RTE fails to improve country?s education system

Updated on: Tuesday, January 24, 2012

When the Right to Education Act was enforced in April 2010, it looked like millions of schoolchildren could dare to dream.

The Act guarantees access to schools, a target that has been met, with the enrolment rate at 90% among children in first grade. The Act demands schools to meet certain requirements, including infrastructure (building, libra-ry, kitchen, toilets), teacher-student ratio, teaching hours etc. However, far from helping improve the situation, things only seem to have gone worse.

The Annual Status of Education Report 2011 serves to reiterate the rather dismal drop in learning levels in the country.

Like the Quality of Education survey that was published not long ago, the ASER report reminds us once more that Indian children are scarcely able to stay afloat at the international level, managing, with a great deal of learning by rote, just about to meet the average international standards.

At first glance, the 20 percent drop in reading levels may seem terribly drastic. But according to the analysis of the report, this drop has been developing gradually and is due to a number of factors.

Also, a recent study by Education Initiatives says that scores on general knowledge in tests given five years apart have dropped by about 10% among Standard 4 students from elite schools.

According to the ASER report, 88% of students in grade 3 cannot read a level 2 text and 71.8% of those in grade 8 still cannot read the basic level 2 text. The numeracy levels are even gloomier, with 93% of grade 8 students still unable to solve a simple level 2 subtraction problem. In all, 75.9% of children don’t learn to read at all and 75.4% still don’t understand basic mathematics.

The goal of granting access to public schools might have been achieved, but that is still not even

scratching the surface. The attendance, the 'real measure of enrollment' as the report puts it, too is abysmal. This is no surprise either, for despite the Right to Free and Compulsory education, the government schools still need to be brought up several notches.

The ASER report focuses on the very basic outcomes of education and indicates that the pace of learning among students is far too slow. 75% of the children who don’t acquire the ‘grade appropriate’ level of progress, in either reading or arithmetic, don’t achieve it even the next year, implying that only one out of every four children is making adequate progress.

Tejaswini Ananthkumar, Founder-Chairperson of Adamya Chetana, says dropout rates in Karnataka are very low. “Attendance levels have improved and are at 80% per year now. The teachers too have become regular.”

The ASER report survey includes rural schools in about 558 districts out of the total 634-odd districts in the country.

RTE fails to improve country?s education system

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