Education in India at the crossroads

The debate

Roughly one decade ago, there was a strong debate in India about
how we should tackle the problem of education. There were two
views:

Intensification

On one side were those who felt that
nothing was fundamentally wrong; all that was needed was more
money. So we should just continue building more government schools
and hiring more civil servants to act as school teachers, and we'll
be fine.

Reform

On the other side were the reformers, who argued
that the basic incentives in Indian education were wrong. Putting
more money down a dysfunctional system was pointless.

The Intensifiers won this debate. An informal coalition of
educationists (i.e. the incumbent education system) and leftists came
together, supported by the World Bank, which pushed for mere
enlargement of Indian education, without questioning the
foundations.



All of us are involved in this story at many levels. At the
simplest, we are the customers of the education establishment. We pay
income tax and VAT and a few other taxes. On top of this, we pay the
2% education cess. In return for this, we get certain educational
services. These influence our kids, and they influence all the young
people that we encounter in this young country. Trillions of rupees
have been spent, and more than a decade has gone by. It is time to
assess the performance of this strategy.



Three blocks of evidence are now visible, which tell us that the
Intensifiers were wrong. The old strategy, which was invigorated by a
vast rise in spending, was the wrong one.

Evidence #1: OECD PISA results for India

This story is well told in a
recent blog post by Lant Pritchett. Bottom line: The first
internationally comparable measurement of what children learn has
been done. The sample correctly includes urban and rural children; it
correctly includes children going to private or public schools; there
are no first order mistakes in what was done. It tells us that Indian
education policy has failed miserably: the results have come out at
the bottom of the world.

Evidence #2: ASER 2011 results

Pratham has been running surveys which measure characteristics of
children and schools in rural India (only). Their latest survey
results, for 2011 show the following facts.



First, rural kids learn less at public school. Here's a simple
example of what the evidence shows. Surveyors ask kids in class III to
recognise numbers upto 100. Here are the numbers, for the proportion
of kids in class III who cannot recognise numbers upto 100:

In 2008, the failure rate with private schools was roughly 17 per
cent. Government schools were much worse at over 30 per cent. A short
three years later, conditions had deteriorated sharply in government
schools. The failure rate had gone up to 40 per cent. Private schools
had also worsened slightly, to a failure rate of 20 per cent. By 2011,
a big gap had opened up between the two: private schools are failing
to teach 20 per cent of the kids while government schools are failing
with a full 40 per cent of their kids.



Parents in India face the choice between sending their
children to a government school, which is free and serves a mid-day
meal, versus sending them to a private school where they pay
fees. Yet, an increasing fraction of parents choose to send
their children to a private school, paying tuition fees from their own
pockets, while government schools are free. The relationship between a
parent and a private school is a transaction between consenting
adults. The relationship between a parent and a government school
involves all of us, because we are paying for it.



Given the low income of parents in India, their use of private
schools is a striking indictment of what the Intensifiers have
wrought:

At class II, the fraction of rural children in private school went
up from 19 per cent (2007) to 23 per cent (2011). At class VII, this
rose more slowly to levels slightly above 20 per cent.

Evidence #3: CMIE household survey

CMIE has data for the year ended March 2011 about the behaviour of
169,492 households, about their expenditure on school/college fees and
tuition fees. Here's the
picture for the quarter ended September 2011; all values as
percent of overall expenditure:

Income class	School/college fees	Private tuition fees
Rich - I	4.79	0.66
Rich - II	3.79	0.51
High Middle Income - I	3.54	0.63
High Middle Income - II	3.12	0.65
High Middle Income - III	2.44	0.68
Middle Income - I	1.93	0.59
Middle Income - II	1.62	0.45
Lower Middle Income - I	1.38	0.49
Lower Middle Income - II	1.05	0.60
Poor - I	0.76	0.58
Poor - II	1.13	0.28
Overall	2.10	0.57

If parents chose to stay within public sector schools, their
expenditure on fees would have been zero. The table shows that across
all income groups of India, there is movement towards private
provision of education, both by paying fees at schools and by paying
for private tuition classes. These two elements add up to 2.67 per
cent of overall expenses of households. (The CMIE household survey
separately measures expenses on books, journals, stationary,
additional professional education, education overseas, hobby classes
and other education expenses. This helps us gain confidence in the
extent to which the two fields in the table above narrowly pin down the
feature of interest).



These decisions of well intentioned parents are the strongest
indictment of education policy in India. The product being given out
by the Intensifiers is such a terrible one, the parents of India are
walking away from it even though it is free and the alternative is
not and the parents are poor.

Implications

For more than a decade, the Intensifiers have controlled Indian
education policy. They have said: Leave education to the education
establishment, do nothing radical, just give us more money, we will
deliver results. Now we know that they were wrong. They took the
money, but failed to deliver the results.



Kapil Sibal has said that his ministry should not be held
responsible for the stream of bad news that is coming out. To me, this seems to be dodging accountability. His ministry is responsible for
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, for the Right To Education Act, for blocking
OECD PISA from being done in India, etc. The bureaucratic consensus of
his ministry represents the education establishment.



The key phrase that needs to be emphasised today is accountability. If a contractor took money from
you, and failed to deliver on building your house, you would sack
him. (You would also take him to court, to recover the money that was
paid to him, for services not delivered). In similar fashion,
education is too important to be left to the educationists. We need to
start over.

What is to be done

• We need to start over in the field of education, with a fresh
  management team, one that is not a part of the status quo, one that is
  rooted in the worlds of incentives, public policy and public
  administration.
  
  


• In 2004, we were told that in return for a tax rate increase of 2%, in the form of an education cess, we would obtain improvements in education. We now know that those improvements did not come about. Hence, that tax rate increase should go. (Even if sharp improvements in educational outcomes had been obtained, the education cess was a mistake in terms of basic public finance, and needs to go. Public expenditures on education should simply come out of general tax revenues; there is no need to have a cess.)


• The flow of public money into the status quo needs to go down
  sharply. There is no reason to put money into something that fails to
  deliver the goods. First we must prove that a mechanism
  delivers results, and only after that should we put money into
  it. This is the common sense that a housewife would apply. She would
  not spent gigabucks on promises from people who have failed to
  deliver.
  
  


• OECD PISA measurement needs to take place every year at every
  district. The production of this data is a public good that the government can and should do. It can be fully contracted out to private firms so as to avoid the problems of public sector production. Datasets about student characteristics and school characteristics should be released, covering every district and every year, so as to enable research.


• Civil servant teachers, who have tenured (permanent) have no
  incentive to teach well, regardless of their qualifications or high
  income. We can't sack them, but what we need to do on a massive
  scale is to stop recruiting them. The existing stock can be
  reallocated to other civil servant functions where staff is in short
  supply. Through this, it would become possible to whittle away at
  the accumulated stock over the coming 20 years.