Introduction

In the post-1991 period, the education sector in India, primarily at the school level, embraced private/corporate funding to ensure that "quality" education is imparted to students who can afford it. Meanwhile, the word, quality, has become a benchmark to wedge distinction between ‘underperforming’ government schools and creative and ‘entrepreneurial' (privately held) public schools. What is more, in the absence of proper oversight of the quality aspect of education from the statist and quasi-state agencies, a number of private players have emerged to take their place. The authors argue that in the name of improving of quality through 'objective' assessment of schools, these for-profit firms have come up with ways to redefine the meaning of quality and the processes to achieve it. This, in turn, has created a niche market for the production, distribution and consumption of educational commodities, both in hardware and software. Especially, schools with limited financial resources are put under immense pressure to buy these commodities.

This note is a part of an ongoing research in which the first author has spent almost fourteen months in the field, conducting participant observation with students studying in a charity run vocational training centre, a private school assessment company based in Mumbai and an education solutions provider catering to the K-12 sector in Hyderabad, India.

The Politics of Private School Accreditation in India

Education, both at the school and higher levels, has always been a bone of contention in India. As for most of its recorded history, education was a prerogative of few upper caste groups. It was also gendered, as women were not allowed to study, barring few celebrated exceptions. The first post-Independence census of 1951 in India recorded a literacy rate of 18.33 percent (male 27.16 percent and female 8.86 percent). With the initiatives of the governments, both at the federal and provincial levels, literacy rates as per the 2011 census has increased to 74.04 percent (87.23 percent for male and 65.46 percent for females). But as the Pratham's Annual Status of Education Report 20151 shows, despite an increase in school enrollment rate as well as percentage of literate children in India, the quality of education remained dismal. The report states that of all the students across India attending Standard V in state-run schools, only 42.2 percent were able to read and comprehend Standard II texts. This was also the case with other classes too. And Pratham's 2018 report reiterates that these figures have only marginally increased to 44.2 percent.2 These observations were as true for state-run schools as for their privately held counterparts.

In such a scenario, assessment of schools become an important part of the Indian education system. Not only does it refer to the achievement of educational objectives on part of the students and teachers, but it also gives a cumulative understanding of where a particular school stands in relation to others, both at the national as well as at the global level. With respect to the second part of its definition, it provides an abstract model that acts as the benchmark against which schools can compare their performance and identify areas for improvement. The areas can broadly cover– leadership and management, teaching and learning, the child, the curriculum, community and partnerships and infrastructure and resources.

The government schools in India, particularly the elite ones such as Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya and Kendriya Vidyalaya, conduct periodic school inspections to assess different aspects of their functioning. They don’t, however, give a comparative assessment of a particular school vis-a-vis other ones. Similarly, a few private schools operating under the aegis of trusts also have school inspections. But, no such thing as an overall assessment in administered.

In fact, the newly emerging private companies in the field of education are trying to bridge this gap. The main plank of their business is to give clients a satisfactory assessment of their schools on the parameters listed above and offer suggestions for improvement. As opposed to the state–run assessment institutions, these private companies operate with a profit motive, and their revenue comes from keeping the clients forever dependent on the former’s suggestions for improvement. For example, the assessment firm that we studied was conceived by a British entrepreneur in association with an Indian socialite. The model of assessment their firm was based on was a US model, in which access to information and communication technology (ICT) was given more importance than other ways of teaching and learning.

It was observed by the first author during their assignments that the lead assessors continuously gave better rankings to schools who were better equipped with ICT applications, such as mobile phone-based applications or hardware, like Smart Boards. In fact, we found an underlying nexus between ed-tech companies and private assessment companies in which the latter actively suggest the products produced by the ed-tech enterprises. Our ed-tech firm, on which we have done an in-depth study, receives reviews from these assessment firms to boost up its sales. This is not to say that the firm was entirely dependent on assessment companies for its revenue, however, there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Questions, such as 'what a happy face looks like’, ‘what a good classroom looks like’, ‘what a good assessment looks like, etc., , are used to classify different schools located in different geographical and socio-cultural spaces. To cite an instance, for one of the school assessments in Nagaland, the lead and associate assessors assigned were from the Indian state of Mumbai. The school, which they visited, was located in a remote district in the state of Nagaland, and it was primarily attended by students from a tribal community. None of the assessors had ever been to that region before. Coming from a metropolitan city like Mumbai, the assessors, as was noted by the first author, harboured several prejudices against the students, teachers and people from the administration . In private conversations, the assessors termed the members of the school as “uncivilised”, “animal like”, “undeserving”, “careless”, “dumb”, among others. Moreover, the school did not have much ICT products to show. The personal biases of the assessors, compounded by the dearth of observable ICT products, resulted in a lower ranking for the school. This can reflect poorly on the school, which has to operate on a tight budget. Moreover, it is not the school’s fault if the trust under which it operates doesn’t provide adequate funds for the professional development of teachers and maintenance of infrastructure.

Conclusion

The idea of ‘making secure judgments’ for school assessments is fraught with problems, when a huge amount of data has to be collected over a span of two-three days. How can we ensure ‘objectivity’ when data is ambiguous, generic in nature and susceptible to multiple interpretations? Schools have their own ethos and operate within a particular cultural setting. Unless school assessments are decoupled from for-profit business models, on the one hand, and assessors are given training to handle their personal biases in terms of cultural differences, quality education in India will remain a realm of the privileged.

About the Authors

Manalisa Sarmah is an independent researcher. She has an M.Phil. in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad, India; ashulisa@gmail.com

Lalatendu Keshari Das is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India; lalatendu.keshari.das@gmail.com

References

1 https://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/National%20PPTs/aser2014indiaenglish.pdf

2 http://img.asercentre.org/docs/ASER%202018/Release%20Material/aserreport2018.pdf. There is variation between states and within the rural and urban settings. The states of Himachal Pradesh and Kerala topping the chart with 74.5 and 73.1 percent, respectively. States like Assam (33.5 percent) and Madhya Pradesh (34.4 percent) adorn the bottom of the table.