A friend from the US?a teacher, not an India-watcher?wrote to me asking what I thought about the ?exciting? new Right to Education Act. ?Well…? I said, not wanting to deflate the enthusiasm, ?It?s a Right to Go to School and Have a Trained Teacher.?
Which is nothing to criticise. The act?s directive to states to deliver a school and a teacher and for parents to avail of it is important. Access to education infrastructure is a big part of access to knowledge that can transform lives, enable social mobility and ensure that a demographic bulge becomes a demographic dividend. However, the act does not yet guarantee an education, and challenges go beyond the current headline debates about where the rupees will come from. Whether states can afford to provide the infrastructure needed is typical federal jockeying for funding?inevitable and resolvable. States? ability to convert funds to seats, supplies and teacher time may be a constraint, but the act steps up the mandate to solve the problem. Ensuring that children from poor families can afford to be students is also an important challenge that will require innovative ways to identify and target funds to the children and families who are least likely to have formal identification or addresses and may seek to actively evade anti-truancy enforcement. But nothing in the act restrains this innovation and there are numerous examples around the world of ways to lure children into school.
The bigger challenge ahead is that the act does little to motivate real returns on these rupees. It includes top-down and bottom-up oversight without fully exploiting the power of either approach to motivate quality education. Although there are opportunities to strengthen the act through some of the ?to-be-notified? policies, it also rules out some of the most powerful motivators for schools and teachers to actually deliver education.
The advantage of bottom-up management by parents and local officials is that these groups are likely to be the best able and most motivated to monitor educational quality. The act effectively rules out a major possibility for enabling these stakeholders to act on their knowledge, however, by ruling out voucher-type programmes that could enable poorer parents to vote with their feet. It states that parents who choose ?non-aided? schools shall not be eligible to make a claim for reimbursement and notes that the right to go to school does not extend to the right to go to private schools.
There are perfectly good reasons to be cautious in committing public funds to private schools, especially in a context with limited quality control on private education, potential for choice to result in income or caste-based segregation of schools and tricky questions about how to ensure that education remains secular without stifling good schools that happen to have a religious affiliation. But eliminating the possibility rather than leaving it open for consideration and state experimentation (as happens in many other federations) may have been an overkill.
The second provision for bottom-up monitoring has no teeth, but some potential. School management committees of local representatives and parents are directed to ?monitor? performance and define school development plans ?that shall be the basis for the plans and grants.? Short of recommending no grants for low-performing schools (which might, if ?the basis of? is serious, provoke closure and allow transfer to other schools), it is hard to see how these committees have any power to correct schools. The option to have these management committees perform ?any other function that shall be notified? is an opportunity to provide some teeth and must be taken.
The act also handicaps top-down monitoring by eliminating ruling out exams for primary school students and barring schools from holding students back or recommending that they go elsewhere for remedial education. These provisions could be rationalised as ways to protect students from stress, inane ?teaching to the test?, and retaliatory expulsion, but they also remove the two most commonly used quality-checks on school performance.
So, yes, the Right to Education Act is exciting. But more for the next steps that it suggests than for the explicit promises it contains today.
The author is director, Centre for Development Finance at the Institute for Financial and Management Research, Chennai