Column : Who will teach the teachers?

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: Equity, innovation and public accountability have been affirmed as the core criteria for the new government. Let’s look at basic education through this prism. In the absence of major changes in public accountability, basic education will not deliver on either the skills needed for long-term growth or equity in opportunities.

Modern growth theory puts innovation at the heart of growth dynamics and education as an essential element of the innovation process, both for activities that push out the technological frontier and to facilitate catching up. In some areas, India will be pushing out the global frontier, but the main growth activity in the medium term lies in catching up, as it was for Japan, Korea and Taiwan in their rapid growth phases. The immediate need for this is breadth and quality in secondary and college education. And it is hard to think of a single country that has achieved this without genuine breadth and quality in basic education.

With respect to equity, the case for action is even more immediate: children who don’t get basic skills will substantially miss out on gains from future growth when they enter the workforce. Inequality in education is a fundamental driver of the reproduction of inequalities of wealth and status.

And there are massive quality problems in basic education. There has indeed been a large effort in getting more resources into education, both from the centre and the states, and a big push on enrollments. But enrollment is not enough. The real problem lies in skills acquisition.

We have a national picture on actual skills thanks to the Annual Survey of Education Report, that for the past four years has tested children at home in a statistically representative sample of rural households in most districts. This is a remarkable organisational effort, with front-line testing by an army of trained volunteers, from many organisations, managed by the ASER Institute (an offshoot of the NGO Pratham).