What ails school education

The opinion here is based on schools and teachers in general across India. Please don’t get biased with a city based school your kid is studying when reading this article. Some schools are an exception.

Looks like NEP is almost getting implemented across the school spectrum. Concept looks interesting and it should be like that. Sadly NEP is so silent on assessment, finding learning gaps and implementation template. Yes they do talk about learning outcomes, but are silent on how to achieve those goals. We still look at assessment as marks and rank.

Reading NEP again and again, I have come up with a wish list on how a school should be. To start with we need to first look at how are schools today. If we list out what is wrong, the list is long rather we better write what is right. Sadly none.

Schools today are mostly working with Management/Board and its process as a center point. Schools are over emphasizing on:

• Information transfer, not on Concept and Application
• Attendance
• Food choice at school
• Uniform
• Home Work
• Individual activities
• Syllabus completion
• Test/Exam score

But NEP talks about

• Concept learning
• Application
• Multi disciplinary learning
• Objective measurement of learning outcomes

All these and more with fun and inclusiveness with society. But is it happening. No, unfortunately. But can it be implemented? Again sadly No. Why? For this we need to closely study the interface between the student and learning and they are Teachers. Let us look at teachers (generally, not intentional. Any correlation to any teacher known or unknown is purely coincidental and unintentional).

• Are school teacher exposed to different cultures – No
• Are school teacher exposed to different technologies – No
• Are school teacher good story teller – No
• Does a school teacher have feedback mechanism – No
• Are schools student/parent centric –No

With this kind of a profile of a teacher generally across India, how can we think of implementing NEP.? The solution is, first we need to change how teachers are trained. Once that is done for few years, and then slowly implements NEP from class 9. Until then give the framework and leave implementation to schools for class 1 to 8. But unfortunately it won’t happen for a simple reason school affiliation Boards be it CBSE, ICSE, State Boards or any other Board are highly process driven rather than outcome driven. The moment we go to a Board to start a school we get a list of must have facilities like no. of classrooms, labs, teachers we need to hire, etc. At today’s land rates it is simply un-viable.

Coming to the main aspect of student assessment, almost every school is marks driven. None, almost none use rubric to assess how clear learning objectives are and how well they relate to the assessments/activities in their course. I will write another article on what and how to use Rubric to measure effective learning outcomes. On the other side what has happened is that most online learning tools and LMS has integrated Rubric in their assessment, but are awfully low on tagging questions on various parameters. Thus even their assessment of measurement is much to be desired.

So finally I wish a school which addresses these lacuna's’ and address it effectively. But will the Board agree to it? I doubt. Yet, I have a easy way to have a school with addresses all these prick points. But are parents ready?

Post your comments and possible solutions. But if you feel my reading of problems and limitation of NEP itself is wrong, even then let me know in comments.