Less than a third of class III students in rural Indian schools can solve simple two-digit subtraction problems, the prestigious Annual Status of Education Report produced by a coalition of non-governmental organisations has found.
The 2011 ASER has also shown an alarming decline in mathematics skills, with the number of class III students able to solve such subtraction problems falling from 36.6 per cent in 2010 to 29.9 per cent in 2011. Among class V children, it said the ability to do a similar subtraction problem has dropped from 70.9 per cent in 2010 to 61 per cent in 2011.
Only Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and north-eastern States have shown improvement from last year, the report says.
Basic reading levels also showed a decline in many States across north India, with the number of children in class V able to read class II level dropped from 53.7 per cent in 2010 to 48.2 per cent in 2011. “Such decline was, however, not visible in southern States,” it said.
Even though primary school enrolment in rural areas stood at 96.7 per cent, attendance has shown a worrying decline from 73.4 per cent in 2007 to 70.9 per cent in 2011.
In Bihar, for example, attendance of children dropped by nine percentage points during the past four years. In Madhya Pradesh, it dropped from 67 per cent to 54.5 per cent in four years. In Uttar Pradesh, the decline in attendance was about seven per cent.
ASER 2011 surveyed 633,465 children in 16,000 schools in 558 districts.
Private schools growing
Even though there has been a marginal improvement in the proportion of schools complying with pupil-teacher ratio, from 38.9 per cent in 2010 to 40.7 per cent, parents still prefer to send their children to private schools, the report has found.
The report has said that a majority of the 97 per cent of rural children going to school were enrolled in a privately-owned institution.
Nationally, private school enrolment has risen over the years for 6-14 years age group from 18.7 per cent in 2006 to 25.6 in 2011, except in Bihar which has the unique distinction of actually decreasing the proportion enrolled in private schools because of opening of a large number of government schools and recruitment of teachers.
But, children's attendance in Bihar is the lowest in the country and nearly 60 per cent elementary school children in the State go to private tutors.
In Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Manipur and Meghalaya, there has been an increase of over 10 percentage points in private school enrolment in the past five years. Between 30 to 50 per cent of children in the rural areas of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are enrolled in private schools.
Tamil Nadu emerged as one State where determined government policies, including the mid-day meal and children-centric learning methodology, had been put in place to attract children to government schools. Yet there was an overall increase of about 8 to 12 percentage points in private enrolment between standard 1 and 8 over the past five years, indicating that the government schools in Tamil Nadu were unable to convince the parents that they were better.
