Soon after the announcement of the CBSE results, Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s Education Minister, claimed on Twitter that the pass percentage of government schools was better than private schools for the second consecutive year as a result of his efforts to improve the state of public education in the capital.
The Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal was quick in congratulating his deputy, declaring it an "education revolution".
Delhi government gets full credit for making education a central theme of politics. Certainly, the government has built new schools, improved existing ones, hiked the salaries of their teachers, sent educators for training abroad, held mass PTMs, brought technology into classrooms and created a conducive environment for bettering education experience of children.
However, improvement in learning outcomes does not have any quick-fix solution. One can invest more to have an infrastructural overhaul but that may not necessarily provide higher results in the short-term. Also, it is dangerous to use pass percentages as the indicator of a happier school time.
Delhi government schools may have performed better than private schools for the second year in the row, but this isn’t the first time that we have seen such a trend. When the Congress government was in power in 2009 and 2010, public schools had a 2% to 3% lead over private counterparts for consecutive years.
Since 2009, government schools have maintained a consistent 87-88 pass percentage, for which both the Congress and the AAP governments can share equal credit. It is the fluctuating performance of private schools which is the real reason for the current euphoria.
In 2009, private schools had a pass percentage of 86.42%, in 2012 this got closer to 90% and then became 92% in 2014. Their performance declined from 89.74% in 2014 to 79.27% in 2017, while the government schools continued to have a steady performance.
The appreciation for a constant performance in the wake of changing educational standards is also not very deserved. Even in pre-AAP years such as 2009-14, the public schools were successful in achieving the same feat even as their private counterparts struggled between 86-92% pass percentage.
The comparison between the aggregate of private and public schools is a strange one to make in the first place. While government schools broadly have a central quality control system, private schools don’t. Any private institution can get affiliated to the CBSE without requisite checks and little public scrutiny. The public schools are part of a collective system whereas the private ones are individual units without any interlink. How, then, is it fair to use private schools as a standard of measurement?
If one looks at other parameters to assess public schools, there are not many stellar statistics. An important indicator can be the number of Delhi government schools in the ranking of Top 100 CBSE schools in Delhi region. In 2009 there were 10 public schools in the list. After the AAP came to power the number has been steady at seven.
There is little evidence to say that the Congress government in 2009 was more enthusiastic about education than the AAP, yet the statistics suggest that 2009-10 was a better a period for Delhi’s children.
In fact, Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya (RPVV) system, established in 1997 – constituting most top performing government schools – have always been ranked exceptionally well for years, for which the present government cannot get any credit. In 2013, when there were 17 RPVVs in the capital, they had a higher score on CBSE Quality Index than Delhi Public School in Mathura Road or Modern School in Barakhamba Road.
An important note to make about education-related statistics is that they are very unreliable. One, they are produced and kept guarded by the governments themselves. There are no independent ways to ascertain their credibility. Secondly, data about results and schooling system is very limited.
Apart from the result statistics made available by the CBSE, there are no other major surveys undertaken. And even then, the volume of data put out in public can hardly be used to make judgements about the state of education.
Thirdly, the aggregate data about private schools is unusable. In their autonomous capacity, they do not have their own collective data to challenge the monopoly of government statistics. And the conditions each year are variable, making any comparative analysis incoherent.
Lastly, quantifying learning is a difficult task, if not impossible. There can be little dispute to the fact that CBSE Boards are a very poor tool to assess how much children have learnt.
In reply to Arvind Kejriwal's congratulatory tweet, the General Secretary of GSTA, an association of teachers serving in Delhi government schools, wrote the following.
Perhaps the game of numbers is tricky. It can lead to undue pressure on educators and students to score well in the Boards at the cost of other more important things. With too much exertion for a display of performance, we may make the education system worse not better.
Percentage points should not be used to legitimise governmental efforts to improve learning. There is a constant fear of schools – both government and private – making maximisation of marks their sole objective. Delhi government should tread carefully, and it should have the patience to allow a natural pace of change.
(Statistical Source: Edunel)
(Akshat Tyagi is the author of ‘Naked Emperor of Education’, India's first young voice against the dehumanising schooling model. He tweets @AshAkshat.)
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