial revision of the school curriculum and pedagogy, with a drastic shift away from customary textbook-oriented teaching and learning to an activity-oriented, intrinsically motivating learning process.

Yet, despite the claims about improvement in learning abilities and teaching standards and increasing involvement of local bodies and Parents-Teachers Associations (PTAs) in local school development and their commitment towards improving infrastructure and other facilities, government and aided private schools have not really come to terms with the general perception about their declining quality, indicated by the steady decline in student enrolment. Nor have they been able to stem the steady flow of students to an ever-increasing number of private, unaided (even, unauthorised), English-medium schools.

The results of the first official enumeration undertaken this academic year indicate that there are 42,30,311 students on the rolls in government, aided and recognised unaided schools following the State syllabus a decline of 1.21 lakh compared with the last year. Of them, 94,000 study in the languishing aided schools. In 2010-11, too, there was a decrease of 1.15 lakh students, a trend seen in previous years too.

Even as the year's head count was on in State-run schools, there were widespread protests over the decision of the Congress-led government to give NOCs to private CBSE/ICSE schools that had the stipulated infrastructure facilities in place and were seeking recognition from the respective Central boards. The NOC from the State government is a condition for obtaining recognition from the Central boards.

There are reportedly 2,500-odd applications from such schools pending before the State government. A number of these schools have been functioning for several years now without obtaining an NOC. True to the trend in Kerala where anybody can start a school today, most of these school managements first buy land and buildings and are hence ready to demand NOCs as and when a State government feels generous about it. Until that time, such institutions present their students after several years of unrecognised schooling for Class X Board examinations through other established schools in the neighbourhood that already have the Central Board's clearance.

In its previous term from 1996 to 2001, the UDF had given NOCs to nearly 500 CBSE/ICSE schools. The LDF government, which came to power subsequently, initially took a tough stand on the issue but eventually gave sanction to 42 CBSE schools.

But if there are enough schools for all the children in the State, why should the ever-growing interest in private unaided English-medium CBSE/ICSE schools be such a bother?

Public provisioning of education (and health) facilities has long been the basis of Kerala's acclaimed development achievements. As is well documented, historically all the social reform and political movements in Kerala have encouraged school education as an effective tool against caste, gender and class discrimination. Kerala accepted early enough that mass literacy required mass schooling. It is also a State where recognition came quite early that universal education, paid for by the state, was an objective of state policy (as it was affirmed in a royal declaration in erstwhile Travancore, which is now part of the State, as early as 1817).

Kerala, therefore, surged ahead of many other States in human development indicators such as literacy levels, including female literacy levels, enrolment in schools, percentage of girl students and Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes students in schools, low drop-out rates and the number of schools (and colleges) even in remote areas. By the early 1980s, enrolment at the primary level was near universal, with virtually no gender gap. Also, significantly, even as early as 1957, 41 per cent of the schoolteachers in Kerala were women, a factor that must have encouraged many parents to send their girls to school, according to scholars. The trend has continued, and at present 71.28 per cent of schoolteachers are women.

By 2002-03, Kerala had one lower primary school for every square kilometre and one high school for every 4 sq km. According to a 2009 survey, there were only 15,776 out-of-school children in the 6-14 age group. Almost all government schools, except a handful, had pucca buildings, access to drinking water, and toilet facilities for boys and girls. Public spending on education in Kerala was the highest in the country and more than 80 per cent of it was on school education.

Government and aided schools had for long been the backbone of the State's public education system. Of the 12,642 schools in 2009-10, about 4,501 (35.6 per cent) were government schools, 7,278 (57.57 per cent) were aided schools, while 863 (6.83 per cent) were private, unaided schools. Private, aided schools outnumber government schools at all levels from lower primary to high school.

In addition, according to State government figures, 912 schools in the State offer courses in non-State syllabi, of which 764 are CBSE schools and 108 are ICSE schools. There were 26 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 14 Jawahar Navodaya schools.

Many more CBSE/ICSE schools are certainly functioning without authorisation, but, as one official told Frontline, because of the chaotic scenario in the CBSE stream, which allows private study up to Class VIII and does not insist on textbooks or curriculum prescribed by the CBSE alone in these classes, there are no reliable figures available to indicate how many of them are weaning students away from State-run schools.

The school-age population in Kerala has been falling steadily from the early 1990s, as a result of the low birth rate-low death rate demographic transition. But fertility decline alone cannot account for the reduction in the number of children in government and aided, private schools.

A key factor is the steady increase in enrolment in the unaided, private, English-medium schools, which follow the non-State syllabi. According to one estimate, between 1990-91 and 2002-03, enrolment in government schools fell by 25.6 per cent, whereas it increased by 71 per cent in private, unaided schools.

UNECONOMIC SCHOOLS

Such a competitive atmosphere has resulted in a lingering problem of uneconomic schools, not in the unaided sector that collects hefty fees and donations and hence can afford to offer more facilities to attract students, but among the government and aided schools. The State pays the salaries of teachers and non-teaching staff in aided schools and provides a maintenance grant to the managers in return for subsidised education.

According to the Kerala Education Rules, a school becomes uneconomic when the number of students in each class/batch falls below 25. A rule of thumb, for example, has been to consider a school with four classes/batches as uneconomic if the total strength falls below 100. But considering the pressure that invariably accompanies any move to close down such schools in Kerala, the rule has now come to mean that a school is uneconomic if the total strength falls below 50 students, a government official said.

Along with uneconomic schools comes a category of protected teachers who are rendered surplus as a result of declining student strength. They were originally recruited by private-aided school managements at their own terms, in most cases after accepting donations, but their salaries, even when they are found to be in excess, continue to be paid by the government.

Teacher costs account for 85 per cent of the total government spending on education in Kerala.

In 2009-10, the fall in student enrolment resulted in 3,962 schools being considered uneconomic, out of which 1,974 were government schools and 1,988 were aided private schools. Of the 2,916 protected teachers, 1,189 were redeployed in government schools and 359 in other aided schools, while 899 were retained in the parent schools.

The original decision of the government was to close down uneconomic schools. But very few uneconomic schools were eventually closed down. Instead, governments began to neglect such schools, by not filling retirement vacancies, and so on, and such institutions continued to have a sub-normal survival with further decline in student strength.

The quality improvement programmes may have benefited schools in the urban centres. But in the rural and semi-urban centres schools are yet to improve [their standards] and even poor parents are reluctant to send their children to such schools, T.K. Jose, a senior government official who spearheaded the Kudambashree poverty eradication programme, said.

The situation is worse in the aided private school sector, according to Education Department officials. This year, the fall in the number of students was 94,000 in the aided schools, whereas it was about 20,000 in the government schools.

Kerala's education system is about to face the same fate as its once-acclaimed health care system. As its market share went down, below 40 per cent or so, the quality of health care in the government system, except perhaps in the medical college hospitals and a handful of district or taluk hospitals, went down considerably and people increasingly began to depend on costly private hospitals. Government hospitals became more and more uneconomic with further erosion in quality. That is going to happen to public education in Kerala, too, James Varghese, Secretary, General Education, told Frontline.

In this context, the introduction of some of the provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, too, may prove to be troublesome in Kerala, he said. With the Act insisting on neighbourhood schools within walking distance of every child's residence, even a State like Kerala, already saturated with schools, will have to open new schools at least about 200 to 300 more. When you go on adding schools, the student strength will naturally decline and you will be left with more uneconomic schools as a result, he said.

Another important problem for the State will be the provision in the Act for 25 per cent reservation of seats as State quota in unaided private schools for neighbourhood children from deprived sections of society. Kerala's public school system already covers almost all such children. Yet it will be forced to subsidise the cost of education of the 25 per cent of the students in the private schools every year, as well. Moreover, with underprivileged students seeking admission in private schools, there will be further erosion in the number of students in the government and aided schools.

The popularity of the unaided CBSE/ICSE schools, even among parents from underprivileged sections of Kerala society, has often been seen as a testimony to the poor quality of education in the government and aided schools. So, has the recent curriculum reform in Kerala been an utter failure?

The State system has proved to be far superior to the CBSE stream. For example, 11 States have adopted the CBSE syllabus in their State schools. Studies conducted by independent agencies have consistently shown that children in the Kerala State stream have much better learning achievements than students in these States. Other States have already started treating the curriculum revision in Kerala as a model. But within Kerala, it is yet to get widespread recognition, James Varghese said.

Kerala's public education system faces the threat of dilution from several quarters. Eventually, it will only affect the poor, who will then be left with a much weakened system, while the middle class and the rich will seek the unaided CBSE/ICSE schools more and more, he said.

Education is free in both government and aided schools. It means that 93 per cent of the schools in Kerala offer free education, which is a boon for poor students. This is the basis for the acclaim that the universal, secular and unifying system is a great leveller of Kerala society. By offering NOCs to CBSE/ICSE schools, the UDF government is perhaps indicating a dangerous course correction, putting pressure on parents from low-income backgrounds, too, to send their children to private schools at unreasonable costs in search of doubtful quality or force them to be excluded from the mainstream.

Even as early as 2005, the Human Development Report prepared for the State government by the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, cautioned: That private sector provision is qualitatively superior is supposed by the general economic logic of quid pro quo, that a price ensures and enforces quality. Such arguments are both baseless and dangerous. Baseless, because conveniently forgotten here is the fact that there is no free lunch: behind every public provision, there is a price in the form of taxes from the public and this price should have ensured and enforced quality as much as it does in private provision. Dangerous, because it props up an unwarranted bias for private sector where there is an explicit provision for exclusion. If education, as perceived in Kerala, is a major way of levelling society, then unequal schooling due to varying educational quality operates against this. Hence, reallocation of public funds to improve quality of basic education in Kerala is essential for the benefit of children of low-income families.