Column : Can we be equal and excellent?

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008 will come up in parliament soon. Given the eagerness of politicians to jump on a bandwagon with wonderful pre-poll optics, it may pass. If the objective of this bill is to make our school system more inclusive and help our children escape their financial, family or geographic opening balance, we need to address some of the problems with the current draft that compromise quality, choice and competition.

I am most worried about the unintended consequences of a provision in the bill that most people now take for granted; a 25% reservation in all private schools for students nominated by the government. While reservations are a legitimate choice for society, we must not pretend there are no alternatives. I can understand the noble motivations of this clause (access, finance or quality) but the transmission losses between theory and execution will create corruption, confusion and replace one ?access apartheid? with another. Most importantly, this reservation may blunt quality and excellence.

The headline of this article comes from a brilliant book called ?Excellence? written in 1961 by educationist John Gardner. He raised difficult questions like how equal do we want to be? How equal can we be? What difficulties does a democracy encounter in pursuing excellence? Can we be equal and excellent? He felt answering these questions was important because if a society cannot rouse itself to the pursuit of excellence, the consequences will be felt in everything that it undertakes. He observed that most societies of which we have any historical records were beautifully organised to keep good men and women down. In such societies, an individual?s status was not determined by gifts or capacities but by membership in a family, caste, or class. Such membership determined the individual?s right, privileges, prestige, and status. While religious reform and democracy are important, the biggest corrosion of hereditary privilege comes from education, employability and employment. An inclusive school system creates sustainable access and the proposed bill is a welcome initiative in fixing the Indian access problem. But instead of seizing an opportunity to separate financing from delivery to spur competition between public and private delivery, the bill reverts to the tired idea of reservation for creating equality of opportunity.

It is important to speculate about motivations for the 25% reservation for government student nominees. Is this a vehicle for creating capacity? Is it for improving quality? Is it to create financial resources by making 75% of the students subsidise the 25%? If it is any of the above, it represents an outdated view of private education as elite schools like Modern, Mayo, DPS, or Cathedral. About 65% of urban and 25% of rural children may already be paying Rs 50 to Rs 2000 per month in private education and rejecting free government education because of teacher absenteeism, multi-grade teaching, and learning outcomes. I?m not saying the private sector is a saint but that it has clients (not hostages).

I believe that the provision for 25% reservation in private schools will be a cesspool for corruption. Who will decide who gets into the best schools? Will these be auctioned? Will it be the insane first-come-first serve that applied to new telecom licenses? Will students be mean tested? Will private schools be reimbursed based on some random government calculation or will these calculations adjust for quality and include both fixed, variable, depreciation and interest costs? Will the same standards of merit be applied to students in the 25% government quota as the 75% standard quota? All in all, this reservation will require a whole new battery of babus to administer, control and operate. Given the difficulty of assessing means and capability of applicants, it will breed corruption (under the table auctioning of seats), create unfair access (for parents with government connections) or probably both.

The 25% reservation clause could easily be substituted with a well designed national education voucher plan that would create inclusiveness with the upsides of choice, transparency, competition, quality and capacity. Other issues with the current draft of the bill include a) new standards must be applied to both government and private schools with no exemptions, b) we must move beyond assuring graduation to ensuring learning and give some learning assurances, c) the inability of government to provide a neighborhood school must be supplemented by a promise to provide financial support, and d) we must provide for parent or community involvement in the school management committee.

As Gardner pointed out, a society can deal with inequality by protecting the slow runners, curbing the swift runners or let individual differences determine the result. As somebody with a ringside seat of the tragedy we call our labour markets, I fully recognise the need for helping the slow with a more inclusive school regime. But let?s not curb the swift by sabotaging merit or compromising the quality and managerial independence of our educational institutions.

?The author is chairman, Teamlease Services