These 2 things can set Indian school education back by 20 years!

There are 2 major news items going around in Public education nowadays: Fee Regulation and NCERT books.

Everyday, some or the other state government announces that they are working towards a law or policy to regulate school fees. And on other days, the HRD Minister or the HRD Secretary announces that steps are afoot to ‘encourage’ CBSE schools to use NCERT books since they are more affordable.

Through this note, I want to lay out why both these steps are misguided and in fact, harmful for Indian school education.

First, let’s tackle the issue of school fee. The fundamental reason for some schools being able to charge high fee, is that supply of good schools is limited. Out of the 1.4 million schools in India, not more than 2000 would qualify as good schools if we go by student learning outcomes. In every city, this boils down to 3-4 good schools where parents line up to admit their children (In metros, it might look like 3-4 in a 2-3 km radius). These schools, then get the ‘right’ to set their fee because the demand for them is infinite. (If they keep increasing capacity, they’ll keep getting admissions). 

As anyone who has followed the downward trajectory of prices of phone calls, air tickets or AC cabs over the last 2 decades knows, the simplest device to bring down prices in any sector is to encourage competition and increase supply. In schools unfortunately, we are going the other way. By introducing fee regulation, we are doing 3 things - 1) Scaring off new private education entrepreneurs from setting up new schools, thereby choking supply. 2) Discouraging existing players from innovating because their ability to price up for that innovation is being taken away and 3) Encouraging rent seeking behaviour from Govt officers or committees empowered to sanction fee increases.

Parents, from their immediate, short term context are justified to ask for fee control, because in a supply constrained sector, they don’t have much alternatives. They can’t shift their child to an inferior school and they feel angry at having to pay increasing fee! They form pressure groups to ask for fee regulation because that’s what they see as a possible solution for them. But Govt. ought to know better. Rather than giving in to parents' demand of fee regulation, it needs to do a root cause analysis and figure out policy interventions to fuel supply of quality schools.

Two things can immensely help in increasing supply of good schools: One, improve the quality of Govt. schools to bring back the hordes of parents who have taken their students aways from Govt. schools because they didn’t see any learning happening there. Because Govt. reneged on its responsibility of providing good, free education, private operators flocked in and parents voted with their wallets. Improving quality of Govt. schools is the single biggest intervention that Govt. can make to control fee because it will instantaneously increase supply - there are a million Govt schools in India, almost 3 times the number of Public schools. There are interesting experiments underway in Delhi Municipal Corporation, Delhi State Govt., Rajasthan, Haryana and Maharashtra in improving Govt. schools and all start from driving teacher accountability and building teacher empowerment and have a component of Public Private Partnership. Other states should learn from them and adopt them on mission mode!

Second, Govt. should incentivise new private schools by making favourable policies towards land acquisition, relaxing RTE norms on land requirements and relaxing stringent requirements on teacher salaries. This will encourage new education entrepreneurs to come in and bring innovative education models that deliver on the same NCERT learning outcomes but use very different pedagogical approaches. By squeezing private schools from the top by regulating fee and from the bottom by onerous land, salary and other norms, Govt. is killing the only part of school education that is currently working in India.

I hope the MHRD Minister and MHRD Secretary look at rising school fees from a rational, economic perspective of demand and supply and work diligently to improve supply. School fee will automatically take care of itself!

Now, let’s tackle the issue of NCERT books. The debate and focus on making NCERT books available to all schools and encouraging all schools to adopt NCERT books, comes from an outdated model of school education. Let me paint a picture of what this model looks like: In a textbook based learning model, the textbook is the anchor of all learning. It is the anchor that defines the syllabus, its content defines the boundaries of learning for students and its book-back questions define what students will ‘mug-up’ for exams. 

But the world has moved far ahead. Student learning can be achieved through reading a reference book but equally and sometimes more effectively, also achieved by watching a video, doing an activity, doing research, doing a project and working with your partner. In today's world, textbook as the anchor and limit of learning is frankly anachronistic and is a big disservice to our goal of excellent learning for Indian students. 

The alternative is to insist all schools adhere to NCERT learning outcomes. Once we do that, we should let schools decide the methods through which they achieve these outcomes. Instead of a textbook, the anchor of learning should be a Learning Path that the teacher designs for her student for a particular learning outcome. This learning path can include a ‘read aloud’ from a reference book. And that reference book can be the NCERT textbook. But the learning path can also include a video from Khan Academy (and multiple other sources of visual learning). That learning path can also include an activity with the Math Kit to figure out fractions or multiplication. And that learning path can definitely include an activity that the student does for example for Newton’s 3rd law of motion. We need to have a conversation about exemplar Learning Paths to drive all schools to achieve NCERT learning outcomes. We need to reward great learning paths. But we cannot insist on ONE STANDARD NCERT textbook - that goes against all that we know about how different students learn and how different teachers teach.

India as the spiritual home of ’sarva dharma sambhav’ believes that God is one but there are different paths to get to Him. Similarly, it is time we accept that learning outcomes too can be one but there are different ways of getting to them. Let's drop our insistence on NCERT textbooks for all schools!

I hope that our policymakers can lift their gaze from fee regulation and NCERT textbooks issues and train their eyes on making Indian school education truly excellent. That would mean increasing supply of good schools and promoting exemplar Learning Paths towards common learning outcomes.