Opinion More regulation on private schools is bad idea

Indian Express

25-04-2025

In 1959, a wonderful essay by Ram Manohar Lohia suggested that powerful people have caste, wealth, and English education. The logical antidote to the problem posed by Lohia was improving India's free K-12 school education. But this opportunity has been sabotaged by flailing government schools; the share of India's children attending a government school has now declined to 45 per cent. This number is 85 per cent in the US, 90 per cent in the UK, and 95 per cent in Japan. Policymakers redirecting the anger at free government schools to self-funded private schools through higher regulatory cholesterol must proceed with caution — the most expensive school is no school.
Good K-12 schools not only represent our best bet for improving social mobility but are also imperative in the new world of education, skills, work, and jobs. In the old world of education, Google knew everything. In the new world, AI is learning everything. In the old world of skills, the objective was to prepare, in the new world, the objective is to repair and upgrade. In the old world of work, employment was a lifetime contract. In the new world, employment is a short, intense, and taxicab relationship. In the old world of jobs, policymakers and educators could predict where jobs would be in the next decade; in the new world, all market predictions seem to have the efficacy of palm reading. More importantly, in the new world of work, dangerous, dirty, repetitive, and uncomplicated jobs will increasingly be done by software and machines.
The low student enrolment share of government schools was choice, not fate. It was a blind spot for the central and state governments in the first 45 years after Independence, and the next 35 years were lost to tactical changes like smaller class sizes, higher teacher salaries, and higher teacher qualifications. This second miss is a warning against the overselling of randomised control trials by economists — they offer solutions that are often correct but rarely scalable, generalisable, or replicable. Some of the tactical changes were necessary but insufficient without systematic reform of governance and teacher performance management.
Performance management is often equated with teacher attendance, yet a teacher needs to be evaluated on outputs (skills and scores) and inputs (competence and classroom management). Scores can be measured based on continuous assessments or end-of-year exams. Skills and concepts are harder in a world where soft skills — being curious, courageous, confident, risk-taking, collaborative and communicative — are also hard skills. Judging teacher competence involves evaluating student interaction, knowledge, planning capacity, communication, feedback abilities, collaboration, and a drive towards excellence. Classroom management needs assessment through observation of teaching and learning (teaching often occurs without learning), classroom setup, instructional differentiation (for process, product, and learning styles), and communication (clarity, questioning, and responsiveness).
Governance is mainly about controlling resources, but it should also be about learning, planning, design, responsiveness to students, parent involvement, teacher management, integrity, faculty growth planning, feedback capability (both formal and informal), role modelling, and fair decision-making. Currently, government school governance confuses school buildings with building schools; almost 4 lakh of our 15 lakh schools have fewer than 50 students (70 per cent of schools in Rajasthan, Karnataka, J&K and Uttarakhand). China has a similar number of students to India, but it has 30 per cent of our schools. State governments must consolidate schools (this will reduce the teacher shortage and multi-grade teaching), dump opaque transfer policies (in a system where tenure and compensation are off the table, location is a potent tool for performance management), grant budget flexibility and delegate funds, functions and functionaries away from state capitals.
Excellence in government schools requires substantive performance management. In other words, a fear of falling and hope of rising, rather than the current box-ticking best captured by the Tamil aphorism, Naan adducha maadri addikyeren, nee arrara maadri aru (I will pretend as if I am beating you, you pretend as if you are crying). Bureaucrats and incompetent teachers, benefiting from the status quo of government schools, insist that progress requires more patience, time, and money. But the current system will fail our children just like Indian socialism failed its poor.
My yearning for better government schools is not an argument against private schools (I attended one). Without this market response to demand, the post-1947 policy errors in primary education would have been catastrophic for India's human capital, the software industry, and corporate India. The notion that the failure of government schools can be overcome by higher regulatory cholesterol for private schools ignores rising costs, including higher teacher salaries, skyrocketing construction costs, and increasing land prices. The cynical confiscation of capacity from private entrepreneurs (RTE takes away 25 per cent) feels like a policy surrender to a tragedy where poor people are paying money to avoid something that is free. It should, instead, be a catalyst for adding quality to what is free.
The challenges of government schools are hardly unique to India or new; Abraham Lincoln filled out an election form describing his education as 'defective'. But it's time to take on the vested interests in government schools that steal the future of our young. Children have only one chance to grow up.