Alert – Long story with a preface…

Preface
So, back in June 2020, I had written an article on Education 4.0. A couple of weeks after that, XXXXXX (a ‘national’ newspaper not to be named) got in touch with me to write a “substantially comprehensive & positive” article about high school education in India using the “Delhi success story” as an example and that this would be a paid article.

Now, I have written several pieces, expert views, op-eds, contributing comments, et al for national newspapers and in none of them did me or the newspaper even mention money. I didn’t think much of it back then, but I do so now… and by the end of this article, you will know why… Anyway, I really did not have enough information / data about K12 education in India or Delhi for that matter back then so I passed on the article…

Now, about a month or so ago, I ended up speaking to a principal of a CBSE school in Delhi. She had been part of a large project that Whistling Woods had done back in 2010-12 wherein we had pioneered the effort to launch a Media Studies elective for the 11th & 12th grade of the CBSE board. We had written the curriculum for it for the CBSE as well as undertaken teacher training. She was one of the people from the original pilot project, and we’ve been in infrequent communication since. Anyway she messaged me with a positive review about another article I had written about “Finding your Passion” and we ended up having a nice chat about various things.

One of the things that came up in the conversation was me talking about how Delhi seems to have ‘fixed’ its K-12 education setup and she refuted it vehemently. That came as a bit of a surprise because she’s quite lefty, not pro-BJP and is a strong AAP supporter. One of the things she mentioned was that the anecdotal evidence of limited success in a very small number of schools was being passed off as a sweeping revolution. She urged me to look at a larger dataset.

So I did. And the results were not pretty…

While the data as under is from many articles and reports, a lot of it is also from the Economic Survey Report commissioned by the Delhi Government itself in 2019-20 about the period 2015-2019 and another one by Praja Foundation, an NGO working in the education sector which was released in 2019.

The data is quite revealing:

• In 2014, number of students in pvt schools was 38%. In 2019, it was 45%. A 7% gain by private schools in total student body in just 5 years means that there is a stark reduction in the enrolment % of new students in government schools vs private schools in these 5 yrs.
• The 10th std pass % has crashed from 99% in 2014 to 69% in 2018.
• While pass percentages of 12th grade govt school students has been about the same, the number of students appearing for them has been reducing dramatically. In an ever-growing student population, why would the number of students taking the 12th std board exams go down, as under?:
  • 2014 – 1.7L
  • 2015 – 1.4L
  • 2016 – 1.3L
  • 2017 – 1.2L
  • 2018 – 1.1L
• Further, the pass percentages of students of Standard 9-11 over the past 2-3 years tell a story:
  • In 2017, 9th std pass % was ONLY 52%.
  • in 2018, 10th std pass % was ONLY 69%
  • In 2018, 11th std pass% was 80%.
• Based on the above three data points, if 100 students attempted the 9th std exams in 2017, only 29 out of those attempted the 12th std exams in 2019. This is TERRIBLE.
• The number of Schools has remained at approx 3000 over the past 5 yrs, give or take 10.
• Enrolment in Govt schools has dropped from 16L in 2014 to 14.5L in 2018, despite a 3% growth in overall school enrolment.
• Govt schools are operating with only 57% regular teachers on rolls with the rest being filled up by guest teachers, who are highly inconsistent as they teach only when they are free from their main jobs.
• Approx 60% schools do not have a full time principal as of now. In all these schools, one of the teachers is on an ‘acting principal’ role.

I tried to find data contradictory to the same online but found NOTHING. All I found were a few photographs of new classrooms with colourful benches (the same 5 photographs) in articles by many media outlets about how Delhi’s school education is getting better. It was key to note that none of those media outlets had any data on their articles…

So, after reviewing all of the above, I am left wondering where is the ‘revolution’ that was supposed to have been enacted in School education in Delhi???

P.S. Happy to receive data to the contrary, if anyone has any…