Share the Accountability in Education: UNESCO GEM Report - Article in Millennium Post Newspaper

Share the Accountability in Education: UNESCO GEM Report

UNESCO released its latest Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2017 on Tuesday 24 October 2017. The thematic title of this year’s report is Accountability in Education: Meeting our commitments. The report is an eye-opener for every individual living on the planet. Its purview is much larger than mere statistics for the citizens of our country. The report highlights the major challenges India faces in achieving global education goals. Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO mentioned in the report that, there are 264 million children and youth not going to school – this is a failure that we must tackle together, because education is a shared responsibility and progress can only be sustainable through common efforts. This is essential to meet the ambitions of Sustainable Development Goals on Education (SDG 4), a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Education Goals are spearheaded by The United Nations about a decade ago. UNSDG 4 mentions Quality Education. It advocates ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.

GEM Report emphasises on two broad questions – Why accountability is needed in the education sector and who all are accountable for the proper dissemination of education? Accountability matters enormously for improving education systems but it should be a means to education ends, not an end in itself. Accountability needs to emphasize building more inclusive, equitable, good-quality education systems and practices instead of blaming individuals. Actors have an obligation, based on a legal, political, social or moral justification, to provide an account of how they met clearly defined responsibilities. Sydney Morning Herald puts this as ‘the sad truth about education: it’s easier to blame someone else than fix the problem’. The report advocates that Governments, Schools and teachers have a frontline role to play here, hand-in-hand with Students themselves and Parents. Accountability starts with governments, which are the primary duty bearers of the right to education. Schools are increasingly held to account not just by governments, but also by parents, community members and students. Teachers have primary responsibility for providing high-quality instruction, but they are expected to do far more than teach. Parents have the main responsibilities for their children’s attendance and behaviour in basic education. Students take on more of these responsibilities as they get older expedite the GEM report 2017. Accountability, therefore, does not easily rest with single actors. For instance, schools may be responsible for providing supportive learning environments, but to deliver on this, they rely on governments providing resources, teachers respecting professional norms and students behaving appropriately. Increasingly, however, voices call for holding people accountable for outcomes beyond their control. Individuals cannot be held accountable for an outcome that also depends on the actions of others.

Adequate resources, capacity and genuine commitment are essential. Governments should spend at least 4% of GDP on education, or allocate 15% of total government expenditure. But one in four countries does not reach these benchmarks. India failed on both these parameters. Govt. expenditure on education in the last financial year was mere 3.8% of GDP and expenditure on education was 14.1% which was less than the required levels.

Other statistics of our country (as given in the GEM report) are far more astonishing. Number of illiterate youth stands at 32 million out of which females account for 62%. Only 41 percent of schools in our country have separate toilets for boys and girls and basic hand washing facilities. India is also performing poor in the Gender Equality domain. Female presence in teaching staff is below 50% at all the levels of education i.e. primary, secondary and tertiary. A significant 21 percent of population aged 15 to 19 is married leading to early pregnancies. Gender disparity in school completion is less than one at all levels of education. Even after seven decades of independence, we are still struggling with child mortality and malnutrition issues. Under 5 mortality rate is 48 and under 5 stunting rate is alarming 38 percent which is a matter of grave shame for our country. 2.8 million out-of-school kids reveal India’s challenge in the Education sector.

The report advocates private sector spending and investment in education. Spending on both private tutoring and education technology is expected to exceed US$200 billion in the next five years. Investment by the International Finance Corporation grew by over US$450 million between 2009 and 2014. It further stresses on capacity building of the teachers and lays emphasis on strong inspection systems. Teacher absenteeism is dealt strongly in the report. A representative panel of 1,297 villages in our country found almost 24% of rural teachers were absent during unannounced school visits in 2010. Another study of 619 schools in six states found 18.5% of teachers absent: 9% on leave, 7% on official duties and 2.5% on unauthorized absence. Effective policy responses are complicated by the many factors influencing teacher absenteeism, e.g. distance to school, pupil/teacher ratio and poor working conditions. To deal with this problem, Economic Survey 2016 recommended using biometrics to tackle teacher absenteeism in primary schools. However, the suggestion was met with protests from teachers, along with technical implementation challenges.

Next revolutionary step in education would be large scale assimilation of ICT. Universalizing laptops and tablets in schools through private engagement requires strong government enforcement. India’s Aakash tablet project was a public-private partnership that, due to inadequate government enforcement, ended up primarily benefiting the vendor. The 2010 project aimed to provide cheap tablets to students at all levels. DataWind, the winner of the project bid, provided a fraction of the promised tablets and had multiple technical issues. An audit found failures in the initial procurement process, including delays and lack of transparency, and assigned primary responsibility to the public institution managing the project (Comptroller and Auditor General of India, 2013).

Learning outcomes have not improved in test-based accountability systems. India has scored exceptionally poor in the PISA examination and thereafter opted out of it. Now, the government has no intentions to participate in it before 2021. This shows the pathetic state of education in the largest democracy of the world. The average difference between lower and upper secondary completion rates is 17 percentage points. But it exceeded 35 percentage points in eight countries, including El Salvador, India, and South Africa, where in 2013 the lower secondary completion rate was 83% compared to an upper secondary completion rate of just 45%. An analysis of several National Sample Surveys in India over 1983–2010 indicated that, despite progress, the education level of scheduled tribes and castes was far below average. The higher education attendance ratio among scheduled tribes increased from 2% to 12% and that of scheduled castes from 4% to 15%, compared to a national average of 23% in 2010.

India’s National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship aims to train 400 million people by 2022. To meet its ambitious target, which exceeds current capacity, the government has sought to involve private sector funding support and institutional Qualification frameworks can support accountability, especially if they are accompanied by skill or competence standards that are used as benchmarks for training and assessment mechanisms. These include the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a public-private partnership established in 2009 to promote private sector participation. The NSDC has partnered with more than 200 training providers and helped set up 37 sector skills councils to engage industry in the development of training programmes.

On the demand side, the NSDC is the implementing agency of the National Skill Certification and Monetary Reward Scheme, better known as STAR (for Standard Training Assessment and Reward). Between its introduction in 2013 and mid-2017, it provided about US$90, on average, to 1.4 million beneficiaries who completed approved training programmes. Managing such a large programme poses numerous oversight challenges, including ensuring that candidate certification by assessors is transparent, beneficiaries receive the full reward, candidates register using a unique identification number or national population register card, and no illegal subcontracting to non-accredited providers occurs. The same concerns are applied to Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (Prime Minister’s Skill Development Scheme), launched in 2015 and also run by the NSDC. Saakshar Bharat Mission (India Literacy Mission) was launched in 2009 with a budget of US$1.2 billion for the first four years. The national government provides 75% and district governments 25%. The programme covers districts with an adult literacy rate below 50% in the 2001 census; the allocation formula is based on numbers of non-literate adults by district. Scholarship spending is underestimated, as many countries, including Brazil, China and India, do not include it in their aid programmes.

The report also touches upon topics like Bullying and violence in the schools. The same has been found increasing in certain pockets of the country. Further, emphasis on issues like Sports and STEM learning are also looked upon. Sports can be an equally constructive setting for learning about gender roles and relationships. In Mumbai, the Parivartan programme trained cricket coaches to model gender-equitable attitudes and behaviours and communicate positive messages to young male athletes about gender, norms, power, masculinity and violence. The programme improved bystander attitudes, with participants more likely to say they would intervene in response to sexual jokes or sexual assault against women.

GEM report highlights that in India, 71% of the 287 medical schools established between 1980 and 2015 were private and concentrated in large cities and wealthier states. China has about 1 million village doctors and India has about 1 million rural medical practitioners who are not graduates of accredited schools. Corruption in higher education takes a variety of forms; India has issues of fraud and unprofessional practice in medical training. Government and court records showed that, between 2010 and 2015, at least 69 of the 398 medical colleges and teaching hospitals had been accused of rigging entrance examinations or accepting bribes to admit students. The regulator recommended closing 24 of the colleges. In 1980, India had 100 public and 11 private medical schools; by 2015, the respective figures were 183 and 215. Accreditation of private institutions was suspect; many were set up by businessmen and politicians with no experience operating medical or educational institutions. The Medical Council of India found private colleges hiring people to pose as full-time faculty members and healthy people to pose as patients in order to pass inspections.

The report came out at exactly the time when our country needs it the most. These days the debate is warm after the untoward incident of a killing of a seven year old schoolboy in a reputed school of Gurugram. Even the authorities are struggling hard to figure out the accountability. With hundreds of millions of people still not going to school, and many not achieving minimum skills at school, it is clear education systems are off track to achieve global goals. The marginalized currently bear the most consequences but also stand to benefit the most if policy-makers pay sufficient attention to their needs. Faced with these challenges, along with tight budgets and increased emphasis on results-oriented value for money, countries are searching for solutions. Increased accountability often tops the list. The report emphasizes that education is a shared responsibility. While governments have primary responsibility, all actors – schools, teachers, parents, students, international organizations, private sector providers, civil society and the media – have a role in improving education systems.

- Jagdeep S. More, Educationalist