With more than half of all children in standard five at least three grade levels behind where they should be, the standards of learning continue to deteriorate in the country, thanks to the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system, mass recruitment of teachers and the high-level curriculum in the early stages of school education.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2012) by NGO Pratham shows that the number of class five students who could not read a class two level text or solve a simple arithmetic problem has increased. In 2010, this number stood at 46.3%, 51.8% in 2011 and 53.2% in 2012.
?There has been a feeling that Right To Education (RTE) may have led to relaxation of classroom teaching since all exams and assessments are scrapped and no child is to be kept back. CCE is now a part of the law and several states are attempting to implement some form of CCE as they understand it. Does CCE catch this decline? Are teachers equipped to take corrective action as the law prescribes? Is corrective action going to be taken?? said Madhav Chavan, CEO-president, Pratham Education Foundation.
As per the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), CCE helps in improving student?s performance by identifying his/her learning difficulties at regular intervals, right from the beginning of the academic session and employing suitable remedial measures for enhancing their learning performance.
These downward trends are also reflected in standard where a child would be expected to be able to at least read a class two text and solve a division sum. Besides, the scheme has inbuilt flexibility for schools to plan their own academic schedules as per specified guidelines on CCE.
However, teachers feel that they have to wait for the highest authority to say what is to be done and the policy of no detention of students is a cause of falling learning levels. ?CCE is a good mechanism because it allows for immediate testing and remediation, but the problem is with its implementation. There is no time for the teachers to do remediation as they have to complete the syllabus on time. This, combined with the fact that they have to pass students who have failed, calls for change management in the way CCE is implemented. It needs to be revisited by making schools empowered for remediation and making the cycle of assessment stronger,? said Bharat Gulia, education expert and founder of education services company Metis.
However, officials from the ministry of human resource development (MHRD) hum a different tune.
?To blame CCE for declining learning is a flawed kind of reasoning. One needs to look at the fact that with mass recruitment of teachers as part of the RTE, the best quality teachers get aligned with the urban schools while schools in the far flung areas with the highest rise in enrolment, get the worst of the lot,? said a? ministry official. This is corroborated by the fact that the qualification criteria for the Teachers Eligibility Test in Haryana had to be relaxed from 3% to 15% to fill up vacancies. Interestingly, the report revealed that for all children in class five, the major decline in reading levels (of 5 percentage points or more) between 2011 and 2012 is seen in Haryana, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala.
